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AMD's Robert Hallock has confirmed that the upcoming AMD Ryzen 4000 Zen 3 processors will be compatible with Socket AM4 as long as the motherboard features an X570 or B550 chipset. Zen 3 will not support older chipsets owing to lower space on the EEPROM of these motherboards. Future prospects of Socket AM4 depend on the industry's I/O innovation.
[...] In a blog post, Hallock confirmed that current AMD X570 and B550 chipset motherboards will support Zen 3 processors after a BIOS update. However, Zen 3 processors will not be compatible with any chipset prior to X570 or B550. This means end of the road for all those who have X470, B450 and below chipset boards. Hallock says that this decision had to be taken as due to BIOS capacity limitations on older platforms.
We've seen AMD taking a similar stance with Zen 2 as well by removing drop-in support for motherboards that have just a 16 MB EEPROM. X570 motherboards have a 32 MB EEPROM thereby enabling larger a AGESA[*] codebase to be comfortably accommodated.
Wikipedia explains that AGESA:
AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA), is a procedure library developed by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), used to perform the Platform Initialization (PI) on mainboards using their AMD64 architecture. As part of the BIOS of such mainboards, AGESA is responsible for the initialization of the processor cores, memory, and the HyperTransport controller.
See also: AMD axes Zen 3 support on 400-series motherboards: Is AMD pulling an Intel?
AMD will use the AM4 socket through its 'Zen 3' CPUs, but it will drop older chipset support
B450 and X470 chipsets won't support AMD Ryzen 4000 processors
Hardware Unboxed: No AMD Zen 3 Support on 400 and 300 Series Motherboards
AMD Zen 3 Based Ryzen 4000 'Vermeer' Desktop CPUs Will Be Compatible With Existing AM4 (X570, X470, B550, B450) Motherboards, Confirmed By XMG (from April 16, fake news or specific to the motherboard manufacturer?)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Tuesday May 12 2020, @11:50PM (11 children)
I don't know what's worse, them straight face lying over obvious planned obsoleteness or them actually telling the truth and their "platform" really reached the point where it takes the space of fully functional 4 openwrt images to get the system to a the boot menu...
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(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 12 2020, @11:55PM (1 child)
It's written in LISP you see...
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Wednesday May 13 2020, @02:16AM
As much as I enjoy LISP jokes, LibreCMC comes with two to three different LISP and LUA interpreters, a linux kernel, userland, package manager and plenty of networking daemons all rolled up into a fully functional router image under 4MB (= 32Mb): https://librecmc.org/librecmc/downloads/snapshots/v1.5.1-core/targets/ar71xx/generic/ [librecmc.org]
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(Score: 3, Informative) by shortscreen on Wednesday May 13 2020, @01:10AM (5 children)
I haven't kept up with the latest PC hardware but I suspect they are talking 16/32 megabits (not bytes) here. How much of that is taken up by UEFI crap?
The AGESA 3.x module used on socket AM2/AM3 boards is only 35KB uncompressed (and is stored compressed inside the ROM) but it mainly does CPU identification, not configuration of bus/memory which is handled by separate modules. If the entire ROM is now 4x as big, I find it hard to imagine that all of that is taken up by anything to do with CPU initialization.
Oh well, AMD was big on maintaining socket compatibility in the past, with some of their Athlon 64 chipsets still being recycled on AM3+ boards many years later, and new CPUs being able to run in years-old boards. Now that they are pushing the performance envelope again maybe they don't care so much.
(Score: 4, Informative) by RamiK on Wednesday May 13 2020, @02:02AM (4 children)
No they're talking about 32MB not Mb. It's already common place in some high-end desktop models with 128MB (not Mb) seen in SBCs, routers and servers.
Ironically, MSI's B450M Mortar Max has an 32MB ( = 256Mb).
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(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Wednesday May 13 2020, @03:14AM (2 children)
I see. Bloaters have been busy these past years.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Wednesday May 13 2020, @04:08AM (1 child)
Well, to be fair, as nodes shrink the EEPROM factories simply aren't making smaller capacity storage anymore... And it's not all bad. BIOS and UEFI drivers were always very sketchy so when projects like LinuxBoot [linuxboot.org] come along taking advantage of the extra space to get the same functionality but with better tested code, it's not without its merits... But yeah. The bloaters pretty much run the place nowadays.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @08:10AM
Not to mention that the EEPROM stores its own operating system that operates between the hardware and the user's OS. Sure, it can get out of the way so the overhead isn't too bad, but it is still there in the EEPROM. Plus, many EEPROM updates use an A/B image or "seamless" system now. So you have to have room for two complete boot images now. And that is in addition to the space needed for read and write wear leveling.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 13 2020, @04:01AM
Yeah, I'm guessing AMD will not actually care if vendors can update older motherboards to work with Zen 3 (see XMG link). They just want to curb enthusiasm early before there are a flood of compatibility complaints.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 13 2020, @03:14PM (2 children)
AMD platforms last practically forever. I am pretty surprised they are sticking with AM4 for the next CPU revision, it's already pretty much the worst thing about Ryzen. I guess they are not going to do a new socket until DDR5 memory forces it. Intel releases new incompatible sockets with almost every CPU, even if the new socket doesn't offer any new functionality.
AMD really, really needs an enthusiast/workstation socket comparable to LGA 2066. AMD's high end processors are great, but they're breathing through a straw.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday May 13 2020, @03:30PM
Zen 2 (Ryzen 3000 desktop) = AM4, 16 cores, DDR4
Zen 3 (Ryzen 4000 desktop) = AM4, 16 cores, DDR4
Zen 4 (Ryzen 5000 desktop) = AM5, 24 cores? DDR5
PCIe 5.0 was rumored for Zen 4, but they will probably kick that can down the road for desktop users.
More memory channels? DDR5 supports 2 memory channels per module [rambus.com].
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 14 2020, @03:24AM
200 usd for a 1950x 12 core, with 40 PCIe channels, and another 250-400 for the motherboard.
You can pay more for other chips, or get the newer incompatible TRx board for Zen... 3? If you need even bigger chips.
Plus there are always single processor Epyc boards if you really want their biggest chips. Even if not officially supported I'm sure they can be overclocked just like the lower end models.