Report: AMD Not Launching New Chipsets until Zen 3+ Processors (Ryzen 6000?)

Tsing

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According to a report by HD Tecnología regarding Intel’s Rocket Lake-S motherboards, AMD’s Ryzen 5000 Series will not be accompanied by new chipsets when they launch later this year. This isn’t really surprising, being that red team has already confirmed Zen 3 support for many pre-existing platforms such as X570, B550, and A520. Even older chipsets (i.e., X470 and B450) will be able to run Ryzen 5000 processors with a...

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New chipsets will probably be timed with ddr5.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not surprised. AMD doesn't exactly like being in the chipset business. It has exited that market many times over the years. B550 was outsourced and it took forever for that to come out. A theoretical X670 chipset had to do two things in order to be viable: 1.) It had to push the feature set forward in some way. 2.) It had to come in at a lower cost than X570 did. I think there are problems inherent to doing either of those things. ASMedia simply may not have been able to come up with anything and or AMD didn't want to invest the R&D in doing so themselves.

It would be one thing if X570 was somehow lagging Intel's Z490 chipset, which it doesn't. I think at present, it makes more sense for ASMedia or AMD to work towards a DDR5 chipset and Zen3+ / Zen4 rather than rebranding X570 as X670 or trying to come up with a minor feature bump just to have a new chipset. They'll get trashed in the reviews if they simply bring a chipset to market called X670 that doesn't offer anything tangible over X570.

I think we'll see some slightly improved X570 boards that may have updated VRM implementations and possibly additional third party features, but at the chipset level, X570 is pretty good as it is. The only thing that sucks, is the TDP of the chipset being roughly 3x that of anything else in the segment. ASMedia may have very well been given the opportunity to create a lower cost, lower power chipset, but it might not have been able to do so due to PCI-Express 4.0 and its requirements.

We may also see improved memory capabilities on refreshed X570 motherboards that launch along side the next generation Ryzen processors. Both because of updates to the design and because the next Ryzen's memory controller is likely to have improved as well. At least, that's what we've seen with each iteration so far.
 
If they make an X570-equivalent, but cheaper, then why does B550 exist?
If they were to make something 'better' than X570, how would it be better in a way that matters?

Even the occasional X370 board that wasn't poorly designed can handle the current 3000-series CPUs; most of what AMD has accomplished with successive chipset releases, it seems, has been to assert a near-Intel level of control over their board partners with respect to design and QA.

As it stands, X570 seems to be a in a pretty good spot with respect to having a competitive featureset and quality implementations. I can't really see a path to needing a replacement without first making significant changes to the CPU platform, mostly to the tune of even more PCIe lanes for stuff like NVMe and USB4 / Thunderbolt.
 
If they make an X570-equivalent, but cheaper, then why does B550 exist?
If they were to make something 'better' than X570, how would it be better in a way that matters?

Even the occasional X370 board that wasn't poorly designed can handle the current 3000-series CPUs; most of what AMD has accomplished with successive chipset releases, it seems, has been to assert a near-Intel level of control over their board partners with respect to design and QA.

As it stands, X570 seems to be a in a pretty good spot with respect to having a competitive featureset and quality implementations. I can't really see a path to needing a replacement without first making significant changes to the CPU platform, mostly to the tune of even more PCIe lanes for stuff like NVMe and USB4 / Thunderbolt.

X570 is extremely expensive. As expensive, if not more expensive even than its Intel counterparts from what I'm told. B550 exists to create a cheaper option for motherboard makers and thus, consumers. However, 550 is not only a lower cost chipset, but it's also a lower end chipset. There is some crossover, but they represent different segments in the market. Therefore, there is still room to make X570 cheaper than it is. It is both costly to manufacture, and its power hungry. As for making something better in a way that matters, I mean expanding the feature set or moving technology forward in some way. Whatever form that takes.

There are probably multiple reasons why we aren't seeing a new chipset for Zen 3. A new chipset might not be ready in time for the release. There might be delays on ASMedia's part since it's unlikely AMD would try and do another one in house. It could also simply be that AMD saw insufficient gains from such a project at this time. That is, they won't see enough ROI to bother with it given that a theoretical X670 chipset will be the end of the line for AM4. Fewer people are going to want to buy into a new chipset that will have such a short shelf life and really doesn't bring anything new to the table in terms of features or performance. And, as I said, (and you just said) X570 is well positioned in terms of its feature set.

One thing you have to consider is that it isn't necessarily the end users that ask for innovation. Often, it's the motherboard manufacturers themselves. Those are AMD's customers as well. I'm sure MSI, GIGABYTE, ASUS, ASRock and more would like X570 to cost less and use less power so they could ditch the active cooling on X570 motherboards. Again, there is room to make X570 cost less and it would improve margins on higher end motherboards. Right now, motherboard margins are razor thin pretty much across the entire product stack.

Lastly, us not seeing a need for a new chipset has nothing to do with anything. We rarely need new chipsets, but usually get them anyway. Intel has done it more times than I can count. Sometimes, it's feature set doesn't even expand. It's just rebranded and that's it. AMD has done it too. A520 isn't much if any different from A320. 990FX was identical to 890FX. The only difference was a VRM specifications update and support for one additional C-state that Bulldozer CPU's supported that older Phenom II's didn't. But the chipset silicon was basically the same.
 
Motherboard manufacturers may not be worried too much about not having a new chipset anyway. Most of them can probably take their current x570 boards and simply upgrade peripherals which in many cases won't need much in the way of changes. Using already known and working designs with few changes allows them to save quite a bit of money on the development and manufacturing costs while still releasing new motherboards for people to buy.

A "new" chipset might allow them to sell more boards but that's not a guarantee, especially if the "new" chipset doesn't offer anything new or advantageous over the previous chipset to make the motherboards more compelling.

I expect it won't be a big deal in the long run. They'll likely come out with new motherboards which are simply updated versions of current motherboards but with some mostly drop in changes. Many have commented about the peripheral feature sets of b550 boards being better in a number of ways over older x570 boards. Motherboard makers can simply update the peripherals on x570 boards to match or exceed b550 boards and still sell plenty of new boards.

For consumers it should be a mostly win/win scenario as long as prices on new model x570 boards don't go sky high. Other than bugs in new BIOS releases due to the new processors there should be few issues with new boards. It's a well known and understood platform at this point.
 
If I were AMD today I would be looking to see the advantages of a new socket. Will it be better? Can I support PCIE 5.0 and be downward compatible to PCIE 3.0? What older deprecated technologies can I leave behind or integrate via Motherboard vendors adding a chip to handle that? Where can I improve performance and embrace new technology?

I would look to a new Technology or two being embraced on whatever the new chipset will be. DDR5 or whatever it happens to be. A streamlined PCIE interface with perhaps more channels even on the Ryzen line of chips thanks to the newer hungry add in cards. and a better integration for Vega based chips. I don't see them doing a refresh without a new technology.
 
I was kinda waiting for a new chipset so I would have 4 years to keep upgrading my CPU (if needed) and I also assumed it would support ddr5.

My only issue there is I also did my last major upgrade when x99 launched alongside ddr4 and it was EXPENSIVE. I think I paid about $500 for 16 gigs of memory and it didn't even support xmp...

The great part though was I bought the i7 5820k, it's a 6 core 3.3ghz CPU and I got an amazing example. It can handle an all core overclock (stable under hours of full load) up to 5.5 GHz on a 240mm rad aio cooler.

I run it at 4.4ghz because I don't want to burn it out and at 4.4 I never see temps go past 70 degrees even after gaming for hours.

Of course it's genuinely time to upgrade so now I have to decide if I want to go with the upcoming ryzen revision or wait for the new chipset and get slammed by ddr5 prices... Although if I'm honest I haven't even looked at what they are at the moment. I also hope that version of ryzen will finally support quad channel because it does help. My current system still has ddr4 running at 2444mhz but it's quad channel so it makes up for the lack of speed.
 
There's no reason pcie5 couldn't be compatible with 3.
 
On B550/X570, the CPU is permitted to provide PCIe 4.0 lanes to the primary M.2 and PCIe x16 slot. On other boards, AMD's microcode limits it to PCIe 3.0.

"A520 isn’t much if any different from A320"

A520 isn't much different from B550. A520 and B550 are both PCIe 3.0 chipsets. PCIe 4.0 support is built into the CPU.

B450 and A320 aren't too different as they are both PCIe 2.0 chipsets.

X570 is physically a Ryzen 3000 PCH, with a firmware that lets it operate as a chipset instead. It was not designed to be a chipset, hence the insane heat production.
 
On B550/X570, the CPU is permitted to provide PCIe 4.0 lanes to the primary M.2 and PCIe x16 slot. On other boards, AMD's microcode limits it to PCIe 3.0.

The X570 chipset is fully PCIe 4.0 compliant. It isn't just the primary PCIe x16 slot and one M.2 slot that are compliant. It's all of the slots. The PCH and CPU's themselves talk to each other over a dedicated PCIe 4.0 x4 link.

"A520 isn’t much if any different from A320"

They are barely chipsets at all. Most of what you get on those boards comes from the CPU and its PCIe controller.

X570 is physically a Ryzen 3000 PCH, with a firmware that lets it operate as a chipset instead. It was not designed to be a chipset, hence the insane heat production.

Not quite. The X570 PCH is based on the Ryzen 3000 series CPU I/O die, but it also incorporates IP from ASMedia and other companies. It's not identical to a Zen2 I/O die. It's an I/O die plus some other stuff. It's not just firmware. Although, you are correct in that using the I/O die for a basis of a chipset is why the TDP on X570 is three times that of other chipsets.


The great part though was I bought the i7 5820k, it's a 6 core 3.3ghz CPU and I got an amazing example. It can handle an all core overclock (stable under hours of full load) up to 5.5 GHz on a 240mm rad aio cooler.

I run it at 4.4ghz because I don't want to burn it out and at 4.4 I never see temps go past 70 degrees even after gaming for hours.

I'm going to call bullshit on this one. Ivy Bridge-E is not capable of 5.5GHz on a 240mm AIO. It's not capable of that on water cooling of any kind. I have owned and overclocked a bunch of those CPU's. That's LN2 territory. Those CPU's tend to top out around 4.5GHz. Some people have gotten a bit more out of them, but not by much. There are tons of examples of these being taken much further via LN2 cooling with the record being 6.33GHz or something like that.

If you could get 5.5GHz out of an i7 5820K and a 240mm AIO, it would have been a lot more popular as a gaming CPU. Even the Core i7 7740X couldn't achieve that (LN2 not withstanding) and it was practically designed for overclocking with examples of that toping out at 5.1GHz to 5.2GHz or so on water cooling. Also, gaming loads a CPU somewhat, but it isn't the type of activity that really heat loads a processor. Try BlenderBenchmark and you'll see much higher than 70c temps at 4.4GHz on a 5820K.
 
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