AMD not supporting Zen3 on older motherboards :(

[For Science!]

The shop will be open until 6 O'clock

AM4 will be supported until 2020

 

I think the wording is very clear. X570 is on the AM4 platform, and so naturally, support was supposed to by until 2020. Now that we are into 2020, AMD is free to no longer produce newer CPUs on the AM4 platform.

 

No promises were broken, and you were always going to get a poorer "long term compatibility" the later you bought into the AM4 platform. In exchange of course for newer features.

 

The only real thing that they didn't correct in my opinion is the lack of backwards compatibility for Zen1 chips on X570, but obviously nobody cares about that.

[Tristerin]

3 minutes ago, For Science! said:

The shop will be open until 6 O'clock

AM4 will be supported until 2020

 

I think the wording is very clear. X570 is on the AM4 platform, and so naturally, support was supposed to by until 2020. Now that we are into 2020, AMD is free to no longer produce newer CPUs on the AM4 platform.

 

No promises were broken, and you were always going to get a poorer "long term compatibility" the later you bought into the AM4 platform. In exchange of course for newer features.

 

The only real thing that they didn't correct in my opinion is the lack of backwards compatibility for Zen1 chips on X570, but obviously nobody cares about that.

Agree - wording is specific, if they said AM4 will be supported until 2021 I would expect December 31st 2020 to be the logical expiration date to that promise.

[Bombastinator]

As long as they support chips that are released through 2020 as they said they would there is little to complain about.  The issue is going back on ones word.   If there is a fundamental issue with chipset compatibility that could be a thing.  @Andk1987 mentions a specific technical issue regarding AGESA bios code.  I don’t know what that is, but finding out sounds like it needs to be done.  There are “zen3” chips out now.  What do they actually run on?

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGESA

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11447/amd-announces-ryzen-agesa-1006-update

[Andk1987]

6 minutes ago, XR6 said:

Maybe they will if enough people complain. IIRC Zen3 will be AM4 (not 100% sure of that) so I'm sure some people with 300 and 400 series boards will complain about lack of support. 

I'm hoping they will even though I probably won't be buying Zen3.

Yeah Zen3 is going to be AM4 socket, as the X570 and B550 boards have an AM4 socket, and theyre listed as compatible, theyll likely be switching to AM5 with DDR5 and zen4 due to pinout and i/o requirements ect

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Tristerin said:

Agree - wording is specific, if they said AM4 will be supported until 2021 I would expect December 31st 2020 to be the logical expiration date to that promise.

This is a fair point.  Was “until” the word consistently  used though?  I am remembering “through”.  I may be wrong though.  

[Andk1987]

1 minute ago, Tristerin said:

Agree - wording is specific, if they said AM4 will be supported until 2021 I would expect December 31st 2020 to be the logical expiration date to that promise.

 

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

As long as they support chips that are released through 2020 as they said they would there is little to complain about.  The issue is going back on ones word.   If there is a fundamental issue with chipset compatibility that could be a thing.  @Andk1987 mentions a specific technical issue regarding AGESA bios code.  I don’t know what that is, but finding out sounds like it needs to be done.  There are “zen3” chips out now.  What do they actually run on?

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGESA

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11447/amd-announces-ryzen-agesa-1006-update

AM4 is the physical socket layout, and its obviously going to be supported with ZEN3 becaust the 5xx series boards are listed compatible, the agesa code is the little packet of code AMD releases to motherboard manufacturers to allow them to build thier BIOS to make the chips work on thier motherboards.

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, Andk1987 said:

Yeah Zen3 is going to be AM4 socket, as the X570 and B550 boards have an AM4 socket, and theyre listed as compatible, theyll likely be switching to AM5 with DDR5 and zen4 due to pinout and i/o requirements ect

I’m wondering at this point about that bios code.  X570 and b550 would have to have a fundamentally different type of bios code that was unsupportable on b450 for this to be a thing.   

[Tristerin]

4 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

This is a fair point.  Was “until” the word consistently  used though?  I am remembering “through”.  I may be wrong though.  

Googling it, every article says "Until" (I just looked at the first page of returns on this and focused on the words Until or Through for searches)

[leadeater]

56 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

Most of this issue is simply because the B550 boards arrived 10 months late. AMD might reverse course, but I kind of doubt it. Supporting 3 separate architectures on a single microcode build would be rather difficult. 

In a lot of cases they can't as many boards have BIOS chips that are too small.

[Andk1987]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

In a lot of cases they can't as many boards have BIOS chips that are too small.

then do what msi did and reduce the graphical elements?

[Taf the Ghost]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

In a lot of cases they can't as many boards have BIOS chips that are too small.

They can't because the baseline spec they set was likely too small. We saw what the Vendors went through to get Zen2 even on the 300 series without a larger BIOS chips. It wasn't pretty...literally. 

 

That being said, it likely is doable, but maybe just really messy & the Vendors would really rather not have to validate it all. Though a lot of this problem is on AMD not getting B550 out. As a result, for a lot of buyers, it looks like only a single generation of actual support.

[wall03]

What is they back track on 400-series but not support 300-series. That would make more sense. Then next year stop supporting 400-series. Something like that.

[Curufinwe_wins]

Seems generally reasonable. Obviously it sucks when there are hard barriers between supported platforms, but it really is something that has to occur at some point.

[Curufinwe_wins]

22 minutes ago, wall03 said:

What is they back track on 400-series but not support 300-series. That would make more sense. Then next year stop supporting 400-series. Something like that.

When they want/need to update the socket (which almost certainly they do), you can't support any of the old socket. If for some reason Intel needs the next gen socket to have 2066 pins vs the 2011 previous, then any and all 2011 socket motherboards will be incompatible.

 

The socket does eventually become a limiting factor for stability/connectivity and we now have 16C cpu's on a socket with less than 1/3rd the pins of threadripper cpus that also have the exact same (or lower) core count.

[Bombastinator]

9 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Seems generally reasonable. Obviously it sucks when there are hard barriers between supported platforms, but it really is something that has to occur at some point.

The question is ARE they hard? 

[Curufinwe_wins]

4 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

The question is ARE they hard? 

Well put it this way... eventually there will be. You can't infinitely scale up connectivity/power/everything else while keeping only 1331 contacts. There is actually a huge amount of design that goes into the arrangements of pin signalling to allow stability and keep interference down to an acceptable level.

 

This one probably isn't since 500 series is supported. But it will happen eventually.

[NumLock21]

AMD did keep their word of using the same socket but they never said anything about using the same chipset, so no one should be complaining about their boards not being able to run their next gen Ryzen 4000 series cpus. Depending on what cpu you have, upgrading to a new one, isn’t going to bring in that much of a difference. Only those who benefit from all those cores are, rest of us, not so much.

[Andk1987]

8 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

AMD did keep their word of using the same socket but they never said anything about using the same chipset, so no one should be complaining about their boards not being able to run their next gen Ryzen 4000 series cpus. Depending on what cpu you have, upgrading to a new one, isn’t going to bring in that much of a difference. Only those who benefit from all those cores are, rest of us, not so much.

i get what youre saying, but when most people whom for buying x570 didnt make sense, ie buying a 3600 which is the strongest contender in thier lineup for gaming value and performance, you had to go b450 or x470 because they didnt release a b550 to go with, now to throw support out the window for those boards is a bit of a shitty move imo

[MageTank]

I don't get why so many people are disappointed by this. This is a good thing. We do not need another AM2/AM3 repeat where backwards compatibility holds back on innovation. At some point, people have to understand that they need to buy a new board in order to make use of new features. Backwards compatibility is fine and all, but it should not last forever, and in the computer hardware industry, even 1 year is enough to make a dramatic difference in feature development. The fact that AMD gave people 3 years on one platform is a miracle in and of itself. 

[Bombastinator]

28 minutes ago, Curufinwe_wins said:

Well put it this way... eventually there will be. You can't infinitely scale up connectivity/power/everything else while keeping only 1331 contacts. There is actually a huge amount of design that goes into the arrangements of pin signalling to allow stability and keep interference down to an acceptable level.

 

This one probably isn't since 500 series is supported. But it will happen eventually.

Sure.  That doesn’t necessarily make it ok this time though.  I dunno.  What is clear is that this announcement kills b450 before b550 is even out.  There currently IS no motherboard with a potential upgrade path at this moment besides x570 which is kinda awful.  They’re both really expensive and not very good at the more reasonably priced end.  The thousand dollar motherboards don’t really effectively exist for the vast majority imho.  Those things are for industrial workstation systems.  This is about AMD taking a year longer than intended to get b550 out and then trying to make the consumer absorb the damage.

 

If b550 had actually been on the market for three or four months even this wouldn’t be a thing.

Edited May 8, 2020 by Bombastinator
Typos and grammar

[NumLock21]

6 minutes ago, Andk1987 said:

i get what youre saying, but when most people whom for buying x570 didnt make sense, ie buying a 3600 which is the strongest contender in thier lineup for gaming value and performance, you had to go b450 or x470 because they didnt release a b550 to go with, now to throw support out the window for those boards is a bit of a shitty move imo

3600 is supported on the b450 and x470

[Bombastinator]

3 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

3600 is supported on the b450 and x470

..and at least several earlier boards afaik, though it takes wiggling.  Might be wrong about that one, but I’m hearing evidence to the contrary on this thread.

 

getting 3xx boards to accept zen3 this I don’t see as something AMD is beholden to do.  Making it work on b&X 4xxx  boards on which it is possible to make work on though?  That they might be beholden to do.  That might be just the max boards and maybe only some of them. It might not even include them, I’m not totally familiar with the technical aspects.  The extra year it took to get b550 out though is not the fault of the consumer who bought b450 on assurances from the company.  Technical comes first though I suspect.  If the code can’t be made compatible with even the larger bios sizes of max (which afaik is the big difference between max and non max) the chip performance should not be adulterated to make it possible.

[EChondo]

1. AMD was very clear that the year 2020 was a cutoff, even since Ryzen 1000/300 series motherboards were first released.

2. AMD itself is not supporting Zen3 on older motherboards. They also didn't support Zen2 on older mobos, but you can still throw a 3950X on a A320 motherboard.

3. I don't see the problem here. This doesn't make all current Ryzen CPU's and mobos obsolete. Unless you're already on a 3950X, then you have an upgrade path with current hardware released.

 

I just bought a 3700X and a X570 Taichi late last year. I don't plan on upgrading until Ryzen 5000. I see Ryzen 4000 being a very weird middleman between current offerings and DDR5/PCIE5. So I'd rather not invest in Ryzen 4000 so soon with a much newer platform 1-2 years out from right now.

[Andk1987]

3 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

3600 is supported on the b450 and x470

yeah i know, ive got one, what im saying is when you bought a 3600 on launch you really didnt have an option, X570 boards simply werent in stock and even if they were they cost more than a 3600 and one of the big selling points of AMD is/was multi generation cpu support, and for them to cut that out from under you is a bit shitty imo.

[MageTank]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

Sure.  That doesn’t necessarily make it ok this time though.  I dunno.  What is clear is that this announcement kills b450 before b550 is even out.  There currently IS no motherboard with a potential upgrade path at this moment besides x570 which is kinda awful.  They’re both really expensive and not very good at the more reasonably priced end.  The thousand dollar motherboards don’t really effectively exist for the vast majority imho.  Those things are for industrial workstation systems.  This is about AMD taking a year longer than intended to get b550 out and then trying to make the consumer absorb the damage.

They are not making anyone "absorb the damage". You are not owed backwards compatibility. New hardware doesn't automatically make your current hardware perform worse (Unless it's RTX, or Gameworks in general... wink wink). You still got what you paid for. Unless your product was explicitly advertised with support for Zen 3 processors, you were not mislead or deceived in any way. A company cannot be at fault simply because you assumed this backwards compatibility train would never stop, nor can they be blamed for "forcing computers to absorb the damage" when innovation requires moving forward. AMD cannot keep introducing new features if they have to constantly cater to the compatibility of older chipsets. Eventually we'd end up seeing what we did on X299 with those Babylake 7740/7760X's, where half of your DIMM slots can't be used, half of your M.2 slots can't be used, and half of the PCIe slots can't be used, except this time it could be worse as it would likely be disabling features on the CPU, not the ancient board you slotted it into.

 

It never ceases to amaze me how AMD bends over backwards to give people backwards compatibility, but the moment it comes time to move forward, people give them grief for doing so.