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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: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 14 2020, @05:49AM
Zen 2's slight gaming deficiency is related to latency (memory, cross-CCX) and clock speed (AMD is currently ahead in IPC). They will get a chance to address this and pull ahead of Intel with Zen 3 (by single digit FPS!!!!1). If Zen 3 can actually consistently beat the last Intel 14nm++++++++ CPUs in gaming, that might get a few more people to jump on, even if it is the end of the socket.
Gaming core counts are going to be pushed up to 8, and arguably 16+ [soylentnews.org] (could be hype), by the next-gen consoles. So the 4-6 core Zen 2 chips could suffer a bit in 2-5 years, even if they are mostly excellent and overkill.
Intel is going to aggressively push towards "7nm" by around 2022, which should be the equivalent of at least TSMC's "5nm". So the process node advantage AMD has enjoyed with Zen 2/3 will not be around forever.
AM5 should include at least Zen 4 and Zen 5 (both confirmed to exist), and likely Zen 6. The big transition will be to monolithic 3D chips, which could improve performance by orders of magnitude. That might happen in the late 2020s on a new socket.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]