AMD revives free boot kit offer for struggling Ryzen 3000 owners

[adidan]

Interesting, not even thought about it, but it sounds like MSI will be releasing 'max' versions of b450/x470 boards with 32mb BIOS chips. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ms...000,39836.html

The 16mb chips ain't big enough and is why raid functionality and some bells and whistles have been lost in the beta bios for 3000 compatibility.

Not sure how other manufacturers fare with this.

[Jonj1611]

On my board which is a Gaming 5 X370, it will support the latest Ryzen, even the 12 core but you do need to update the bios before installing the chip and you lose support for older chips, from the bios notes :

Due to BIOS ROM size limited, NO Bristol Ridge (AMD 7th Gen A-series/ Athlon™ X4 series) APU support.

[adidan]

On my board which is a Gaming 5 X370, it will support the latest Ryzen, even the 12 core but you do need to update the bios before installing the chip and you lose support for older chips, from the bios notes :

Due to BIOS ROM size limited, NO Bristol Ridge (AMD 7th Gen A-series/ Athlon™ X4 series) APU support.

I guess that just means unless you can rollback the bios (?) you won't be able to repurpose the board with some older chips in the future.

I'm not sure that would be an issue for many people though.

[watercooled]

They are still a fair chunk of silicon, and a RISC-V 32 bit base instruction set core, boot rom and a bit of RAM would not add horribly to the transistor count if integrated on. Add an optional second ethernet interface and you have a lights out controller. But then people would complain it is a possible security hazard

I wonder if it would be possible to disable said controller with a jumper to allay those concerns?

[Xlucine]

I'm still wondering if the IO die from ryzen is just a bit power hungry, and ASmedia are better at designing motherboards and hence their chips use less power

On my board which is a Gaming 5 X370, it will support the latest Ryzen, even the 12 core but you do need to update the bios before installing the chip and you lose support for older chips, from the bios notes :

Due to BIOS ROM size limited, NO Bristol Ridge (AMD 7th Gen A-series/ Athlon™ X4 series) APU support.

Probably why the boot kit has a fairly modern athlon, rather than the BR APU they used to offer (unless they ran out of stock)

[DanceswithUnix]

Due to BIOS ROM size limited, NO Bristol Ridge (AMD 7th Gen A-series/ Athlon™ X4 series) APU support.

When I was choosing an X470 board there a few that already dropped BR support and I avoided those.

I got annoyed years ago by a motherboard that was quite capable of supporting the Phenom CPUs when they came out except the BIOS was too small. A long time later ASUS released a BIOS that removed network booting to allow Phenom support, but I had moved by at that point. It shows this isn't a new thing, but the pressure on cost is always severe in manufacturing so I don't think it is something mobo companies can learn from so perhaps AMD needs to enforce "You shall have a 32Mb flash chip" to level the playing field.

In the past Gigabyte did removable BIOS rom chips, if that were still a thing they could probably just sell you an upgrade kit.

At least in this case, with the very low cost of the Zen based Athlons, the loss of BR doesn't feel significant.

I do wonder what will happen in a year though. Since Socket FM2, AMD have released a refresh part for every generation with bugs fixed, tweaks to thermal management and using any process tweaks to improve clocks. So I am expecting Ryzen 4000 series will be a refresh of 3000 and still on socket AM4 and that will require BIOS support.

[watercooled]

I wonder how much space is taken up by the pretty, but frankly useless GUIs? About the only useful GUI aspect I recall seeing is the fan curves, but even then only because the built-in fan curves were utterly terrible, to the point I'd question if the team/person who came up with them even knew what CPU they were for.

Explanation if anyone's bothered: My current Intel, Kaby Lake board - the fan profiles caused the fan to spin obnoxiously loudly when the heatsink was still stone cold, because CPU temperatures were at something like 50C. Not even remotely hot for Kaby Lake but the board seemed to think it was borderline catastrophic, rather than the reality of load temps lower than that being practically impossible on an unmodified CPU...

Frustratingly the amount of control over the fan curve is still quite limited but I managed to get it to a sane compromise.

[Xlucine]

When I was choosing an X470 board there a few that already dropped BR support and I avoided those.

I got annoyed years ago by a motherboard that was quite capable of supporting the Phenom CPUs when they came out except the BIOS was too small. A long time later ASUS released a BIOS that removed network booting to allow Phenom support, but I had moved by at that point. It shows this isn't a new thing, but the pressure on cost is always severe in manufacturing so I don't think it is something mobo companies can learn from so perhaps AMD needs to enforce "You shall have a 32Mb flash chip" to level the playing field.

In the past Gigabyte did removable BIOS rom chips, if that were still a thing they could probably just sell you an upgrade kit.

At least in this case, with the very low cost of the Zen based Athlons, the loss of BR doesn't feel significant.

I do wonder what will happen in a year though. Since Socket FM2, AMD have released a refresh part for every generation with bugs fixed, tweaks to thermal management and using any process tweaks to improve clocks. So I am expecting Ryzen 4000 series will be a refresh of 3000 and still on socket AM4 and that will require BIOS support.

Next year will be interesting. Statements from AMD only go up to zen2, and show zen3 in 2020:
https://hexus.net/tech/news/mainboar...oduct-manager/

I think a zen2 refresh on AM4 would be fine for next year (since intel can only offer 10 cores for the next gen, and with PCIe 4.0 and DDR4 there's no obvious signs of IO bottlenecks); but we'll have to see what turns up

[watercooled]

I wonder if Zen3 would be DDR5? IIRC it's expected to find use in some products by the end of the year.

If so that would require another socket unless AMD do something they've done in the past and include two memory controllers to enable backwards-compatibility. I don't find that particularly likely though, just IMHO.

[adidan]

I wonder if Zen3 would be DDR5? IIRC it's expected to find use in some products by the end of the year.

If so that would require another socket unless AMD do something they've done in the past and include two memory controllers to enable backwards-compatibility. I don't find that particularly likely though, just IMHO.

By all accounts Zen2+ and Zen3 will still be on DDR4.

Edit: TBH i think DDR5 will come along with pcie5.0 whose specification is already available. Not sure how long pcie4.0 will last tbh (that is all very much guesswork on my part).

[DanceswithUnix]

I wonder if Zen3 would be DDR5? IIRC it's expected to find use in some products by the end of the year.

If so that would require another socket unless AMD do something they've done in the past and include two memory controllers to enable backwards-compatibility. I don't find that particularly likely though, just IMHO.

From road maps ages ago I suspect DDR5 was AMD's expectation. That needs DDR5 to go mainstream, which needs Intel to release an actual new product, so the way things are going I wouldn't be surprised if it was DDR4 instead.

OFC if the rumour that Playstation 5 has Zen cores with 3 threads per CPU translates to the desktop chips, then some more bandwidth could work out nicely for Zen3. Perhaps by then AMD will have enough market share that they can dictate hardware uptake.

It doesn't need two memory controllers to do two standards, just one controller that is flexible. If DDR5 is electrically close enough to DDR4 (I haven't looked, so no idea) then that might be possible.

[watercooled]

From road maps ages ago I suspect DDR5 was AMD's expectation. That needs DDR5 to go mainstream, which needs Intel to release an actual new product, so the way things are going I wouldn't be surprised if it was DDR4 instead.

OFC if the rumour that Playstation 5 has Zen cores with 3 threads per CPU translates to the desktop chips, then some more bandwidth could work out nicely for Zen3. Perhaps by then AMD will have enough market share that they can dictate hardware uptake.

I thought PS5 was supposedly Zen2 based?

It doesn't need two memory controllers to do two standards, just one controller that is flexible. If DDR5 is electrically close enough to DDR4 (I haven't looked, so no idea) then that might be possible.

DDR4 and DDR5 have different pinouts though, so you'd need a new motherboard for the new standard regardless. Interesting thought about a sort of hybrid controller though, has that been done on desktop before?

[DanceswithUnix]

I thought PS5 was supposedly Zen2 based?


DDR4 and DDR5 have different pinouts though, so you'd need a new motherboard for the new standard regardless. Interesting thought about a sort of hybrid controller though, has that been done on desktop before?

Consoles are usually some odd in-between technology rather than just standard off the shelf.

The Phenom II had a DDR2/DDR3 controller in it, and could be used in AM2 or AM3 motherboards.

[Corky34]

You know the marketing opportunity of Ryzen 5 (Zen 4, 5nm?) on AM5 with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 is just too good to pass-up.

If that's what they intend to do they'll be targeting 2021.

[Jimrummy2395]

I've had to deal with this recently, so it's nice AMD is reviving it again. Such a pain.

[watercooled]

Consoles are usually some odd in-between technology rather than just standard off the shelf.

The Phenom II had a DDR2/DDR3 controller in it, and could be used in AM2 or AM3 motherboards.

I remember, I mean the pinouts of the memory modules rather than the CPU socket.

However memory is an interesting point for the next consoles - they will obviously have a faster GPU than existing consoles, but where does that leave memory? Do you reckon they'll stick with using GDDR to allow for greater bandwidth for the GPU? DDR5 approaches GDDR5 in terms of bandwidth, but GDDR6 pulls away further. HBM is a thing too, but I wonder what cost would be like for that?