Tuesday, January 30th 2018

An EPYC Threadripper: Der8auer Gets EPYC CPU Working on X399 Motherboard
So, maybe it isn't really working - but at least the system boots up all the way to the BIOS memory checks, where it then stops emitting life signs. Der8auer went through a sort of blind process to discover that there is a particular ID pin on EPYC that when covered, allows the CPU to be booted up by a X399 motherboard (in this case, an ASUS X399 Zenith Extreme). ID pins are nothing new, and basically tell sockets whether or not they should be powering up a particular CPU.
So what exactly does this mean? Nothing much - only that the sockets and pinouts are the same. The approach towards detecting the ID pin was a crude, brute force one, appending a piece of electrical tape to different parts of the CPU, narrowing down the search for a single pin. When this particular pin was covered, standby power finally kept on, and the motherboard ran through some initial boot steps until stopping at the D0 memory boot code. Der8auer thinks that a "simple" BIOS switch on this TR4 motherboard to an EPYC motherboard's BIOS would suffice to get the EPYC CPU running on this Threadripper motherboard. Check out the full video after the break.
Source:
Der8auer's YouTube
So what exactly does this mean? Nothing much - only that the sockets and pinouts are the same. The approach towards detecting the ID pin was a crude, brute force one, appending a piece of electrical tape to different parts of the CPU, narrowing down the search for a single pin. When this particular pin was covered, standby power finally kept on, and the motherboard ran through some initial boot steps until stopping at the D0 memory boot code. Der8auer thinks that a "simple" BIOS switch on this TR4 motherboard to an EPYC motherboard's BIOS would suffice to get the EPYC CPU running on this Threadripper motherboard. Check out the full video after the break.
37 Comments on An EPYC Threadripper: Der8auer Gets EPYC CPU Working on X399 Motherboard
First off, there are specific pin differences that reference communication between different parts of the platform tropology..
by blocking the pin as he did, he simply stopped a hard fault condition. you could likely force a EPYC to perform a full bootup if you ousted specific pins but stability would likely be compromised as therte really is quite a difference between the two from a functional level especially in IMC.
EDIT; Fricken auto-correct. Always getting it wrong..
If he succeeds it opens the platform up to further upgrades, now if he figures out a multiplier hack there would be some sweet rigs out.
My original point was that AMD has nothing to worry about as this will likely never become mainstream.
you can possibly "Make it work" but it would not be ideal by any means and likely from just a cursory look on my part of both platforms, there is a high likelihood you will lose core functionality if you get it to work at all.
I would love to see how it sorts out... I kinda wish I had time to allocate as I could potentially double the research effort on this... but I digress.... things to do.... (adulting sucks)