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AMD to Detail Zen 2, Navi Architectures Come Hot Chips in August

Valantar said:
As always, the safe alternative for anyone planning to buy an older-series motherboard with a new CPU is to wait until you can rely on stock to have the most recent BIOS updates - which takes a month or two. For anyone else, this isn't an issue - either you're buying a new-series motherboard, or you have an older CPU already that you're upgrading from which you can use for upgrading the BIOS.
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It's fairly easy if you already own an old CPU, but I was thinking of the use case where the buyer gets a brand new board with the "old" chipset and a new CPU. I was saved by BIOS flashback once when building a Kaby Lake system, I didn't even think about it until the machine didn't POST, it turned out that the new board had a very old BIOS.

Think of all the fancy useless crap motherboard makers put on their boards, while "BIOS flashback" should have been standard… :rolleyes:
 
EarthDog said:
It can be the same story with huge brick and mortars (I was intentionally generic with my words above). It just depends on how many are ordered, when, and how many are sold/leftover along with when you are buying. All around its a crapshoot, really. In general, the longer the better, no matter where you are purchasing it from.

EDIT: Also, those large B&Ms have to take whatever stock they get from AIBs... if AIBs have a bunch of old stock, chances are they aren't taking the time to flash them either.

PS - I also happen to know the Procurment Manager for components at Microcenter (he's based in Ohio where I live).
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That's true, but most half-decent brick-and-mortars can do a necessary BIOS upgrade for you in store (or at least ought to be able to do so), free of charge.
 
Valantar said:
That's true, but most half-decent brick-and-mortars can do a necessary BIOS upgrade for you in store (or at least ought to be able to do so), free of charge.
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I've seen it done for a cost (Microcenter)..It would be nice to have that as commonplace. Does Frys do that?
 
EarthDog said:
I've seen it done for a cost (Microcenter)..It would be nice to have that as commonplace. Does Frys do that?
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I'm not in the US, so I have no idea whatsoever, but at both the stores I've worked at and the ones I frequent now (much smaller than US retail giants, I might add - large electronics chains in Norway are useless when it comes to PC parts) have done stuff like that free of charge. After all, it's a relatively quick fix that helps move old-stock hardware, which both pleases management and helps the store's reputation. Of course all the stores in question have either had in-house service techs or have had technically competent sales staff with the equipment and time to quickly rig up a system for something like this. I've done a lot of weird, off-the-cuff service in my time in retail.
 
Maybe mom and pop shops will do that here...but no big shops I know of will. :)
 
Some great news a few days before official announcements.
Towards the end of the video the big news about Ryzen 3000 12C hitting 5GHz turbo clocks. :eek:

And a crop from an instance of the same video (18m37s) that can help caclulate IPC gains from Threadripper 2950 with almost the same clocks. Result: +18,5% for Zen2 in IPC!!!

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Some of us have told so just by math logic from the 7nm and the previous zen+ clocks but not many believed that would be possible. I just thought it was early for a new process to hit 5GHz. If they managed it so soon, we will see great products with awesome performance/W efficiency too. And as some of us have told many months ago, only price will determine this line of CPUs' market success.
 
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