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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

AMD to Support Zen 3 and Ryzen 4000 CPUs on B450 and X470 Motherboards [anandtech.com]

In a surprising twist, AMD has today announced that it intends to enable Ryzen 4000 and Zen 3 support on its older B450 and X470 Motherboards. This is going to be a 'promise now, figure out the details later' arrangement, but this should enable most (if not all) users running 400 series AMD motherboards to upgrade to the Zen 3 processors set to be unveiled later this year.

[...] AMD came under a lot of fire. The company had originally promised that it would support the AM4 platform from 2016 through 2020 (or 'through to' 2020). A lot of users had assumed that this meant any AM4 platform based motherboard would be able to accept any processor made from 2016 to 2020, including the new Zen 3 processors set to be unveiled later this year. The fact that there was a discrepancy between what the users expected and what AMD had been saying essentially became a miscommunication or a misunderstanding, but one that had a negative effect on a number of users who were expecting to upgrade the system.

Ultimately the reason for the lockout was down to the BIOS size. Each generation of processors require a portion of the BIOS space for compatibility code – normally if you can support one processor from a generation, then you can support them all. We are also in the era of graphical interface BIOSes, and as a result some of the BIOS code was reserved for fancy menus and the ability to adjust fan curves or update the BIOS in a more intuitive way. All of this takes up space, and some vendors ditched the fancy graphics in order to support more processors.

Most AMD motherboards are outfitted with 128 megabit (16 megabyte) BIOS chips. The reason why this is the case is due to a limitation on some of AMD's early AM4 processors – due to design, they can only ever address the first 16 megabytes of a BIOS chip. So even if a motherboard vendor had a larger BIOS chip, say MSI had a 32 megabyte chip, then it would actually operate like two partitioned BIOSes and it would get very complicated. There is no easy way to support every AM4 processor with a simple 16 megabyte BIOS.

Previously: AMD's Zen 3 CPUs Will Not be Compatible with X470, B450, and Older Motherboards [soylentnews.org]

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