AMD confirms you will need a 500 series chipset or newer for Zen 3

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Lays the blame at the door of previous motherboard series BIOS flash capacity.

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Read more.

Bit annoying (not for me personally though) but it does sound like the kind of issue that a few pre-500 MBs will be able to handle and a few others can be bodged into working... shame for the majority of boards though.

Biggest news here for me is that Biostar are still producing motherboards. I thought they'd died out.

it is understandable, you can't keep on pouring water into the glass, however some stuff gets outdated and you start a new chain of events with the next generations, if they keep what they been doing now then stuff is going to last for quite a while in general but with leaps... compared to Intel who need a new chipset and motherboard for whatever they make.

I wonder if any manufacturers are brave enough to release a Zen 3 only BIOS

I bet the modders out there will - or remove Zen1 and a few others and keep Zen2 and 3 so you have a choice

And what's to stop AMD letting motherboard manufacturors release 2 bios, one for support of older chips and one for newer chips with both having a "Generic" slot so that you can flash either and have the mobo at least boot as say it need a different bios for the inserted cpu and allow you to flash it?

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Originally Posted by zaph0d

And what's to stop AMD letting motherboard manufacturors release 2 bios, one for support of older chips and one for newer chips with both having a "Generic" slot so that you can flash either and have the mobo at least boot as say it need a different bios for the inserted cpu and allow you to flash it?

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Because they would surely incur the wrath of AMD

TBH This doesn't bother me much, I buy a cpu and motherboard together and only replace one due to being faulty or compatibility (had to replace one in the past due to lack of driver support :().... compared with intel they're still far better in terms of longevity in most cases.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the 4xx MB's able to use the next gen cpu if i'm honest but I suspect the main reason for the change is pcie4 which is only supported from 5xx MB's. Having to support a pcie3 and pcie4 in the same code would ultimately add bloat etc, not to mention more 'work'.

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Originally Posted by LSG501

TBH This doesn't bother me much, I buy a cpu and motherboard together and only replace one due to being faulty or compatibility (had to replace one in the past due to lack of driver support :().... compared with intel they're still far better in terms of longevity in most cases.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the 4xx MB's able to use the next gen cpu if i'm honest but I suspect the main reason for the change is pcie4 which is only supported from 5xx MB's. Having to support a pcie3 and pcie4 in the same code would ultimately add bloat etc, not to mention more 'work'.

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The B550 MB chipset doesn't actually touch any of the PCIe 4.0 stuff, all they're doing is rating the traces between CPU and GPU/storage to fully use the PCIe 4.0 controller on the CPU (PCIe is also fully backwards compatible so X570 already supports 4.0, 3.0, and 1.0)

more importantly how is the x670 coming along?

You would have thought rolling support would have made more sense than drawing a line. Maybe some pressure from motherboard manufacturers to actually sell some new boards and bit having to endlessly support the old ones. Who knows?

Was getting very close to pulling the trigger on a 3600 + B450m but not really in a rush so will wait a month or two and consider the options.

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Originally Posted by Xlucine

The B550 MB chipset doesn't actually touch any of the PCIe 4.0 stuff, all they're doing is rating the traces between CPU and GPU/storage to fully use the PCIe 4.0 controller on the CPU (PCIe is also fully backwards compatible so X570 already supports 4.0, 3.0, and 1.0)

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Just need to go to ratemytraces.com. Cor, look at the copper on that!

OK, it's been a long week and I'm helping the wife use up some wine.

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Originally Posted by jimbouk

You would have thought rolling support would have made more sense than drawing a line. Maybe some pressure from motherboard manufacturers to actually sell some new boards and bit having to endlessly support the old ones. Who knows?

Was getting very close to pulling the trigger on a 3600 + B450m but not really in a rush so will wait a month or two and consider the options.

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Probably not so much the MB makers, AMD have to cut the support code for this stuff. Their support matrix must be getting a tad out of hand, I can imaging them trying to reign it in and push that out to the MB makers in their AGESA packages.

Double post

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Originally Posted by Xlucine

The B550 MB chipset doesn't actually touch any of the PCIe 4.0 stuff, all they're doing is rating the traces between CPU and GPU/storage to fully use the PCIe 4.0 controller on the CPU (PCIe is also fully backwards compatible so X570 already supports 4.0, 3.0, and 1.0)

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While pcie4 is backwards compatible that doesn't mean the code for it would also work with a pcie3 only board. I'm not a coder but they could need a completely different set of code to support pci3 versus pcie4.

In all honesty though (should have really said this earlier lol) it's likely more about motherboard manufacturers putting a little pressure on AMD due to people not buying the 'new stuff' and/or just reusing old boards, that's got to be hitting their profit margins.

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Originally Posted by LSG501

While pcie4 is backwards compatible that doesn't mean the code for it would also work with a pcie3 only board. I'm not a coder but they could need a completely different set of code to support pci3 versus pcie4.

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I am an embedded software guy happy on the software/hardware boundary. PCIe isn't a software feature, it will be about hardware feature enabling. So in line with any well designed system I would expect the Zen2 PCIe hardware to be an extension of the earlier hardware or you end up in a hell of driver/hardware/platform/OS combinations.

Also as Xlucine says, the PCIe4 lanes here are straight from the CPU onto the motherboard card sockets without touching the chipset.

So this is just policy, someone has decided this for some politics reason.

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In all honesty though (should have really said this earlier lol) it's likely more about motherboard manufacturers putting a little pressure on AMD due to people not buying the 'new stuff' and/or just reusing old boards, that's got to be hitting their profit margins.

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It could be that motherboard makers don't want to dredge up all their old motherboards (again) and re-test with new CPU/ram combinations to update the QVL list. I don't like the idea, but I could understand that. I don't think CPU upgrades are damaging though, as those old CPUs aren't just going straight to landfill. The old replaced CPU from an upgrade is likely to end up in a new system, so overall motherboard sales have to be roughly in line with CPU sales. Re-using an old CPU "for now" with the possibility of updating to something newer later works better if all AM4 cpus work in all AM4 sockets as it builds confidence that you should invest in a motherboard to soak up that old chip.