But if true, this could mean that we could potentially see some AMD Ryzen 4000 series CPUs hit clock speeds close to 5 GHz with overclocking, which is a far cry from the ~4.1Ghz of first generation Ryzen.Just when we started to think that the techsphere is winding down for the weekend we get a barrage of leaks and rumors show up on our desks. 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. It might end up being a one-way solution. AMD stated that this might be a possibility, but they haven’t worked on those details at this time.There is still 6+ months (?) The AMD Ryzen family is an x86-64 microprocessor family from AMD, based on the Zen microarchitecture.The Ryzen lineup includes Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, Ryzen 7, Ryzen 9, and Ryzen Threadripper with up to 64 cores. However, it will be up to the ODM partner to actually enable it as a feature for their motherboard or pre-built system. 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. AMD Zen 3 ‘Ryzen 4000’ Desktop CPUs & RDNA 2 ‘Radeon RX Navi 2X’ GPUs On Track For 2020 Launch – EPYC Milan Ships Later This Year, 5nm Zen 4 in 2021.
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.On that chart, it was noted almost immediately that there was a glaring omission. 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. Well folks, this is going to be a fun one, so let's get straight to it!That being said, I'd be remiss not to urge readers to take these rumors with a grain of salt, we're still ways out from the Ryzen 4000 series making it to market and things are always subject to change. 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. The former one will likely be a default BIOS, which will be picked up by auto-update software, however the latter will likely always be a Beta BIOS, and it will require user intervention.In conversations with AMD, we also discovered more insight into what this entails.
Zen 3 support on b450 and x470 is a mess (editorial) The complexity of this situation is exactly why AMD decided to shift support for Zen 3 to 500-series chipset motherboards in the first place.