Why X570 chipset can pull 15W

Jurrunio · June 13, 2019

AMD said "in-house design", no wonder. That explains why its heat output is this much higher than ASmedia designs

though I wonder if the "$40 per chipset" rumour holds true

mariushm · June 13, 2019

PCI-e 4 requires more power to transmit data , just like 10 gbps ethernet requires more power compared to 1 gbps chips... today ~2-5w, used to be more... compared to <1w for 1gbps.

There's more pci-e 4 lanes exposed (12) compared to previous chipsets (8 pci-e 3.0 for x470), there's some internal lanes used to connect usb 3.1 gen 2 (10g), sata, etc...

Some parts of chipset are still licensed/bought from AsMedia, AMD makes chipset in-house now instead of letting AsMedia make it as TSMC

TDP is 11w, with peak at 15w depending how much of stuff inside chipset is used.

Previous chipsets were made at TSMC on 55nm or 40nm (i forget now, but it's on wikipedia and other places) and that's a way cheaper fabrication node BUT on 40nm+ the power would have been 20-25w. Even on 28nm TDP would have been high.

It probably cost AMD a few million to adapt the licensed stuff to 14nm (but it made sense as it's similar to stuff in the 14nnm i/o chiplet in Ryzen cpus) and they're also using valuable 14nm wafers for a chipset... factory makes limited number of wafers each month... that explains the higher cost.

If a gpu chip is more profitable...you lose money by making chipsets.

x570 boards are more expensive also because for some they have to increase pcb layers from 4 to 6 and on highest end you may see 8-10 layers.

pci-e 4 requires better routing of traces between cpu and pci-e slots so more layers helps with that.

Also bigger vrm (more phases, mosfets, capacitors), big heatsink on chipset , fan that is point of failure so price includes the higher cost of warranties over 3-5y boards are guaranteed for...