Friday, June 14th 2019
ASMedia-sourced AMD B550, A520 Chipset Motherboards Arrive in 2020
If a recent MSRP price-list leak is anything to go by, motherboards based on the AMD X570 chipset will cost a pretty penny, beating even Intel's premium Z390 Express chipset on average motherboard pricing. Those looking for an affordable motherboard for the Ryzen 3000 series processors have the option of choosing existing AMD 400-series chipset based motherboards, and taking advantage of the USB BIOS Flashback feature that's almost universally available on the AMD platform. You lose out on PCI-Express gen 4.0 with the older platforms, which may not be a big compromise when it comes to graphics cards, but would limit your M.2 NVMe SSD performance upgrade path. One possible option would be to wait for affordable variants of AMD's 500-series chipsets, which are sourced from ASMedia.
According to DigiTimes, ASMedia will tape out its next-generation AMD-platform chipset silicon, and is on track to shipping its new chipsets to motherboard manufacturers by Q4-2019. This would pin availability of the first motherboards based on these chipsets to at least Q1 2020. These chipsets not only feature PCI-Express gen 4.0 downstream lanes, but also boards based on these will be built to AMD's PCB requirements for the new platform, enabling a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot for discrete graphics, and revised CPU VRM and memory wiring specifications that improve overclocking over the previous generation platform. For now there are two SKUs in the works, the B550, which succeeds the B450, and the A520, succeeding the A320.Image Credit: Hardware.info
Source:
DigiTimes
According to DigiTimes, ASMedia will tape out its next-generation AMD-platform chipset silicon, and is on track to shipping its new chipsets to motherboard manufacturers by Q4-2019. This would pin availability of the first motherboards based on these chipsets to at least Q1 2020. These chipsets not only feature PCI-Express gen 4.0 downstream lanes, but also boards based on these will be built to AMD's PCB requirements for the new platform, enabling a PCI-Express 4.0 x16 slot for discrete graphics, and revised CPU VRM and memory wiring specifications that improve overclocking over the previous generation platform. For now there are two SKUs in the works, the B550, which succeeds the B450, and the A520, succeeding the A320.Image Credit: Hardware.info
83 Comments on ASMedia-sourced AMD B550, A520 Chipset Motherboards Arrive in 2020
This will seriously hamper Ryzen 3 and 5 cpu sales rest of the year for people looking for Ryzen 3000 PCIe 4.0 system on a budget.
They should have had these chipsets available this summer already to maximize the sales of Ryzen 3000 while they have a clear advantage in the market.
While doing every thing else just right this is a BIG MISS BY AMD.
Sure you can choose to go for a cheap 400 series PCIe 3.0 motherboard with Ryzen 3000 BUT most people will feel that they want PCIe 4.0 when they anyways buy a cpu that supports it.
The salvation here is if motherboard manufacturers redesign and market new motherboards that have proper support for PCIe 4.0 with 400 series chipset.
EDIT:
Can see down below people are trashing PCIe 4.0 and says it make no difference now and we could as well stick to PCIe 3.0.
With PCIe 4.0 it is enuf to allocate 8x PCIe 4.0 to the graphics card and then you can play around with the rest 12x PCIe 4.0 that is direct linked to the cpu doing SSD Raid 0 or what ever. With Intel and PCIe 3.0 this is impossible, you are basically bandwidth starved using Intel cpu and PCIe 3.0.
Well if i buy a computer now i won't upgrade again for like 5 years or more, so maybe PCIe 4.0 don't matter on day one but it could definitely matter in a couple of years or so and then i don't want to be sitting there with PCIe 3.0 when i could have had PCIe 4.0.
Really hope at lest a few price worthy X570 motherboards will turn up that doesn't kill your budget totally.
Nvme SSD is not the most budget friendly option in the first place.
Are board vendors updating existing inventory BIOSes to be 3000-series ready? If not, what's the skinny on this USB flashback thing mentioned - does it allow one to buy a B450 board and 3000-series chip that don't work without an update, and then perform the update anyway without needing a temporary 1000 or 2000 CPU to do so? The 8700k has already lost much of its advantage over the 2000-series Ryzens. It's slower than a 2700X now:
www.extremetech.com/computing/291649-intel-performance-amd-spectre-meltdown-mds-patches
Spectre/Meltdown/MDS/Zombieload/RIDL/Fallout - that's six significant flaws in Intel's architecture which have caused a 25% performance drop in Skylake/Kaby Lake/Coffee Lake products, even if you leave hyperthreading on - which is not recommended. If you turn off hyperthreading, that's an even bigger performance drop and disables a feature that people paid a $100+ premium for. Meanwhile, in the last 18 months of Spectre/Meltdown/MDS/Zombieload/RIDL/Fallout patches, AMD have lost just 3% of their original performance and SMT is safe to leave enabled.
I think delaying new budget motherboards for that long is a mistake. However, if B450 and X470 aren't going to have many differences, they might as well sell all of those out first.
I'm mostly interested in overclocking and stability features over I/O.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_chipsets#AM4_Chipsets
Now all of a sudden Asmedia is all good?
I'm not gonna ask about OCing the 3600 because if that board can handle an OCed 8 core 2700 then it can too easly a 6 core cpu made at 7nm.
And B450 if you consider 16c CPU (maybe as a later upgrade) didn't look like as viable solution due to possible weak VRM.
Also, for those who mentioned the first generation boards... a news report I read said only some of the B350 boards will get BIOS updates, most likely the "most popular" of them. So, if your board didn't sell well enough, you may be out of luck.