MSI adds ZEN3 support to Series 400 Chipsets, even with 16 MB BIOS

My Mortar B450 is doing a happy dance!
Going to upgrade the 2200G to newest APU.

 

It's not confusing, what MSI are doing is basically dropping support for older chips to make room for Zen 3 chips. Probably drop some of the first generation ryzen cpu's off to make room for Zen 3 chips.

 

When people talk about memories not less than GBs why mobo vendors miserly embed 16 MB BIOS ROMs which were the norms of 2000s ?

 

I figured they would be the first to announce it.

 

16MB BIOS ROM are more than enough for storing few KB of AGESA microcode.. The space is "wasted" by 3rd party chipset firmwares, useless functions and graphics effects and of corse ad-hoc system tuning code (eg: overclocking functions, fans tuning) and basic BIOS program.

 

supports more of the cpu's.

 

Then it makes sense getting rid of the support for older cpus to make room for the new ones. 16mb is more than enough to support all zen2/zen3 cpus.

 

As I said, it's not only about putting a new version of AGESA on it. 32MB version means less issues for putting all the rest of useless things. Just thing about how much place a couple of bitmaps can take on a few MB ROM.
The OrochiPI AGESA in uncompressed form was like ~100KB size.. Let's say that we have now... 500KB to 1MB size (let's overestimate it!), all the rest is the default BIOS/UEFI program, 3rd party chipset firmwares, tuning profiles, graphics and animation effects.
Not supporting older MB is more due economical reasons than BIOS sizes, otherwise they would just support only the "MAX" motherboards.

 

I also consider the 32MB need completely bulls**t.

My "ancient" PRIME X370-PRO has the latest AGESA ComboAM4 1.0.0.4b in a bios image of only 11 MB, which it increased just by 3 MB since I bought it for a Zen 1 (R7 1700) CPU (and it STILL supports that one, I tested, since I still have it)
So the entirety of all the CPUs since first release of Zen (2000 series, 3000 series, all APUs) only increased the bios image size by just 3 MB !??

Even if the AGESA need for Zen 3 is double the size of what was added for Zen 2, it should STILL fit in 16 MB just fine without removing the support for any of the CPUs.
And my guess is that 300 series could support Zen 3 just fine IF they (AMD) wanted it...

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I think this entire situation is a combination of lazy programming and marketing BS.

 

Not on every brand, Asrock were around 32/64 and Asus 32 to 128 on AM4... but even with 16 and "lite" look the MSI bios is better to use.
My 1st MSI board was bought because there wasn't Asus version aviable of the X79 at this moment... I had a not so good image of the brand.
But since i am totaly convincted of the quality of MSI (and Asrock too for the same reason)...

 

There is also a power stage that need to be better...
But since most maker exceed even the 400 recomendation on the 300, even in an extreme way sometime (exemple on Asrock: i think 9 phases is enough on a A320 lol) it should be possible, i totaly agree with you.

 

I would argue it's wasted on cheesy graphics.
If I were MSI, I'd offer 2 options: a graphically simple option (which could still use a mouse pointer but fewer bitmaps) or one that supports most/all CPUs.

 

Bitmap graphics waste a lot of space.

Those are 128Mb, all ASUS motherboards like all other OEM use 16MB (128Mb) or 32MB (256Mb) ROMs for BIOS.

 

Cool.
My board should get Zen3 support then.
MSI X470 Gaming Pro.
Just wanna slap in a 4600x and some 3600+ ram.
Currently have a 2700x and 3000mhz

 

If people did not watch the Gamers Nexus videos or read up on it, 16MB roms were around not because they were cheap but because pre-matisse Ryzens could not address anything above 16MB...in fact if they were put into a board with a 32MB rom and no special tricks applied, the pre-matisse Ryzen would/could not boot. So the boards that have 32MB roms and support pre-matisse Ryzens divide up the rom in such a way that the other half of the rom does not exist for them.

 

I still can't find a straight answer to that

heck why are they even called "rom" at this point? okey the cpu for some reason can't address more than 16mb, so lets partition a 4gb "rom" into whatever many parts it would need to work, done.

I'm looking for something along the lines of "bios rom chips are not normal nand flash, they are incredibly specialized, resilient, low latency, and cost like $10 per megabyte" as a reason for these ridiculously small sizes, but all we get is non answers like "oh yeah 32mb costs way more, so they use 16mb!"

I mean its not like cpu cache, which is very easy to understand why they are as small as they are, this on the other hand just looks like planned obsolescence

 

I disagree because fan control is very important in my mind and the same thing goes for overclocking because you don't want to alienate your customers by getting rid of features for new CPUs. Also why would they make 32mb and beyond boards then? There are boards out there that had to get rid of fan control to support newer CPUs. I think the graphics could be simplified while keeping the pretty menus. This is why the make lower chipset boards with less features because they know those users aren't going try and overclock their CPUs with them.