Friday, January 7th 2022
AMD Explores Adding Ryzen 5000-series Support to 300-series Chipsets
One of the most debated questions surrounding AMD's AM4 platform has been the lack of support for AMD's Ryzen 5000-series CPUs on the company's 300-series chipsets. Now, in an interview with Tom's Hardware, AMD's Corporate VP and GM of the Client Channel business, David McAfee, has thrown some cautious words into the hellish debate on platform fragmentation (some even say artificial segmentation). "It's definitely something we're working through," David said. "And it's not lost on us at all that this would be a good thing to do for the community, and we're trying to figure out how to make it happen." It's not a promise, but it seems that AMD is indeed contemplating solutions that would enable first-generation AM4 chipsets to support AMD's latest Ryzen 5000 series CPUs.
The problem has mostly to do with storage space: there are only so much available bits to be used in AM4 motherboards' 16 MB SPI ROM, the read-only memory bank that stores BIOS configurations and the necessary instructions for processor support. As AM4 is one of the longest-lived consumer platforms ever, the number of CPUs has ballooned, which has led to difficult decisions as to which CPUs to support. However, some more creative board partners have resorted to interesting techniques that allowed them to free up space in the SPI ROM that could be used to add support for otherwise incompatible CPUs, such as simplifying the BIOS GUI and falling back on more traditional text-based UIs. That and other practices resulted in a number of vendors adding support for AMD's Ryzen 5000 chips on the most entry-level A320 motherboards, which left consumers that had opted for the more technically accomplished X370 motherboards high and dry - barring a few lucky, ASRock-toting exceptions.
"I know that this has been a topic that, honestly, gets a lot of attention and a lot of discussion within AMD," David McAffee continued. "I'm not joking when I say that - I've literally had three conversations on this very topic today. And I'm not talking about with members of the press; I'm talking about internal conversations within our engineering teams and planning teams to understand what options we have and what we can do, and how can we deliver the right experience for a 300-series motherboard user who wants to upgrade to a 5000-series processor."
That might be more complicated than expected, however, since power delivery requirements have also changed throughout generations. AMD has scaled its AM4 socket from eight Zen cores in a single CPU up to 16 with AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, and you can be sure that power requirements are different between them. It's likely that any move in this area would require a per-motherboard validation, and again, AMD didn't promise anything: but there's at least a light at the end of the tunnel.
Source:
Tom's Hardware
The problem has mostly to do with storage space: there are only so much available bits to be used in AM4 motherboards' 16 MB SPI ROM, the read-only memory bank that stores BIOS configurations and the necessary instructions for processor support. As AM4 is one of the longest-lived consumer platforms ever, the number of CPUs has ballooned, which has led to difficult decisions as to which CPUs to support. However, some more creative board partners have resorted to interesting techniques that allowed them to free up space in the SPI ROM that could be used to add support for otherwise incompatible CPUs, such as simplifying the BIOS GUI and falling back on more traditional text-based UIs. That and other practices resulted in a number of vendors adding support for AMD's Ryzen 5000 chips on the most entry-level A320 motherboards, which left consumers that had opted for the more technically accomplished X370 motherboards high and dry - barring a few lucky, ASRock-toting exceptions.
That might be more complicated than expected, however, since power delivery requirements have also changed throughout generations. AMD has scaled its AM4 socket from eight Zen cores in a single CPU up to 16 with AMD's flagship Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, and you can be sure that power requirements are different between them. It's likely that any move in this area would require a per-motherboard validation, and again, AMD didn't promise anything: but there's at least a light at the end of the tunnel.
48 Comments on AMD Explores Adding Ryzen 5000-series Support to 300-series Chipsets
AMD needs to come up with a generic universal one that fits, and let tell the board makers to use it - and they can throw their customisations on top, but tone down the space wasting shit
but, again, I’d like to see test results which can prove that ‘ageing’ boards are ‘not fit for purpose’ when paired with a R3000 or even R5000 please.
If you want a socketable BIOS chip, solder a socket onto the board yourself. Complaining that motherboard manufacturers don't do it is a waste of everyone's time because it ain't gonna happen.
It was a nice, but useless thing that a lot of board makers added.
The bigger issue these days seems to be that they need a lot of extra graphical elements to handle display scaling, or the interface looks all blurred out.
The other issue is that the AGESA is apparently growing a lot in size and it seems like AMD needs to figure out a better way to do things, as Intel is apparently not having the same bloat issues when it comes to their CPU code for the UEFI.
Also, AMD doesn't make UEFI's, that would be AMI and Insyde, not sure if there's anyone else left. Their stuff is then "merged" with the AGESA by the board makers. I guess this might also be part of the reason why things are the way they are.Well, considering most mid-range boards and up now have an MCU onboard, which allows for programming of the BIOS chip from a USB stick, a socketed chip isn't as important as it once was, nor is having a backup BIOS chip. Even a bad flash isn't likely to fry the flash memory and the MCU would just write over whatever a bad flash caused.
Since most people don't know what BIOS/UEFI is, they wouldn't be updating them, which is kind of stupid. Even with Windows based update utilities, most people aren't going to be doing it, because their computer is working. Just like most people don't update their drives...
www.asus.com/us/motherboards-components/motherboards/prime/prime-x370-pro/HelpDesk_CPU/
3950 is supported
www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/PRIME/PRIME-X370-A/HelpDesk_CPU/
Unless the VRM's hold you back, the only true feature loss from a newer AM4 CPU on an older board, is dropping to PCI-E 3.0
It's just that; these VRM's obviously will run hot and while running at 90 degrees is perfectly fine, caps around it on the long run cant.
When i see boards with 16 fase VRM setup included like 900 amps or so; there's no CPU in the world consuming 900 amps, not even on LN2.
Lots of its is marketing gimmick you wont even use in all it's lifetime.
I just got a B550 Steel Legend for a R7 5800 with a TR ARO-M14G cooler.
That mobo is 14 phase, its a middle ground system with a higher cpu and 3600 ram.
Why do you think that is? Because a properly designed board can handle any CPU even with 2 phases. It just depends on the build quality, the used components (like higher grade or faster switching vrm's etc) and the traces. Seriously there's no need for a 14 phase vrm on a board lol.
And mind you those VRM's are designed for 24/7 usage and not your avg 8 hours a day.
It's just marketing gimmicks to thrive up the price; mobo vendors KNOW you would not in a 10 year ever need to tap into the full VRM's potential or capacity, yet they sell it with extreme pricing and you think you have a solid board, lol.
Now, you're definitely rigth number of phases is a marketing term and there's no need for 10+ phases with good designs but there's a lot that goes into designing these boards. For example, desktop boards use larger heatsinks on the vrms because regular desktop coolers provide marginal airflow for the power delivery so they need to compensate for that, as they need to spread the load across multiple phases, as they need to use lower power phases with higher efficiency and better costs (because the cost of the board needs to be low contrary to server boards) etc etc etc
It's a big balancing act
The cooling is purely because of the passive setup CPU's and GPU's have.
And I mean, to be fair Ryzen was something entirely new and different - heck AMD controls a large part of what a mobo maker can do with the AEGSA chunks. It's a strange beast in retrospect - "here mobo maker, design your board to run this processor but you have to use this firmware chunk that even we keep changing around - oh and we're launching 2 months earlier than we last talked"
Thankfully despite that many boards (majority?) after a few firmware updates were totally awesome and fine. Others though... lets say they were quickly discontinued. Or in Asus's case (to their credit though!) only had some firmware updates after a model's successor B450 replacement came out. But I mean - credit they still update!
And to be clear I'm okay with that - that's the gamble you take with buying launch day platform. If you want the safe bet you wait. Even though I had (still having) some bad experiences with some early B350 boards from Asus doesn't mean I think Asus only makes junk (and lol looking up for this comment, I was amazed/impressed they actually have a 'Win11' firmware for it recently, so... good on them!). I might get irritated at MSI's messaging but I'm pretty sure they make some good boards too and I won't begrudge them for that.
But yea if sorry it came off as me bashing all early 3xx boards or at Asus and MSI - I treat everything on a "per model" for computer parts. All manufacturers have their good and ... less remembered (in retrospect) models.I actually hadn't seen this news until this thread - which... yea. Maybe it's easier to validate A320 boards since there's no official overclocking support?
Since my x370 just got 4000G series support in december, i'm leaning towards AMD genuinely trying to make this work
They COULD bring it back as a default-off option for people to use similar to overclocking (at your own risk, etc) - but as a default option it was a bad idea