I would figure the opposite. There are plenty of people like me staying on AM4 because of the RAM price increases. I will probably skip AM5 entirely.

> less demand from new system builders mean depressed prices

Only if they overestimate demand and overproduce CPUs. Otherwise it will lead to higher prices because there's less economy of scale.

100% this

The PCI-Express bus is actually rather slow. Only ~63 GB/s, even with PCIe 5 x16!

PCIe is simply not a bottleneck for gaming. All the textures and models are loaded into the GPU once, when the game loads, then re-used from VRAM for every frame. Otherwise, a scene with a lowly 2 GB of assets would cap out at only ~30 fps.

Which is funny to think about historically. I remember when AGP first came out, and it was advertised as making it so GPUs wouldn't need tons of memory, only enough for the frame buffers, and that they would stream texture data across AGP. Well, the demands for bandwidth couldn't keep up. And now, even if the port itself was fast enough, the system RAM wouldn't be. DDR5-6400 running in dual-channel mode is only ~102 GB/s. On the flip side the RTX 5050, a current-gen budget card, has over 3x that at 320 GB/s, and on the top end, the RTX 5090 is 1.8 TB/s.

The biggest difference for me for PCIe 5.0 has been additional bandwidth for my M2 drive.

And even when AMD does move their mainstream desktop processors to a new socket, there's very little reason to expect them to be trying to accommodate multi-GPU setups. SLI and Crossfire are dead, multi-GPU gaming isn't coming back for the foreseeable future, so multi-GPU is more or less a purely workstation/server feature at this point. They're not going to increase the cost of their mainstream platform for the sole purpose of cannibalizing Threadripper sales.

Similarly:

Leaks = the author just made something up, but now it ranks extra highly when someone searches for "[upcoming thing] leaks"