The competition between companies such as AMD, Intel and Nvidia shows no signs of slowing and 2024 looks set to be a hugely exciting year for PC enthusiasts and gamers with AMD’s Zen 5 Ryzen 8000 series and Intel’s 15th Gen Arrow Lake CPUs due as well as new graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia.
This is off the back of 2023, which saw AMD’s Ryzen 7000X3D CPUs launch with the Ryzen 7 7800X3D widely regarded as the best gaming CPU out there. We also saw Nvidia’s RTX 4070, 4070 Ti, 4060 and 4060 Ti launch this year as well as Intel’s 14th Gen CPUs. Here’s my list of the top five PC hardware launches to look forward to in 2024.
AMD Zen 5/Ryzen 8000
AMD has a new architecture planned for 2024 and Zen 5 will also use a smaller 4nm manufacturing process ushering in yet greater power efficiency to its already substantial lead over Intel in this area. Of course, the new architecture will also mean more performance, but it will also be compatible with current Socket AM5 motherboards.
AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series along with its Zen 4 architecture launched all the back in the last months of 2022 and despite it having a huge active fan base and the Zen 4 being highly anticipated, it came at a time of increasing prices and tightening wallets and AMD had the added task of forcing any would-be upgraders to invest in expensive DDR5 memory and new motherboards too. This time, though, memory and motherboard prices are far more reasonable than they were at launch.
Since then the Ryzen 7000 series has gained traction and the 3D V-Cache gaming-centric models launched earlier in 2023 certainly helped. However, Intel matches or betters AMD’s latest CPUs in most tasks except in games that benefit the most from 3D V-Cache and the Ryzen 8000-series is largely seen an important test for AMD’s new Socket AM5 platform.
It has reiterated it’s support for Socket AM5, which will see new processors till at least the end of 2025 and possibly beyond that so even buying into the new platform late in 2024 when Ryzen 8000 is due to launch will still make sense seeing as there will likely be another few generations of processors launched after Ryzen 8000 too. Current Ryzen 7000 owners will likely need to upgrade their motherboard’s BIOS but CPU coolers will still be compatible as the socket is staying just as it is and it goes without saying that if you own a current 600-series AMD chipset motherboard, it will be compatible with Ryzen 8000 too.
Even more exciting is that Intel seems to be planning its CPU launch around the same time, meaning we could have Zen 5 and Intel’s 15th Gen Arrow Lake CPUs launching within a narrow time frame making for battle we only see a few times every decade.
Intel ArrowLake/ 15th Gen Core Ultra
A successor to Intel’s 13th Gen Raptor Lake CPUs was expected in 2023 in the form of Meteor Lake – a new architecture and a new processor socket too, but this was delayed and replaced with so-called Raptor Lake refresh range of 14th Gen CPUs such as the Core i9-14900K. However, apart from slight frequency boosts and support for Intel’s Application Performance Optimizer, the new CPUs were largely a disappointment and even the only model to have a core count increase – the Core i7-14700K – barely warrants the extra outlay over the existing Core i7-13700K.
Still, the 14th Gen CPUs add extra options to 12th Gen CPU owners looking for potential upgrades but as Intel’s LGA1700 platform is now a dead end, it’s not something anyone should be considering investing in seeing as the company has a new socket arriving in hopefully less that 12 months time.
It’s Arrow Lake CPUs and LGA1851 socket are rumored to arrive late in 2024 and to be clear, you won’t be able to use existing 600 or 700-series chipset motherboards with them. You’ll need to invest in what is expected to be an 800-series chipset motherboard as well as DDR5 memory since it’s widely expected that Intel will finally ditch DDR4 support. Cooler support is still up in the air, but early reports point at greater cooler mounting pressure being required, which could require adaptor kits similar to those we had to use in the early days of LGA1700.
This should be a similar upgrade to what we saw moving from 11th Gen to 12th Gen or 12th Gen to 13th Gen – both sizeable performance increases thanks to a range of factors. Intel is also meant to be using its Intel 20A process in manufacturing – equivalent to a 2nm manufacturing process and this should help curtail the high power draw we’ve seen with both 13th and 14th Gen CPUs. Early reports are that we could see up to 15 percent performance improvements in multi-threaded applications and five percent in single-thread plus additional features that we’ll get to in the Intel 800-series chipset section below. Exciting times.
AMD 700-series and Intel 800-series chipsets and motherboards
Both AMD and Intel will be releasing new chipsets for their next generation CPUs launching next year, but there’s one key difference. AMD’s motherboards will use the existing Socket AM5 present on current motherboards while Intel will be launching a whole new CPU socket that isn’t backwards compatible with previous CPUs. Still, new motherboards are on the cards as well as new features.
Starting with Intel and the new 800-series motherboards will use the new LGA1851 socket that features additional pins, many of which look set to offer additional bandwidth for wider PCIe 5.0 support, ushering in the ability to use a graphics card and PCIe 5.0 storage device without either device having to share or lose PCIe lanes.
It’s expected AMD will offer wider PCIe 5.0 support with its 700-series motherboards too with WiFi 7 and 5 Gigabit wired networking likely being expanded too, being part of high-end boards at the moment. As previously mentioned, Intel’s new boards will likely require adaptor kits and possibly new coolers depending on how the CPU socket pressure differs, but no more information is available at present.
Nvidia RTX 4000 Super series
Nvidia is looking to start 2024 with a bang as it seems all but confirmed the company will launch ‘Super’ versions of its RTX 4070, 4070 Ti and 4080 in January with a likely announcement in Las Vegas’ CES event. No pricing information has been released yet but it seems the RTX 4070 Super is to sit alongside the RTX 4070 for now while the RTX 4080 and RTX 4070 Ti will likely be replaced by the new super versions.
The RTX 4070 Ti Super is said to be receiving a memory upgrade from 12GB GDDR6X to 16GB, moving it in line with AMD, which has 16GB minimum on most of its Radeon RX 7000-series cards. The RTX 4070 Super looks set to receive a sizeable CUDA core increase from 5,888 with the 4070, to 7,168 with the new model, not far off the standard RTX 4070 Ti’s 7,680. The RTX 4080 Super will likely have a gain of around 500 CUDA cores, but will stick with the existing 16GB of memory.
The new cards could cement Nvidia as the dominant force in high-end gaming GPUs, especially as AMD isn’t likely to release any new high-end models in the first half of 2024 and if rumors are to be believed then Radeon RX 8000-series isn’t likely to include models that compete with Nvidia’s flagships, focussing instead on competing below the RTX 4080.
AMD Radeon RX 8000 series
We’re expecting a new graphics architecture from AMD in 2024 and RDNA 4 has already been featured on slides from the company in a 2024 timeframe. What’s not clear, though, are any specifications or models, with the most interesting information in the last few months being that AMD isn’t aiming to beat Nvidia’s equivalent flagship. That means that we probably won’t see a 8900 XTX battling it out with an Nvidia RTX 4090 Super in 2024, but there are reports that the next AMD flagship, despite being launched with mid-range price tag, could still beat the current RX 7900 XTX flagship.
Going back to pricing and value and focussing on the price segments the vast majority of gamers are more interested in makes sense and it’s an area AMD has been very successful with in the past. The Radeon RX 5700 XT was a mid-range flagship and sold well and AMD’s Radeon 6000-series have consistently offered better value for money than Nvidia’s equivalent models.
We’ll know a lot more about these launches after January’s CES event in Las Vegas and throughout early 2024 so follow me on Forbes using the blue button below or on Facebook for the latest hardware news and reviews.
