| JEMC said: Bummer. While I don't think that will have a huge impact in the total sales, it's quite obvious that the ones that know about this will hold their purchase and go straight to the 5000 series with AM5, DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and whatever AMD comes up with. But let's not fool ourselves, many of the original boards weren't ready to handle 8 or more cores and they struggled with the newer processors. They had to put a line and say enough, even if it's just to avoid problems with people burning their mobos. |
There is also the issue of space... Some board manufacturers only implemented a tiny amount of ROM storage and filled it up with pretty UI effects rather than microcode to support various CPU models...
So some boards actually had a firmware that supported one mix of CPU's and another firmware that supported another.
It was a mess, essentially board manufacturers tried to save a penny.
Another issue is of motherboard quality.
Take the Asus Crosshair for example... An AM2 motherboard, there was no guarantees it eventually would get support to run AM3 and AM3+ processors because other motherboards didn't, however Asus actually implemented pretty good power delivery which made it possible.
Basically this situation has always existed for AMD, it's up to the board manufacturers to implement support... And not all manufacturers care about support after the first 6 months of release... Plus not all boards are high-enough quality to support newer processors due to issues like power delivery.
Your mileage has always varied, you just need to keep an eye on your boards firmware to see if you can run something newer.
I saying that, I had an old Asrock board which never had a firmware update to support a rebadged Phenom 2 x4 as an Athlon 2 x4, yet it still ran, at the right clocks, just the CPU name was mis-reported.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
