AMD AM4 boards expected to drop Bristol Ridge APU support

[HEXUS]

There are over 45 AM4 processors and more on the way, but doubling BIOS size is prohibitive.

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[shaithis]

Hmm, after all the talk of AMD being more backwards compatible than Intel, to drop any AM4 processors this soon seems mad.

I am guessing that you should be able to use UBU to have a newer BIOS and add the microcode for your old CPU....but many people will not want to do that, nor know they could....as we know some manufacturers will not release the same BIOS twice for different subsets of CPU.

[flearider]

just put it in the hands of the retail sellers .. flash when bought

[DanceswithUnix]

I'm sure there is a lot of useless crud they could exclude instead.

[afiretruck]

I'm sure there is a lot of useless crud they could exclude instead.

I'm sure all of the fancy GUIs take up a fair amount of that 16MB.

I've never quite understood the need for those. Most of the people who would go rummaging around in their BIOS settings are going to be technically-minded so won't need coddling with the "friendly-looking" interfaces we have today.

[ik9000]

Some older motherboards were being sold which weren't compatible with the latest motherboards, they wouldn't even boot.

should that be latest processors?

[Corky34]

Hmm, after all the talk of AMD being more backwards compatible than Intel, to drop any AM4 processors this soon seems mad.

That they used the same socket for what was a fairly major architectural change in processor and that it covers four years seems more mad to me, it probably would've been better to draw a line under excavator-based CPU's and moved to a new socket/microcode base with Zen, I'm guessing they didn't do that because getting customers to buy into new sockets and processors instead of just a new CPU creates barriers and AMD wanted to make the adoption of Zen as streamlined as possible (they were more concerned with sales numbers and market share increases).

[ik9000]

That they used the same socket for what was a fairly major architectural change in processor and that it covers four years seems more mad to me, it probably would've been better to draw a line under excavator-based CPU's and moved to a new socket/microcode base with Zen, I'm guessing they didn't do that because getting customers to buy into new sockets and processors instead of just a new CPU creates barriers and AMD wanted to make the adoption of Zen as streamlined as possible (they were more concerned with sales numbers and market share increases).

pff corky, that's such a narrow minded view. They clearly should have burned all older CPUs in a great big bonfire because they're old and no longer fit for purpose. Look, here's a web link that proves it.



See - old CPU catching fire. They're all dangerous and people would be better off getting rid of these death traps. It's just the government not wanting to admit that CPUs are now a currency, and propagating the problem by sitting back and letting anyone buy them irrespective of who they are or where they come from. I know because I've spoken to people!

[Wolfclaw]

Surprised manufacturers just don't shrink the bios capacity right down and ship the boards with a basic bios and then you flash the appropriate firmware to match the chip.

[ik9000]

Surprised manufacturers just don't shrink the bios capacity right down and ship the boards with a basic bios and then you flash the appropriate firmware to match the chip.

yeah I've often wondered that too. But mine being just s1156 it wasn't too much of an issue.

[DanceswithUnix]

Surprised manufacturers just don't shrink the bios capacity right down and ship the boards with a basic bios and then you flash the appropriate firmware to match the chip.

Because that would require being able to flash the BIOS without a working CPU, which is tricky enough they only put that onto expensive motherboards.

Otherwise, that motherboard we got at work wouldn't have required a Bristol Ridge to get the BIOS flashed to get the 2600 working.

But, at the expense of showing my age, a 16MB flash chip... that's the entire addressing range of a 68000 cpu (they only wired up 24 of the 32 address bits) and that isn't enough to easily *boot* a modern CPU? World. Gone. Mad.

[DanceswithUnix]

Pricing seems iffy. I can get a 256 Mbit SPI flash chip for £3.38 one-off from Farnell. The board must be going through a lot of middle men's markups to hit $4.

http://uk.farnell.com/spansion/s25fl...RoCxN4QAvD_BwE

[qasdfdsaq]

Seems to me more like a smokescreen for laziness (i.e. can't be bothered testing new BIOS releases for regressions against every single AM4 processor ever released) or only happening on the cheapest boards.

Consumer routers, devices generally cheaper tier-for-tier than consumer motherboards, voluntarily went up to 1Gbit and larger flash chips nearly a decade ago just to give the users more room to play around with. Can't imagine the cost of flash chips being such a crucial issue unless they've gone up in cost by a factor of ten in the last few years.

Because that would require being able to flash the BIOS without a working CPU, which is tricky enough they only put that onto expensive motherboards.

Otherwise, that motherboard we got at work wouldn't have required a Bristol Ridge to get the BIOS flashed to get the 2600 working.

But, at the expense of showing my age, a 16MB flash chip... that's the entire addressing range of a 68000 cpu (they only wired up 24 of the 32 address bits) and that isn't enough to easily *boot* a modern CPU? World. Gone. Mad.

16MB is more than enough to easily *boot* a modern CPU, to be fair, half of it's taken up by fancy graphics and animations in the EFI, and ultimately the problem stated in this article has nothing to do with it not being enough space to boot a modern CPU, it's about it not being enough space to boot and manage the functionality of a hundred different CPUs, therefore they're cutting down the number of CPUs that it can boot and manage. Given the talk is about dropping support for APUs it may be graphics firmware is also taking up space in the flash. Space doesn't even come into the picture if you're talking about booting one modern CPU.

That said, one halfway house solution would be to only include basic microcodes in the default BIOS, for example leaving out advanced functionality such as virtualisation, memory encryption or error correction, or turbo modes, thus being enough to boot a modern OS and flash a CPU specific firmware, but this would really involve a lot of co-operation from AMD, and given it's likely only happening on the cheapest boards, not even worth considering.