AMD prevents motherboard manufacturers from releasing beta BIOS for Ryzen 5000 on X370

[Icarus_Radio]

Summary

AMD forbids the makers from even releasing a beta BIOS for X370 platform.

 

Quotes

Quote

AMD has gone out of its way to prevent motherboard makers from offering Ryzen 5000 Desktop CPU support on AM4 based X370 motherboards. This was stated by an ASRock representative to customers asking if they will be receiving Zen 3 support on older 300-series boards.

 

My thoughts

It feels bad that AMD tells customer what they cannot do. This is more like an Intel or Apple thing (or NVIDIA for their mining limiter recently).

 

Sources

https://wccftech.com/amd-warns-motherboard-makers-offering-ryzen-5000-desktop-cpu-bios-support-on-am4-x370/

[WhitetailAni]

I mean, AMD told motherboard manufacturers "no Zen 2 support on A320" and they did it anyway by cutting out so many features on the BIOS that they could squeeze Zen 2 support in.

Maybe they'll do that again for B350 and X370.

[mariushm]

I'm fine with it.

AMD never promised support for x370, and officially only promised support for 5xx series chipsets then agreed on b4xx chipsets due to consumer demand.

If they let Asrock make updates for x370, every x370 motherboard buyer would put pressure on the other manufacturers and ask for bioses and complaint that they're greedy and don't release bioses to make more money out of new boards, which is bad.

 

Most x370 motherboards had small size bios chips, which can't even contain the microcode and all the stuff needed for new ryzen processors, so they'd probably have to drop support for ryzen 1xxx processors and a lot of those boards don't have bios flashback feature, which means if something fails during bios update, you're screwed.

 

Also, the x370 boards - majority of them - have bad VRMs ... bad as in poor heatsinks and only 4-6 phases with average mosfets ... decent for up to a 8 core cpu, but forget about a 12-16 core cpu on it.

A lot of manufacturers weren't sure about how good AM4 processors would be and they preferred to focus on paying SLI licenses and fancy heatsinks and rgb instead of vrm and io features.

 

 

[TrigrH]

This is bullshit, originally I was 100% okay with AMD not having ryzen 5000 support.... Then we all found out THEY USE THE SAME IO DIE as ryzen 3000.

 

There is no reason why AIB's shouldn't have the OPTION to add support.

[Levent]

Its only a matter of time before people are able to inject CPU support into those boards anyways. Funny enough, people are able to flash B450 bioses on some selected Asrock X370 and A320 boards. If its real (considering its from the least reliable tech "news" of the internet, wccftech) it is a shitty move but not unexpected.

[Moonzy]

It can't be, AMD is our best pal, they wouldn't do something like this!

 

Meh, they locked down pcie 4.0 on x470 boards iirc, so am not really surprised

 

"Our socket's upgradability is 50% longer than our competitor"

2 generations to 3, lul

 

Let board manufacturers to decide whether their board's VRM can support the new CPU or not, and let customer decide if they wanna upgrade their CPU or not, tell them the risk of re-using the board and let them decide, instead of forcing them to buy a new board even though theirs are completely capable

[Jet_ski]

They stopped a beta BIOS, what’s scandalous about that? We don’t know what bugs a beta BIOS might have. It could brick people’s motherboards.

[WhitetailAni]

24 minutes ago, Moonzy said:

Meh, they locked down pcie 4.0 on x470 boards iirc, so am not really surprised

Yep. ASUS went to release a beta BIOS that enabled PCIe 4.0 on X470, and AMD came in and said "Nope. That's X570 only."

[Moonzy]

3 minutes ago, Jet_ski said:

They stopped a beta BIOS, what’s scandalous about that? We don’t know what bugs a beta BIOS might have. It could brick people’s motherboards.

"there's a chance it wont work, so lets make it not work at all"

 

unless im understanding it wrong?

[WhitetailAni]

5 minutes ago, Jet_ski said:

They stopped a beta BIOS, what’s scandalous about that? We don’t know what bugs a beta BIOS might have. It could brick people’s motherboards.

I mean, people have already flashed an X470 BIOS to the X370 version with no problems.

And that's even more dangerous since X370 is not the same as X470.

 

So what's wrong with this?

[Mr.Meerkat]

There are two views to this issue...
View A: Consumers and mobo manufacturers should be the ones that decide whether it's supported or not, AMD you shouldn't have a say. 
View B: Given lack of BIOS chip storage on most 300 series mobos with not so good VRMs, the BIOSes being "beta" (i.e. it could brick your mobo) or cut down significantly (which complicates things such as X370 not being able to support first gen Ryzen, especially with no rollback features), it could be argued this is beneficial to consumers. 

 

I'm personally on the fence but am leaning more towards view B. Why you ask? There's already been a lot of negativity in regards to 300 series motherboards back when the 3000-series chips were released. Those BIOSes were already heavily, heavily cut down with support dropped on many CPUs and if they were to add support to 5000-series CPUs, it means even more streamlined BIOSes and even more CPUs dropped from support, which is also bad for the consumers as when 300-series don't support 1000-series, it will piss people off (a lot). 

[LAwLz]

If Intel did anything similar to this nobody on this forum would defend it. But since this is AMD... 

[Moonzy]

9 minutes ago, Mr.Meerkat said:

(i.e. it could brick your mobo)

get a new board if that's the case

 

problem is that we can try to get it to work without having to spend any money

if it doesnt work, THEN spend the money on a new board

 

given the amount of 500 chipsets needing bios update to support ryzen 5000, i dont see it having major issues, or the motherboard manufacturer wouldnt have approved of the bios to begin with

[Neftex]

look the boards have some price when youre buying them, in that price they had to account for the bios development. none of the manufacturers knew they would have to update the bios 4 fucking years later. doing that isnt free and wasnt accounted for in the price of the board. amd doesnt want want their other partners under pressure from public to release new bioses just because asrock decided to do it anyway

[thorhammerz]

10 hours ago, Moonzy said:

"there's a chance it wont work, so lets make it not work at all"

 

unless im understanding it wrong?

And when it doesn't work, the customer then refunds (or tries to...) the product, wasting everyone's time (and more importantly, the vendor's money in labour / customer service and return shipping fees) .

 

In such a world, why on earth would they possibly make it not work to begin? It's not like the manufacturers / vendors would be the side with the asymmetric (and lopsided) risk profile against them, amirite?

[Mark Kaine]

18 hours ago, mariushm said:

AMD never promised support for x370,

They did though...  when Ryzen came out they said all boards would be forward compatible on the same platform (am4) *unlike* intel... and then just dropped support later on anyways.

 

 

 

 

[mariushm]

The 370 (and 470) chipset advertised SLI and crossfire, so some motherboards had 2 pci-e x16 slots connected to the cpu, which got switched to pci-e x8 if you installed a second video card.

The problem is there's a maximum limit to how long the pci-e 4.0 traces (between cpu socket and slot) are supposed to be, and on a lot of motherboards the length of traces going to the 2nd slot could be above that limit.

 

Also, pci-e 4.0 in theory requires better pcb materials and better routing of traces, but in practice it can work on some motherboards  with minimal error rates - if the design was good enough

 

Another issue is memory compatibility ... when the B350 chipset and x370 chipset motherboards were released, The Ryzen 1xxx could do only 3000-3200 Mhz ... A LOT of motherboards could barely do 3000 Mhz. It has to do with the cpu (the memory controller inside was poorly tuned for various memory chips) but it also has to do with the actual circuit board traces going from cpu socket to the memory slots.

If you use a Ryzen 5xxx cpu somehow on such board, that doesn't mean you're gonna be able to suddenly use 3600 Mhz memory sticks.

 

Now put yourself in AMD's position - you allow them to make a bios to support these new cpus on old chipsets but you have to add notes like

* "You must not use SLI mode or install two cards in the two pci-e slots because that will result in crashes or reboots or driver bluescreens"   or " you must disable pci-e 4.0 if using two cards"    ---  inadvertendly someone would ignore this and complain on forums that the latest bios screwed up their pc or return the motherboard to warranty.

* you can use Ryzen 5xxx cpus but you won't get the full performance because memory must stay on 3000 mhz for highest stability

 

 

[Vishera]

Basically AMD wants you to buy their newest more expensive chipsets,

They tried to do that with B450/X470 but gave in for the backlash they received.

 

AMD has proven that their argument in the matter is BS,since B450 and X470 boards are supporting all generations of Ryzen with no problems.

Same thing with the AM3 platform,you could take an old AM3 board and pop a FX-8350 into it and it will work (even though the majority of AM3 boards had crap VRMs)

[Vishera]

6 minutes ago, mariushm said:

The problem is there's a maximum limit to how long the pci-e 4.0 traces (between cpu socket and slot) are supposed to be, and on a lot of motherboards the length of traces going to the 2nd slot could be above that limit.

AMD disabled PCI-E 4 on B450/X470 motherboards.

[Vishera]

10 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

They did though...  when Ryzen came out they said all boards would be forward compatible on the same platform (am4) *unlike* intel... and then just dropped support later on anyways.

 

 

 

 

And that's what we call false advertising.

Just like when AMD said that the FX-8350 is an 8 cores/8 thread processor,while in fact it's a 4 modules/8 threads CPU.

[Mark Kaine]

4 minutes ago, Vishera said:

And that's what we call false advertising.

It was definitely one of the reasons people chose 1st/2nd/3rd gen Ryzens,  I know i did...

 

I get there might be some limitations,  but that's just bad planning and then they should have called the "incompatible" chips AM4+ or something (which afaik doesn't exist they still call it AM4?)

 

Quote

And to most people's delight, the AM4 socket could outlast its expected timeframe of being the default socket till at least 2020. Senior Director of Product Management at AMD, David McAfee feels that a new socket is not needed until a radical architecture change happens, including significant changes to memory and PCI slots. He said,

"It will really take a major inflection point in the platform technology for us to move off of socket AM4." 

Except i apparently cant just drop a 5000 series cpu in my b350 board and expect it to work, even though its still called AM4. This isnt just false advertising, its also confusing to the consumer.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[HenrySalayne]

41 minutes ago, Vishera said:

Basically AMD wants you to buy their newest more expensive chipsets,

They tried to do that with B450/X470 but gave in for the backlash they received.

 

AMD has proven that their argument in the matter is BS,since B450 and X470 boards are supporting all generations of Ryzen with no problems.

Same thing with the AM3 platform,you could take an old AM3 board and pop a FX-8350 into it and it will work (even though the majority of AM3 boards had crap VRMs)

TechTechPotatoe (Dr. Ian Cutrass) released a video talking about profit margins yesterday:

He doesn't talk about motherboards but GPUs. The margin on GPUs is much lower because of the size and the amount of components on these boards. The same applies to mainboards. Compared to a CPU, AMD probably doesn't make a significant cut on a chipset.

Selling even more CPUs to owners of older motherboards seems like a good thing. But: AMD probably doesn't want any more confusion about what is working and what isn't. The older chipsets already had two BIOS variants for a different set of supported CPUs and you needed either one or the other BIOS to use a specific model. Another reason could be to protect partners who don't want or can enable 5000 series CPUs for their 300 series boards.

This is one of the few cases in which "money" probably wasn't driving the decision.

[jagdtigger]

6 minutes ago, HenrySalayne said:

AMD probably doesn't want any more confusion about what is working and what isn't.

Um then mobo manufacturers can put a huge sticker on the bios update stating "Unofficial support for xth gen ryzen cpu's"?

[Doobeedoo]

I do wonder on AM5 will BIOS chip size be increased in capacity by default to allow more leverage.

[GDRRiley]

11 hours ago, LAwLz said:

If Intel did anything similar to this nobody on this forum would defend it. But since this is AMD... 

last I checked people ripped into intel for making z170/z270 different from z370 and z490 for no reason