With the launch of AMD's Zen 5-based Granite Ridge processor family clearly approaching, Asus has begun the process of rolling out support for its next-generation chip to its latest enthusiast X670E motherboards. The release of a compatible BIOS indicates that this chip could be released at essentially any time.

Hardware leaker HXL, with a keen eye, spotted the release of the BIOS series on the Asus ROG forum. So far, seven BIOS have been released, all for Asus ROG boards. All of them contain the latest AGESA update named FireRangePi.

How close is the Zen 5 release with this news? Publicly, AMD has only stated that it is aiming for a late 2024 release; AMD CEO Lisa Su's Computex keynote on June 3 would be the logical place to reveal this product range. AMD is planning a similar 2019 Computex keynote to announce Zen 2, setting a historical precedent.

If AMD does announce Zen 5 at Computex, expect all motherboard vendors to showcase their next-generation motherboards.

If Zen 5 is to appear sooner rather than later, this will be a problem for Intel. Its own next-generation Arrow Lake chip is likely to be proposed at CES in late 2024 or 2025 at best, and if Zen 5 manages to convincingly beat out Intel's 14th generation desktop products, it could be a tough half year for the Blue Team.

According to a recent post by reputable leaker Kepler_L2 on our sister site Anandtech's forums, Zen 5 is 40% faster than Zen 4 in the SPEC benchmark. We don't know if this result is due to increased clock speeds or a specific instruction set, but if Zen 5 could be this much faster than Zen 4, we would be overjoyed.

What we do know is that, aside from the new core architecture, Granite Ridge will again be a chiplet design. There will be models with up to 16 cores, all with integrated AI engines, faster memory support, and perhaps the same I/O die as the Zen 4, RDNA 2 integrated graphics AMD will certainly release an X3D version later this year. Perhaps they will keep them up their sleeves to compete with Intel's Arrow Lake CPUs.

It won't take long to determine whether Zen 5 is something special, something wet, or something in between. With these new BIOSes out in the open, we can expect more leaks in the coming weeks, and we can't wait to see what AMD is cooking up in their labs.