Question B550 chipset, so AMD joins the dark side after all.

[Shivansps]

I just read the article...

So let me get this straight, this chipset is coming out like a year later, they did not even bother to add CPU PCI-E 4.0 uplink support or to increase the number of sata ports that is ALREADY a problem on every 6 sata B450 motherboard (NVME x4 disables the 2 SOC Sata, thus 6 sata B450 mbs losses 2 sata if NVME is used), and they even dare to futher reduce backguard compatibility?

I was not expecting for the PCI-E lanes FROM the chipset to be 4.0, but only USB 3.2 G2, no more satas, CPU link still 3.0 and the PCI-E lanes 3.0 is beyond disappointing.

 

[Rigg]

But the point here is that OEM could have re-designed the B450 mbs for it, and those MBs would have been in the market for a long time ago by now, but since it was agesa blocked, they could not do that.

What is the basis of this assertion? Do you have insider info from the AIB's? Are you a design engineer?
The explanation from @DrMrLordX seems plausible to me. AIB partners have been saying b550 was around the corner since shortly after Zen 2 launched. I'm not sure why you think they could have magically pulled b450 boards w/PCIE 4.0 out of a hat any sooner.

 

[Markfw]

You get what you pay for. You want all the bells and whistles ? you pay for it... x570..

You are not going to get a Rolls-Royce on a yugo budget.

 

[soresu]

You get what you pay for. You want all the bells and whistles ? you pay for it... x570..

You are not going to get a Rolls-Royce on a yugo budget.

It begs the question though, what will the Bx50 platform for Zen4 have to offer the mid range market?

At what point do you reach overkill for systems not designed for the best components in the first place?

Will all the PCIE 3.0 lanes become 4.0 lanes once the main CPU IO is 5.0 based?

Or will it just stick with 3.0 lanes anyway.

Certainly as 4.0 IO came with a significant power cost in silicon over 3.0 we can imagine that 5.0 lanes will be a an even greater power drain (and MB thermal issue), coupled with the new wider USB4/TB3 lanes that inevitably must come.

 

[Hitman928]

It begs the question though, what will the Bx50 platform for Zen4 have to offer the mid range market?

At what point do you reach overkill for systems not designed for the best components in the first place?

Will all the PCIE 3.0 lanes become 4.0 lanes once the main CPU IO is 5.0 based?

Or will it just stick with 3.0 lanes anyway.

Certainly as 4.0 IO came with a significant power cost in silicon over 3.0 we can imagine that 5.0 lanes will be a an even greater power drain (and MB thermal issue), coupled with the new wider USB4/TB3 lanes that inevitably must come.

Zen4 will most likely be on a new socket.

 

[soresu]

Zen4 will most likely be on a new socket.

I get that, I was talking about the features on the mainstream chipset.

As to the new socket, that's a definite, quite possibly as a knock on effect of needing more pins to account for extra stacked dies in the new x3D package configurations, plus DDR5 of course, maybe even adding future proofing for PCIE 6 aswell as the necessaries for PCIE 5.

The question is what kind of departure are we looking at:

ie HS/F compatibility, socket lifetime, etc...

 

[Shmee]

I would expect a 5 series board to support PCIe 4. Ok, they dont, so many users would get X570 if they need PCIe 4. That's fine. But then what is the point of getting a B550 over a B450?

 

[Hitman928]

I would expect a 5 series board to support PCIe 4. Ok, they dont, so many users would get X570 if they need PCIe 4. That's fine. But then what is the point of getting a B550 over a B450?

PCIe4 GPU slot and (depending on what the mobo maker does), PCIe4 x4 NVMe slot. Also now Ryzen 4000 series support.

 

[Rigg]

It begs the question though, what will the Bx50 platform for Zen4 have to offer the mid range market?

At what point do you reach overkill for systems not designed for the best components in the first place?

Will all the PCIE 3.0 lanes become 4.0 lanes once the main CPU IO is 5.0 based?

Or will it just stick with 3.0 lanes anyway.

Certainly as 4.0 IO came with a significant power cost in silicon over 3.0 we can imagine that 5.0 lanes will be a an even greater power drain (and MB thermal issue), coupled with the new wider USB4/TB3 lanes that inevitably must come.

My Guess is AMD will want to go heavily with the #5 theme in there marketing 2 years from now....... 5nm/5000 series CPU's/AM5/DDR5/PCIE 5.0. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of this trickle down to bx50 but the chipset stuff would probably all be 4.0 on bx50. I doubt the Flagship storage and GPU will be up to the task of 5.0 by then but somebody has to push the technology forward.

 

[DrMrLordX]

@Shmee asks a good question. PCIe 4.0 still isn't a compelling feature right now for a lot of users. It would be hard for OEMs to sell B550 boards if B450 supported Vermeer.

 

[Hitman928]

I get that, I was talking about the features on the mainstream chipset.

As to the new socket, that's a definite, quite possibly as a knock on effect of needing more pins to account for extra stacked dies in the new x3D package configurations, plus DDR5 of course, maybe even adding future proofing for PCIE 6 aswell as the necessaries for PCIE 5.

The question is what kind of departure are we looking at:

ie HS/F compatibility, socket lifetime, etc...

Ok, I get you. It's a good question, I don't know. I don't think anyone knows what AMD's or Intel's (or ARM vendors') plan is withe PCIe5. It may get relegated to server/workstation only. We'll have to wait and see.

 

[chrisjames61]

Exactly, same point. People don't refer to those as new gens either, but if I'm the only one around here that thinks that, so be it. It's just semantics, which, of course, is exceedingly popular battle material around here.

What I was trying to say was that Zen and Zen+ were distinctly different. 12 nm vs 14 nm, higher frequency, improved memory controller so I think it warrants being called second generation Ryzen.

 

[chrisjames61]

You get what you pay for. You want all the bells and whistles ? you pay for it... x570..

You are not going to get a Rolls-Royce on a yugo budget.

I bet a lot of the young guys here don't even know what a Yugo was lol!

 

[Hans Gruber]

I bet a lot of the young guys here don't even know what a Yugo was lol!

That was around the time when Mazda had a truck for just $5795. The Yugo was $3,995

 

[chrisjames61]

That was around the time when Mazda had a truck for just $5795. The Yugo was $3,995

I remember a co-worker had a Yugo that was only a couple years old in the late 80's. He decided he didn't want it and the resale value was nil so we destroyed it with baseball bats.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I remember a co-worker had a Yugo that was only a couple years old in the late 80's. He decided he didn't want it and the resale value was nil so we destroyed it with baseball bats.

Hope that doesn't happen to B450 motherboards...

 

[Shmee]

Ah ok my bad. I thought I was seeing that the B550 had no PCIe 4.

 

[rbk123]

What I was trying to say was that Zen and Zen+ were distinctly different. 12 nm vs 14 nm, higher frequency, improved memory controller so I think it warrants being called second generation Ryzen.

I understand but those are all refinements, not architectural changes like between Zen and Zen 2 (and presumably Zen 3). There's a reason AMD didn't call it Zen 2. However it appears moot since they're referred to as generations here (and apparently with the E-press) regardless, so I have no qualms changing my wording going forward.

 

[VirtualLarry]

As far as architectures go, I consider Zen and Zen+ to be roughly the same, same basic IPC, maybe some bug-fixes, some memory-controller firmware improvements, and of course, 12nm silicon lithography, rather than 14nm. Zen2 architecture is where things really got good, bigger caches (L3 "gamecache"), MUCH better memory-controller, 7nm litho, +15% or more IPC increase, AVX512 support / 256-bit AVX pipelines, etc.

But as far as actual Ryzen product generations go, yes, there have been three so far, 1000-series, 2000-series, and 3000-series. Zen3 architecture will be 4000-series CPUs.

 

[Shivansps]

Routing. The chipset and CPU socket don't exist in a vacuum. All motherboard designs come from a reference design, which is (in this case) going to come from ASMedia and AMD. All the reports were saying that ASMedia was struggling with PCIe 4.0 on B550.

I know about that issue with asmedia, thats exactly why i belived B550 to had a PCI-E 4.0 link with the CPU, what makes me wonder if Asmedia just gave up and AMD ended up accepting it. But this whole thing of spending months and months to try to make PCI-E 4.0 traces to work on a chipset that has no PCI-E 4.0 I/O and dont even need those traces makes no sence to me. It is just a glorified PCI-E I/O hub device and little more.

And i know about references designs as well, that means nothing, there is plenty of examples of OEMs doing things whiout references designs, like when AMD blocked the CPU core unlock on Phenoms, most OEM developed their own options, some of them included developing their own chip, re-route some traces to the chipset, etc... they did that with PCB revisions or launching new ones btw.

Heh. Really? We had page upon page of fighting about Matisse support on A320. It got pretty heated!

it was just part of the controversy of the 300 series chipset at that time, nothing special. BTW, A320 is the only 300 series chipsets that is not EOL yet, so i was kinda right to say it was more important than some people belived.

What is the basis of this assertion? Do you have insider info from the AIB's? Are you a design engineer?
The explanation from @DrMrLordX seems plausible to me. AIB partners have been saying b550 was around the corner since shortly after Zen 2 launched. I'm not sure why you think they could have magically pulled b450 boards w/PCIE 4.0 out of a hat any sooner.

First, timing was never in question here, it was about if you can do a PCI-E 4.0 mb with proper traces to use the lanes from the CPU to the main PCI-E and NVME with a b450. There is no information to say this is not possible. The chipset is not much diferent from any other PCI-E device and is not connected to those lanes either.

But if timing is the question, lets remember Phenom CPU core unlock, thats a fine example of AMD blocking something and OEM going as far as making own controllers to overcome that block, and timing, most people did not even realised that CPU core unlock was actually blocked by AMD (and for a good reason).

 

[CHADBOGA]

Has AMD ever promised that current Chipsets would support Ryzen after 2020? I don't recall any such thing. At some point old Chipsets need to be retired.

Not after 2020, but I thought they had promised it would be supported in 2020.

 

[Topweasel]

Ahh hell my bad, I was thinking about the bandwidth and forgot of the lanes.

Yeah its one of those things that has to be decided beforehand. It's how boards like my x370 Tiachi got away with so many Sata but still have 2 NVME drives. They took the 4x PCIe 3.0 that the chipset could hand out and went an extra 2 SATA, and took the 2x PCIe 3.0 and made it 4x PCIe 2.0. For my drive it doesn't make a difference if it was PCIe 2.0 or 3.0, but a PCIe 2.0 drive would only get 2x PCIe 2.0 if it was left at 2x PCIe 3.0.

So someone would have to take that 4x PCIe 4.0 make that port 4x PCIe 3.0 no matter what you choose and then buff the Sata ports. I would think any board trying to cram a couple more Sata ports in there would go that route. But honestly with the bonus PCIe 4.0 slots and the 4.0 com to the chipset. X570 is going to be the only realistic solution for high Sata solutions anyways. Trying to make the economy chipset the home server solution doesn't seem to be the smartest use case.

But if its not this, if its not every board supporting every CPU from day one till end of time, if its not enough integrated graphics, or not using HBM, or whatever. This person is going to pick out something either only slightly reasonable or for the most part grab something on the spec sheet that doesn't mean anything and it will be how this manufacturer is specifically screwing him over.

 

[Topweasel]

Not after 2020, but I thought they had promised it would be supported in 2020.

They were rather specific while being vague. Probably for this reason. They always were very specific in that AM4 was going to be used till 2020 and then confirmed later that it was through 2020 (so included Zen 3). We at that point assumed that it meant with the effort that they were putting into keeping the older platforms with updates to 2k and 3k CPU's that meant that 4k CPU's would also see the same treatment. But considering push back from board suppliers for support, it being longer than their OEM requirements, and the mess that most older boards would have to be ( This bios for 2k and earlier, this one for 3k, and this one for 4k), and possibly then having to support all three branches. I am sure this is a nightmare they just have to back out of and again doesn't actually go against what they said.

 

[TheGiant]

AMD massively overdelivered comparing to "industry" standard
what dark side? I got mine 3900X which was at that time top desktop CPU and the tomahawk b450 board for 95 EUR..what can I lose from 95EUR lol

 

[Ranulf]

While it sucks, I can't say I'm surprised especially with the delay of B550 boards. I can't blame AMD for wanting to avoid all the compatibility issues. As a hobbyist, I'm not perturbed by dealing with bios issues, they're just annoying. Most average users are not going to want to deal with the hassles or know how to fix them. Something that we in the know should emphasize to the average layman before touting the greatness of drop in cpu upgrades.

Also, I thank people for the hilarious usb/sata discussion. USB to replace sata... what a laugh riot. There are many reasons I have had esata ports (just buy those $5-10 pci bracket ones) on my utility desktop systems (or still use older laptops with esata ports) to get an easy quick sata connection to a HD dock.

But then I'm apparently a crazy person that still has optical drives and hdd's in my gaming systems for internal backups and more games before offloading copies to NAS etc..

 

[AnandThenMan]

I bet a lot of the young guys here don't even know what a Yugo was lol!

Good car but it is no Trabant.