AMD commits violent entry/exit strategy to Metatarsal - Pulling an Intel, the AMD way.

[King Daddy Telomerase]

From what I understand, it's only going to be a limited, one-way update for these boards.

My guess is for the boards with smaller BIOS chips, probably not for the B450 Tomahawk types that have the space and should get regular updates. Those recent B450/X470 buyers that care about overclocking and VRMs are the main people this change is for... how many people with shit boards they got bundled in some prebuilt even care about updating their CPU? Thus, I think this was a worthwhile PR decision by AMD for the small percentage of headaches they'll get from people probably cluelessly buying used incompatible shit in a few years.

 

[Gustav Schuchardt]

Ehh I think the issue is more nuanced. While they did fuck up releasing B550 very late, they aren’t wrong about BIOS ROM size limitations. Gamers Nexus made a good video about it:

https://youtu.be/JluNkjdpxFo

That is indeed a good video but one thing bothered me. Old school BIOSes had a certain gravitas to them with white text on a blue background in 80x25 mode. Ever since EFI we've had graphical user interfaces in the firmware which are very tacky. My desktop has a mass of mismatched colors and animated fans spinning. And you have to go into 'Expert mode' to actually do anything with it. I'd much prefer the old 80x25 look, particularly if the image was smaller but I can see that the motherboard manufacturers are not keen to be seen to 'go back'. The other thing is that you only use the firmware once when you set the box up, after that you don't care what it looks like.

Sooner or later, given how bloated modern firmware is they were always going to need to move to larger flash chips and choosing that as a cut-off point for compatibility makes sense. But I guess I would say that as I don't have an old AMD system I was planning to upgrade. I've got an old Intel one, but I never expected to be able to upgrade it. Intel breaks compatibility artificially, AMD seems to have a valid reason. If I were buying a motherboard now, it would be AMD given how impressive Ryzen is at the moment, but right now my desktop CPU is fine and should be for some time.

I wonder if it wouldn't be possible to split the UI and the stuff you need to boot an OS. So the boot stuff would be in flash and would be present all the time but the UI would be on disk - you'd put in the EFI system partition with a backup on a flash drive. It seems risky though - mess up and your career will be buried in RMAs.

Seems AMD has backtracked and will support Zen 3 on b450/x470 boards.

http://archive.md/zEpyW

The solution they picked is much more conservative than this - remove some support for older CPUs and add support for new ones.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

The solution they picked is much more conservative than this - remove some support for older CPUs and add support for new ones.

It's also risky because of morons, being one myself I know how they think and what they are capable of.

 

[Reverend]

B chipsets are for basic bitches. Hardcore niggas get Threadrippers.

 

[OnMoTi]

B chipsets are for basic bitches. Hardcore niggas get Threadrippers.

But threadrippers suck for gaming (relative to their price.)

 

[Reverend]

But threadrippers suck for gaming (relative to their price.)

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The human eye can't see more than 28fps, anything past 60 and it's the fucking same. All those scores do nothing but say "Well this CPU is fast, but this other one is faster" and makes 0 difference in observational gaming at all.

Video Card is the backbone of Gaming, CPU helps surely but so does a fuckton of RAM (anything less than 128GB is gimping yourself with a TR) and an m2 nvme drive.

Also TR excel at multicore/multithread use which games are getting there but for people who buy TR for business uses (3d modeling, data analytics etc.) TR destroys a Xeon/I7(9) relative to the price points of core/$$$ equation.

You aren't buying a Threadripper for gaming, you are buying it because it's a workstation CPU that is xeon-like performance for 1/3 the price. Buy a 1080gt, a good 4k monitor, and enjoy gaming with all the options turned on and ignore benchmarks because they mean fuckall after a point.

 

[King Daddy Telomerase]

Most of the benchmarks done for Threadrippers were faulty with people not enabling proper modes for memory, also.

I still wouldn't buy one if your main focus is gaming, but I will concur that people will regret recently buying sub-8 core CPUs within 2 years.