Welp, here comes the socket fragmentation from AMD with AM4. It seems that the older motherboards such as the X370/X470 will NOT be compatible with the upcoming Zen 3 CPUs!

https://www.techpowerup.com/266710/amd-b550-chipset-detailed-its-ready-for-zen-3-older-am4-motherboards-not-compatible

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.

Here's their blog post about it:

https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2020/05/07/the-exciting-future-of-amd-socket-am4

Q: What about (X pre-500 Series chipset)?
A: AMD has no plans to introduce “Zen 3” architecture support for older chipsets. While we wish could enable full support for every processor on every chipset, the flash memory chips that store BIOS settings and support have capacity limitations. Given these limitations, and the unprecedented longevity of the AM4 socket, there will inevitably be a time and place where a transition to free up space is necessary—the AMD 500 Series chipsets are that time.

Q: How long will Socket AM4 last from here?
A: This will depend on the schedule of industry I/O technologies. Such technology changes typically require adjustments to the pin count or layout of a processor package, which would necessitate a new socket. We have no specific details to share concerning this roadmap or timing right now, but we know it’s important to keep you updated—and we will.

There were already discussions about the size of the BIOS chips and how much they could hold, with some boards having higher capacity chips than others, so it doesn't surprise me that this is (one of) the reasons behind it.

The other one is clearly PR talk. We know AM5 will come next and if he's not saying it is because that could impact sales.

Is that actually something people are concerned about? AM3+ and AM4 have lasted for ages and AM5 will probably too.

It is cause some people made purchases thinking their older mobo's will work with the new zen 3 cpus. There are people that recommended getting the B450 over X570 due to this reason since AMD didn't say it wouldn't be supported going forward. I think the general expectation was that every motherboard that has the AM4 socket will support all the cpus that are made for that socket and that expectation was set by AMD.

Now personally, this isn't the biggest of deals since 3 generations of support is still pretty fap worthy but I do think they should have communicated this with the Zen 2 launch.

And here I thought all AMD users are millionaires by now by only buying AMD for the past decade and saving so much money.

Humble Bundle is offering free Steam keys for Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation.

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/ashes-of-the-singularity-escalation-free-game

Thanks for sharing.

Loll I will say that going from 1700 to 3900X without needing to swap out the motherboard did save me time so if nothing else, there's that!

The question now is how restrictive AMD will be if some of the motherboard vendors want to add support for their new CPUs with their old motherboards. When PCI-E 4.0 just came out on AMD platforms, Asus figured out a way to have their X370 Crosshair IV that originally shipped with PCI-E 3.0 to have PCI-E 4.0 compability with a BIOS update as long as you had a Zen 2 CPU which actually worked. But AMD said nope and forced Asus to revert pack.