AMD Reverses Course on B450 and X470 Support for Zen 3

Discussion in 'Frontpage news' started by jwb1, May 19, 2020.

  1. bobblunderton

    bobblunderton Master Guru

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    I believe it's like this with almost any new process, until they get it down a little better and start getting better silicon more often and hence more samples that are better quality that get binned downward only for marketing purposes. I specifically remember that with Core i7 920 d0 stepping, Wolfdale 45nm dual-core Pentium e5200 and similar chips, that could overclock very very well. These were binned down not so much due to the chip itself, but due to market conditions.
    This is much more-so the case with a new process + new architecture. That is the very reason for intel's tick-tock type schedule or process-architecture-refinement or whatever it was.
    Pushing a new process and architecture simultaneously can be very trying, good thing TSMC is pretty accomplished in the chip manufacturing business - for AMD's sake anyways (and ours!).
    For what it's worth (my 2¢) my 3700x seems fine and I got it 2~3 weeks after launch from a domestic brick-and-mortar retailer. Glad you got a better one though, no crime in that!
    Sometimes you can go back, but that usually involves getting a custom BIOS from the manufacturer, and also necessitates having a supporter CPU while you flash the older BIOS over the newer version IF the board does NOT have 'flashback' feature.
    MOST (but not all!!!) manufacturers will work with you and give you a private BIOS if needed in these cases. However, that aside, your comment still has much weight for the majority of us.
    Yes we all should. Without customers a business is just a brick-box of no use to anyone.
     
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  2. H83

    H83 Ancient Guru

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    Good move from. I´m happy for all the AMD users.:) Now if only a certain company took notice of this example...
     
  3. Reddoguk

    Reddoguk Ancient Guru

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    I have a pretty decent B450 mobo but i'll still be getting a new mobo when i can get a 4xxx AMD cpu.

    Seems like no new chipset is in the pipeline, because i really wanted a 670X or B650 to go with my new 4600X/4700X.

    Looks like i'll have to get 570X after all or just wait and see what comes along.
     
  4. JamesSneed

    JamesSneed Ancient Guru

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    Been my assumption all along. At least some high end x370 boards. It does buy brand loyalty for the next upgrade.
     
    Last edited: May 20, 2020

  5. Izi Cheeseborn

    Izi Cheeseborn Active Member

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    It is possible to go back to older bios. Mobo have factory day 1 bios(revision factory variants) in it which can be accessed for information purposes for the official technicians. Even if the mobo has gone through many bios personal user updates.
     
  6. EspHack

    EspHack Ancient Guru

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    what I still don't understand is why are bios chips soo small, are they like $10 per mb or something? the cpu has no reasonable way to address bigger chips?
     
  7. HARDRESET

    HARDRESET Master Guru

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    Thank you AMD for the reversal !
    support those who supported you AMD !
     

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  8. MaCk0y

    MaCk0y Maha Guru

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    If a user with a Zen 2 CPU updates the BIOS to support Zen 3, will the update finish successfully but then is unable to POST or will the board get bricked during the update?
     
  9. Fender178

    Fender178 Ancient Guru

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    AMD specifically said that you couldn't rollback your BIOS but maybe that just AMD talking out of their rears again. I am sure there is a way of doing it. With me I am probably going to be getting a b550 board just to have the features of the 5xx series chipset. Or if I can get a decent price on x570 I will get one of those.

    Nope not with the current boards that support both Zen 2 and Zen 3 unless the BIOS itself is faulty and has issues.
     
  10. EspHack

    EspHack Ancient Guru

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    it wont get bricked, but it wont boot from older cpus so you better have the new one right there, the exact models to be supported or unsupported after the new optional bios is yet to be produced, each board maker will have its own i guess

    but if i had to guess, going from zen 2 to 3 wont be a problem like that, its probably zen1 units and those worthless athlon chips getting the axe
     

  11. suty455

    suty455 Master Guru

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    I am not really sure AMD ever said the CPUs would be supported on the Chipset all they mentioned in all the slides I have seen was socket AM4 and they stated support would be up to 2020 which it is, the issue really is with folks who want to drop a superior gen CPU into an old socket that doesnt support all its features and negates a large part of the reason for buying the new CPU in the first place, personally I dont get it why buy a new CPU that cannot work to its full potential its like dropping a V8 into a fiat 500 loads of power but you cant use the damn thing as its brakes etc are not up to the job silly really but at least its still better than Intel
     
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  12. JamesSneed

    JamesSneed Ancient Guru

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    While I agree on some level I dont think this is a good analogy. It's more like dropping in a new powerful V8 but not getting the nav system since its in the old car. If the drop in doesn't decrease performance(it shouldn't) and you only lose chipset features due to the older motherboard then why not? Hell going back to x370 you really only loose PCIe-4.0 and USB 3.2 Gen2 support which both of those for many people will not be important.
     
  13. Mineria

    Mineria Ancient Guru

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    It doesn't really matter which batch you get, there can always be bad samples in between.

    Got a 3700X some weeks ago which had an issue with the PCIEx16 slot, monitor detected no input and the board complained over missing a video card too, lights and fans did act completely normal thou, could also see on the keyboards led profile that it in fact booted into Windows, switched it to the second x8 slot and it worked.
    I still didn't suspect the CPU at that point, so checked CPU in old system, ran memtest86, OCCT and so one, and not getting any errors...
    So I did an RMA on the X470 and got a X570 on top in the meantime where I also faced the x16 slot issue, since I now had 2 boards and wanted a second build I did order a 3600 which made it work on both boards.
    Ended up writing to AMD which very quickly took the RMA and replaced it with a new 3700X, never seen anything being moved so fast between Denmark and the Netherlands, the new 3700X works flawless.

    Got to add, both CPU's are a huge upgrade for me, been using a 4970K for the last 5-6 years, it really showed it's age when I upgraded GPU.

    Also nice to see that AMD offers Zen3 support for B450 and X470, but tbh. I don't think there will be a huge difference between Zen2 and Zen3 on these boards, none the less, it will be interesting to see the difference.
     
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  14. schmidtbag

    schmidtbag Ancient Guru

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    That's nice they decided to listen to customers. Too bad about us 300 series users, but, I honestly wasn't expecting to have compatibility with a 4th generation product in my motherboard anyway.

    I still think AMD could've got away without releasing Zen3 for AM4 if they just did things differently. It was stupid of them to attempt to release it for AM4 while artificially breaking backward compatibility.
     
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  15. Fender178

    Fender178 Ancient Guru

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    Yeah I agree that AMD could have gotten away with not releasing Zen3 for AM4 and the same thing applies with 6xx series chipset they could release that with the release of AM5.
     

  16. Abomlol

    Abomlol Member

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    Two BIOSes diverged in a wood, and I --
    I took the upgrade path less traveled by...
    - Lisa Su
     
  17. D3M1G0D

    D3M1G0D Guest

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    Took longer than I was expecting but they finally did the right thing (I had a feeling they would ;)). The backlash was overwhelming, even on the AMD subreddit, and it was inevitable that they would cave.

    This is bad news for my wallet though. I originally had no intention of upgrading but I'm suddenly tempted (depends on how big of a performance leap there is).
     
  18. Celcius

    Celcius Master Guru

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    Firstly, full disclosure: I don't really have a horse in this particular contest as I don't have any foreseeable need or inclination to purchase a ZEN 3 CPU.

    I felt that AMD's original stance on this was not an example of greed and/or backsliding. AMD *did* make a pledge to support this socket until, or through, (choose one), 2020. And, from Bristol & Summit Ridge, all the way through to Matisse and Picasso, I'd say, (and I'm fully aware I'm in the minority on this), they made good on that pledge.

    Take a moment and recall that Zen 3 was a long way off in 2017; none of the 400-series boards, much less the 500-series, even existed yet. Also yet to be realized were all the BIOS and AGESA updates, chipset drivers, etc. Little of the infrastructure that supports this platform was around. With 3rd-gen ZEN years away, perhaps the "twenty-twenty" claim was overly optimistic. Fair enough.

    So, yes, not providing three-plus years of support through three generations of ZEN processors on every motherboard could be looked upon as a pledge broken by some. And that's perfectly OK. From my perspective, I feel that prior to this news, we received, at the very least, 85% or better of what was promised. And it now appears AMD is going to try and drive that number a bit closer to 100%. (Yes, I'm fully aware that the 300-series mobo-guerillas are still crawling their way through the concertina wire, refusing to give up the struggle.)

    Finally, I'm a bit surprised that so many wish to pair a ZEN 3 chip on earlier motherboards. You guys realize that AMD's upcoming JiggleWare® breast-physics co-processor requires PCIe 4.0 support, don't you?
     
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  19. JonasBeckman

    JonasBeckman Ancient Guru

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    Wonder how much the 16 or 32 MB bios storage plays into this, looks like there's plenty of room now and if support for the earlier models could be stripped down or made modular it might end up being a non issue.
    Good to see AMD doing this though, unless there's a clear technical restriction other than storage space (Was pretty surprised when looking through a spreadsheet for how few 32's there were.) I don't see why backwards compatibility couldn't continue.

    EDIT: Mb, MB, MIB, Mib.

    Bits and bytes. :p
    I keep mixing it all up but it looks like the current bios sizes are around 8 - 11 Megas or some such with a variety of empty blocks or padding data so there's room for now assuming this is a limitation as even many of the higher-end boards use 16/128 instead of 32/256 though some like ASRock and MSI seem to be using these more than others.
    (Going via this motherboard overview: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...FnsZYZiW1pfiDZnKCjaXyzd1o/edit#gid=2112472504 )

    EDIT: Ah there is some technicalities involved, wonder how much of a problem this *really* is and AMD is basically giving a attempt here at doing it anyway knowing it will be complicated and a likely customer support issue down the line.
    (From the instructions this does not seem like your typical update and there's a lot of limitations. https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/gmp45o/the_zen_3_architecture_is_coming_to_amd_x470_and/ )
     
    Last edited: May 20, 2020
  20. Shakey_Jake33

    Shakey_Jake33 Guest

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    GN explained well why simply stripping things away isn't as simple as it sounds. For example, stripping out support for legacy CPUs might seem like a non-issue to us, but is a complete headache in other global markets where those CPUs are still high sellers. People buy a B450 motherboard expecting it to work with X processor but find that it does not because of the bios revision that was loaded onto the board. RMA headache.

    AMD's solution is a bit of a fudge, but a good compromise. The beta bioses with stripped CPU support will not be available at retail, B450 boards will not 'officially' support Zen 3 as far as retail goes, it will be limited to enthusiasts who have to intentionally install the bios themselves. I guess AMD are holding tight and hoping people don't mess up their boards.
     

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