I think Zen 6 is going to be limeted by AM5 but they are also talking about quad channel memory support, so they may be brewing up some HEDC kung-fu beyond AM5 but they also intend to support AM5. Certainly the 9950X is hampered by the socket. I assume it could dominate every benchmark over Intel, if it had quad channel memory. As it is, Intel beats AMD in a small handful of benchmarks that are memory constrained. AM6 will move to 24 cores, 20% higher clock, predicted 10% IPC uplift. That is going to be a problem for AM5.
Lots of people applaud AMD for being so faithful to its sockets over time, but this is a consequence of that. As someone who always buys a new board with a new CPU, I find it to be a hinderance to progress.
I will point out, AMD is the CPU leader so whatever they are doing can't be all bad. Perhaps not worthy of mentioning is they have an RX 9080 product coming out in the next couple of months that should compete with the RTX 5080. It won't be the most relevant product, as it won't be large volume and it won't establish any sort of leadership but AMD is a lot closer to the front of the pack than nVidia fan boys will admit. It sounds like there will be a Zen 5 refresh in the middle of this year. It will include mostly or exclusively laptop parts, from what I can tell.
