AMD to Support Zen 3 and Ryzen 4000 CPUs on B450 and X470 Motherboards

[harlan4096]

In a surprising twist, AMD has today announced that it intends to enable Ryzen 4000 and Zen 3 support on its older B450 and X470 Motherboards. This is going to be a ‘promise now, figure out the details later’ arrangement, but this should enable most (if not all) users running 400 series AMD motherboards to upgrade to the Zen 3 processors set to be unveiled later this year.

BackgroundWhen AMD launched the Ryzen 3 3300X and Ryzen 3 3100 processors, it also gave users details about the upcoming B550 chipset that these processors were targeted for. Part of that announcement included a chart, showing how due to BIOS limitations, certain chipsets would only support certain AM4 processors. X570, for example, would support previous Ryzen 2000, current Ryzen 3000, and future Ryzen 4000 processors – it did not support the original Ryzen 1000 processors.

On that chart, it was noted almost immediately that there was a glaring omission. AMD’s B450 and X470 motherboards were listed as supporting Ryzen 1000/2000/3000, but not the future Zen3-based Ryzen 4000 processors. This made a number of users immediately very concerned, especially if they had purchased a B450 or X470 motherboard with a Ryzen 3000 processor with the hopes to upgrade it in the future.

AMD came under a lot of fire. The company had originally promised that it would support the AM4 platform from 2016 through 2020 (or ‘through to’ 2020). A lot of users had assumed that this meant any AM4 platform based motherboard would be able to accept any processor made from 2016 to 2020, including the new Zen 3 processors set to be unveiled later this year. The fact that there was a discrepancy between what the users expected and what AMD had been saying essentially became a miscommunication or a misunderstanding, but one that had a negative effect on a number of users who were expecting to upgrade the system.

Ultimately the reason for the lockout was down to the BIOS size. Each generation of processors require a portion of the BIOS space for compatibility code – normally if you can support one processor from a generation, then you can support them all. We are also in the era of graphical interface BIOSes, and as a result some of the BIOS code was reserved for fancy menus and the ability to adjust fan curves or update the BIOS in a more intuitive way. All of this takes up space, and some vendors ditched the fancy graphics in order to support more processors.

Most AMD motherboards are outfitted with 128 megabit (16 megabyte) BIOS chips. The reason why this is the case is due to a limitation on some of AMD’s early AM4 processors – due to design, they can only ever address the first 16 megabytes of a BIOS chip. So even if a motherboard vendor had a larger BIOS chip, say MSI had a 32 megabyte chip, then it would actually operate like two partitioned BIOSes and it would get very complicated. There is no easy way to support every AM4 processor with a simple 16 megabyte BIOS.

By our estimate there are 84/86 current processors on the AM4 platform in total, counting Ryzen Pro parts as well. These are set across several families (A-Series, Zen, Zen APU, Zen+, Zen+ APU, Zen2, Zen2 APU, etc), each with their own AGESA platform to deal with, which all has to go into the BIOS. This is what makes it such a tight squeeze.

As a result AMD initially made the decision that the B450/X470 motherboards would support the Ryzen 1000, Ryzen 2000, and Ryzen 3000 processors, but would not be able to support any more due to this limit. AMD ultimately wanted the 500-series chipsets, the B550/X570, to be a launchpad for the future Ryzen processors.
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[harlan4096]

Additional Info: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-re...therboards