- Joined
- Jul 19, 2017
So AMD announced their B550 chipset, nearly a year late, to go along with the launch of their new Ryzen 3000 quad core processors. The B550, despite being a year late at this point, still wont launch until june 16th, and seems fairly uneventful except for allowing PCIe 4.0 to the first expansion slot and the first M.2 slot from the CPU. However, the press release did ruffle some feathers, if by ruffle feathers you mean hit a pillow factory with an airstrike. AMD announced their ryzen 4000 series processors would ONLY work with B550 and X570 boards.
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Now, why is this a problem? Well, sicne 2017 AMD has been touting one of the big selling points of Socket AM4 and Ryzen was that the socket would be supported through 2020. This was reasonably assumed, based on AMD's past history of supporting motherboards, to mean that socket AM4 motherboards would support newer Ryzen chips, and that in 2021 with the coming of DDR5 memory so would the AM5 chipset. As recently as May of 2019 AMD was still stating support "through" 2020, and was pushing their B450 motherboareds as recently as February for new builds and "ready for future processing demands". Not only customers but OEMs like MSI were caught completely offguard.
Now, this is not the first time that this has been an issue, as X370/B350 did not naively support the 3000 series due to limited motherboard BIOS size and changes to the boost system, but AMD did still supply the AGESA microcode necessary for support so that motherboard OEMs could still implement support if they wished on the boards that could support the chips. Many did this by removing support for the 1000 series if you applied the 3000 series patch, which was fine to most consumers. There was widespread musing that AMD would do the same thing here, but AMD dropped a second bombshell: there would be no, zero, zilch, AGESA microcode for 400 or 300 series chipsets for the 4000 series. This was confirmed by a video from Hardwareunboxed this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsBRNck_-wA&t=629s
This means that anyone who bought a high end X370, 470 or midrange B450 motherboard with the intention of buying a ryzen 4000 series late this year is now SOL, they'll need to buy a X570 board for that, which will have no more upgrades available. There are many excuses and rationalizations, with AMD claiming this is caused by the limited size of BIOS ROMs (yet they didnt mandate the use of larger ROMs in their chipset design, hmmmm...) but the general feeling in a significant portion of the consumer base is that this is due to AMD's incompetence and lack of forward planning (something I've been panning them for for YEARS), because the company just announced the 3100 series 8 cores, which make 0 sense in the current market unless you were buying them to tide you over until the 4000 series launched, and they are being bundled with B450 boards that simply cant run 4000 series chips. Companies like MSI being baffled by this announcement further suggests AMD wasnt planning this out and has been bumbling their way through CPU support. This also means that anyone who wants to buy a 4000 series part will be buying into a dead platform, as AM5 comes out in 2021. This would be fine if it was the last in a series of 4 chips, but now it seems that AMD is content in letting all their older customers buy a motherboard for 1 generation of chip and artificially segmenting their older boards in a way worse then intel, which is rather on the nose as AMD has used this forwards compatibility as a selling point since 2017 wiht ryzen 1000, and intel's generational compatibility is well defined every year.
AMD B550 Chipset Detailed, It's Ready for Zen 3, Older AM4 Motherboards not Compatible
In their briefing leading up to today's Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X review embargo, AMD disclosed that its upcoming "Zen 3" 4th generation Ryzen desktop processors will only support AMD 500-series (or later) chipsets. The next-gen processors will not work with older 400-series or 300-series chi...
Now, why is this a problem? Well, sicne 2017 AMD has been touting one of the big selling points of Socket AM4 and Ryzen was that the socket would be supported through 2020. This was reasonably assumed, based on AMD's past history of supporting motherboards, to mean that socket AM4 motherboards would support newer Ryzen chips, and that in 2021 with the coming of DDR5 memory so would the AM5 chipset. As recently as May of 2019 AMD was still stating support "through" 2020, and was pushing their B450 motherboareds as recently as February for new builds and "ready for future processing demands". Not only customers but OEMs like MSI were caught completely offguard.
Now, this is not the first time that this has been an issue, as X370/B350 did not naively support the 3000 series due to limited motherboard BIOS size and changes to the boost system, but AMD did still supply the AGESA microcode necessary for support so that motherboard OEMs could still implement support if they wished on the boards that could support the chips. Many did this by removing support for the 1000 series if you applied the 3000 series patch, which was fine to most consumers. There was widespread musing that AMD would do the same thing here, but AMD dropped a second bombshell: there would be no, zero, zilch, AGESA microcode for 400 or 300 series chipsets for the 4000 series. This was confirmed by a video from Hardwareunboxed this morning: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsBRNck_-wA&t=629s
This means that anyone who bought a high end X370, 470 or midrange B450 motherboard with the intention of buying a ryzen 4000 series late this year is now SOL, they'll need to buy a X570 board for that, which will have no more upgrades available. There are many excuses and rationalizations, with AMD claiming this is caused by the limited size of BIOS ROMs (yet they didnt mandate the use of larger ROMs in their chipset design, hmmmm...) but the general feeling in a significant portion of the consumer base is that this is due to AMD's incompetence and lack of forward planning (something I've been panning them for for YEARS), because the company just announced the 3100 series 8 cores, which make 0 sense in the current market unless you were buying them to tide you over until the 4000 series launched, and they are being bundled with B450 boards that simply cant run 4000 series chips. Companies like MSI being baffled by this announcement further suggests AMD wasnt planning this out and has been bumbling their way through CPU support. This also means that anyone who wants to buy a 4000 series part will be buying into a dead platform, as AM5 comes out in 2021. This would be fine if it was the last in a series of 4 chips, but now it seems that AMD is content in letting all their older customers buy a motherboard for 1 generation of chip and artificially segmenting their older boards in a way worse then intel, which is rather on the nose as AMD has used this forwards compatibility as a selling point since 2017 wiht ryzen 1000, and intel's generational compatibility is well defined every year.
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