AMD has revealed some great, if expected news for PC hardware enthusiasts as it confirmed that its next generation of desktop processors – 4th Gen Ryzen – which will use its Zen 3 architecture, will be compatible with current X570 and B550 motherboards.
This means that current owners of the latest generation of Socket AM4 will be able to drop in one of the new CPUs when they arrive, but owners of older chipset motherboards, such as X470 or B450 will need to upgrade.
The X570 chipset is it’s current flagship mainstream chipset and offers PCIe 4.0 support, while cheaper boards that use the recently announced B550 chipset, also offer PCIe 4.0 support and will be available soon. In a blog post on its website, AMD’s Robert Hallock, Technical Marketing lead for AMD consumer processors, said that current motherboards will work with its next generation processors, but would require a BIOS update.
However, this could pose problems for enthusiasts purchasing motherboards around the time of Zen 3′s release if they have no way of updating the motherboard’s BIOS with a compatible CPU first. Some motherboards offer some form of USB BIOS Flashback – a tool to update the BIOS without a CPU even being in the CPU socket.
An alternative is to use AMD’s short term processor loan boot kit, which has been available to deal with the same situation with previous generations of CPUs. Asked whether the actual socket would need to change in future, Hallock said there were no plans here, but future technology changes could require it in future.
I should point out that the actual cooler mounting mechanism could stay the same for much longer than this, though, since there have been no changes made here since AMD introduced Socket AM4 in 2017.
