Factory Drawing of ASUS X670 Prime-P WiFi Appears Online

[Chrispy_]

Have you heard about any slots being torn off Z690 boards?

Hah! Not yet, but if UPS/Fedex can rip a dual-slot GPU out of a PCIe 4.0 slot, I'm wondering if there's excitingly-destructive shenanigans to come as we see more Z690 prebuilts!

 

[trsttte]

I'm a bit disappointed looking at this, 2 chipsets but we still will only have a sigle x16 slot. No x8 for example or anything extra, still the same old x4 that migth even be shared with nvme (choose either slot or m.2) and an x1.

I was hoping the move to pcie 5.0 would mean better IO but for now it will continue to be just a marketing bullet point - hopefully at least the freaking x4 slots and m.2 are not shared, that would just add insult to injury

One positive is that with 2 chipsets they'll not be able to dump everything in the same IOMMU group, they'll need at least 2

 

[Aquinus]

@TheLostSwede any indications that the chipset(s) will be driven by PCIe 5.0? (Between CPU and chipset that is.)

 

[TheLostSwede]

I'm a bit disappointed looking at this, 2 chipsets but we still will only have a sigle x16 slot. No x8 for example or anything extra, still the same old x4 that migth even be shared with nvme (choose either slot or m.2) and an x1.

You're aware that the Prime series is sortf of Asus bottom or the barrel products along with TUF, right? I wouldn't based too much of what the platform will offer on this one board.
On the Intel side, this is the comparable product. https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/PRIME/PRIME-Z690-P/

I was hoping the move to pcie 5.0 would mean better IO but for now it will continue to be just a marketing bullet point - hopefully at least the freaking x4 slots and m.2 are not shared, that would just add insult to injury

AMD has at least added four lanes of PCIe 5.0 for an SSD, something Intel totally missed out on.

@TheLostSwede any indications that the chipset(s) will be driven by PCIe 5.0? (Between CPU and chipset that is.)

No, sorry, I haven't heard anything about that. We should know in a few hours I hope, but it's possible AMD won't spill the details at their keynote, but I should be able to find out a bit more on Tuesday if nothing else.

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

@TheLostSwede any indications that the chipset(s) will be driven by PCIe 5.0? (Between CPU and chipset that is.)

if the leaks and rumor info keep with the others, yes its likely, but its still speculation for now.

ASRock AM5 Motherboard and More Leaked Ahead of Computex

It appears that ASRock got a little bit too excited and posted a Computex video earlier today that contained a brief glimpse of its upcoming X670E Taichi motherboard. The screenshot that was captured by Wccftech doesn't give away too much details, but the board appears to have at least three M.2...

www.techpowerup.com

The company mentions PCIe 5.0 for both graphics and the M.2 interface, which pretty much cements the earlier rumors about AMD offering PCIe 5.0 support for the M.2 interface on the AM5 platform.

 

[TheLostSwede]

if the leaks and rumor info keep with the others, yes its likely, but its still speculation for now.

ASRock AM5 Motherboard and More Leaked Ahead of Computex

It appears that ASRock got a little bit too excited and posted a Computex video earlier today that contained a brief glimpse of its upcoming X670E Taichi motherboard. The screenshot that was captured by Wccftech doesn't give away too much details, but the board appears to have at least three M.2...

www.techpowerup.com

What does that have to do with the chipset being connected to the CPU over PCIe 5.0?
The x16 slot and one M.2 slot are directly connected to the CPU and those two are the ones with PCIe 5.0 support and the only things I have had confirmed are PCIe 5.0 at this point in time.

Some random little bits about a couple of potential MSI boards.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1528269114082754560

 

[looniam]

@DeathtoGnomes is this news then?

there are enough assholes in the world.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

What does that have to do with the chipset being connected to the CPU over PCIe 5.0?
The x16 slot and one M.2 slot are directly connected to the CPU and those two are the ones with PCIe 5.0 support and the only things I have had confirmed are PCIe 5.0 at this point in time.

Do CPU's generally generate more than one PCIe revision?

 

[Chrispy_]

I'm a bit disappointed looking at this, 2 chipsets but we still will only have a sigle x16 slot

SLI is dead on consumer platforms.

There's a niche use for multiple GPUs in the HEDT Prosumer lineup and AMD have Threadripper Pro for that. Let's face it, if you can afford the minimum cost of entry (a pair of 3090 cards) then the CPU and platform costs are basically negligible anyway....

 

[Logoffon]

Hmm yes, westbridge and eastbridge instead of north and south ones.

 

[trsttte]

You're aware that the Prime series is sortf of Asus bottom or the barrel products along with TUF, right? I wouldn't based too much of what the platform will offer on this one board.
On the Intel side, this is the comparable product. https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/PRIME/PRIME-Z690-P/

True, but they sometimes reuse the same board layout for 2 or 3 variants (like Prime, TUF and Pro or something like that).

AMD has at least added four lanes of PCIe 5.0 for an SSD, something Intel totally missed out on.

Intel used PCIe 5.0 really just as a marketing bullet point, there's no consumer products on the market that support pcie5.0, not even their Intel Arc gpus (coming soon^TM) will support it. I think the big advantage of Alder Lake was the 8x DMI (chipset link), but that's not as "marketable" for the general consumer.

x16 slot and nvme being on 5.0 is great and all, but I'm more curious on how AMD will handle the chipset link with the 2 chipsets, x4 or x2 to each one? Or x8 to the master and then x4 from master to slave?

SLI is dead on consumer platforms.

There's a niche use for multiple GPUs in the HEDT Prosumer lineup and AMD have Threadripper Pro for that. Let's face it, if you can afford the minimum cost of entry (a pair of 3090 cards) then the CPU and platform costs are basically negligible anyway....

SLI is far from the only reason to want more expansion, even before going HEDT. There's capture cards, gpu passthrough, sound cards, usb expansion, ethernet nics, etc. that users may want to connect. And Threadripper Pro is a BIG jump in everything, especially price, that would be more of an argument when regular Threadripper was being updated, but it seems that it's a dead platform for now.

I was hoping the move to PCIe 5.0 and dividing the chipset, or whatever their idea with the 2 chips is, there was going to be more IO which (with the very limited info we have now) doesn't seem to be the case. Even though Asus Prime is the lower end of the Asus lineup, this is still the X chipset version, not B or A budget ones.

 

[Jism]

Just like EPYC is Zen devided in 2 parts. So 2 chipsets is'nt so unusual. You got far more bandwidth if cores can talk to their own chipset instead of sharing one.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

I'm a bit disappointed looking at this, 2 chipsets but we still will only have a sigle x16 slot. No x8 for example or anything extra, still the same old x4 that migth even be shared with nvme (choose either slot or m.2) and an x1.

I was hoping the move to pcie 5.0 would mean better IO but for now it will continue to be just a marketing bullet point - hopefully at least the freaking x4 slots and m.2 are not shared, that would just add insult to injury

One positive is that with 2 chipsets they'll not be able to dump everything in the same IOMMU group, they'll need at least 2

That's it though, with the one x16 pciex slot the other lanes split effectively could give more pciex4 lanes , we could get effectively 3x pciex4 X 16, I would upgrade in a heartbeat.

Looks dubious because the main slot will be direct from CPU, so what Are those chipsets fed by and capable of.
Remembering, the CPU will have a chipset too.

Plus surface mount pciex slots wouldn't necessarily show on the picture.

 

[tabascosauz]

Hah! Not yet, but if UPS/Fedex can rip a dual-slot GPU out of a PCIe 4.0 slot, I'm wondering if there's excitingly-destructive shenanigans to come as we see more Z690 prebuilts!

SMT slots aren't new or made of paper maché...if your standard is "UPS-proof" then there's no product that will ever satisfy your expectations I'm afraid

Through-hole or SMT, it's more a reflection of the prebuilt maker's ability to properly pack the product for shipping

 

[Aquinus]

What does that have to do with the chipset being connected to the CPU over PCIe 5.0?
The x16 slot and one M.2 slot are directly connected to the CPU and those two are the ones with PCIe 5.0 support and the only things I have had confirmed are PCIe 5.0 at this point in time.

Some random little bits about a couple of potential MSI boards.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1528269114082754560

That USB type C with 20Gbit is what is standing out to me since it says it's coming from "chip1." You don't need PCIe 5.0 to get that, but it's definitely something that stands out as peculiar to me.

 

[bobsled]

True, but they sometimes reuse the same board layout for 2 or 3 variants (like Prime, TUF and Pro or something like that).



Intel used PCIe 5.0 really just as a marketing bullet point, there's no consumer products on the market that support pcie5.0, not even their Intel Arc gpus (coming soon^TM) will support it. I think the big advantage of Alder Lake was the 8x DMI (chipset link), but that's not as "marketable" for the general consumer.

x16 slot and nvme being on 5.0 is great and all, but I'm more curious on how AMD will handle the chipset link with the 2 chipsets, x4 or x2 to each one? Or x8 to the master and then x4 from master to slave?



SLI is far from the only reason to want more expansion, even before going HEDT. There's capture cards, gpu passthrough, sound cards, usb expansion, ethernet nics, etc. that users may want to connect. And Threadripper Pro is a BIG jump in everything, especially price, that would be more of an argument when regular Threadripper was being updated, but it seems that it's a dead platform for now.

I was hoping the move to PCIe 5.0 and dividing the chipset, or whatever their idea with the 2 chips is, there was going to be more IO which (with the very limited info we have now) doesn't seem to be the case. Even though Asus Prime is the lower end of the Asus lineup, this is still the X chipset version, not B or A budget ones.

Absolutely, this person gets it. I have a single GPU connected, but multiple NVMe drives (3, and looking to get more to replace spinning rust), 10GbE card, firewire card and looking to get additional cards soon.
I need lanes and am stuck on ThreadRipper 2nd gen until the situation improves, but I’d really like the IPC and refresh schedule of a desktop platform.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Do CPU's generally generate more than one PCIe revision?

You tell me.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

You tell me.

Oh. Well I guess that one does.

 

[TheLostSwede]

Oh. Well I guess that one does.

You mean all Intel Alder Lake CPUs?
Expect to see a lot more mixed PCIe revision supported in the future on all kinds of platforms.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

You mean all Intel Alder Lake CPUs?

Yes. IIRC, Zen 3 CPU's we're 4.0 all the way, right? Except the APU's?

 

[TheLostSwede]

Yes. IIRC, Zen 3 CPU's we're 4.0 all the way, right? Except the APU's?

Yes, as PCIe 4.0 wasn't quite as expensive to implement and didn't have as many board related layout limitations as PCIe 5.0.

 

[Chrispy_]

SLI is far from the only reason to want more expansion, even before going HEDT. There's capture cards, gpu passthrough, sound cards, usb expansion, ethernet nics, etc.

• Capture cards may have a physical x16 interface (many of them are only x4 physical) but they don't need bandwidth at all. They hardware-encode to low-bandwidth streams.
• GPU passthrough is far beyond the scope of consumer platforms. Yes, in beta since Sept2021 you can now pass through Geforce cards instead of Quadro/A-series cards to VMs but we're touching on enterprise/rackmount solutions already, probably going beyond even the scope of Threadripper Pro HEDT platforms. Outside of academic curiosity, why would you want GPU passthrough on a desktop platform?
• Sound cards are not limited by a PCIe 1.0 x1 interface. They need low latency and almost zero bandwidth.
• USB expansion is valid, but the Zen4 CPU itself is the limitation of the platform. They've quadrupled the bandwidth over Zen3 (so 8x Gen5 instead of 4x Gen4) but that's still only a total of 256Gbit/s for the entire chipset-CPU interconnect. That's only enough for 6x Thunderbolt 4 (40Gbit/s) USB ports and assumes that you disable everything else (so SATA, NVMe, NIC, Audio, USB2, all other motherboard slots except the x16 PEG slot - which is a comically unrealistic option). Realistically, if a board provides more than two TB4 ports the chipset is going to be crippled for bandwidth without disabling important things like M.2 slots and other USB 3.2 ports. Once again, we're into Threadripper Pro or EPYC territory if you need that much USB bandwidth for whatever niche use it is that requires so many TB4 ports.

I was hoping the move to PCIe 5.0 and dividing the chipset, or whatever their idea with the 2 chips is, there was going to be more IO which (with the very limited info we have now) doesn't seem to be the case. Even though Asus Prime is the lower end of the Asus lineup, this is still the X chipset version, not B or A budget ones.

This will come down to manufacturers in how they implement it on each individual board model. With 8x Gen5 lanes coming from the CPU, it's likely that most vendors will spend up to half of that budget to offer up to four PCIe 4.0 x4 M.2 slots for NVMe storage. The rest will go on internal or rear IO and integrated peripherals. On X570 boards you only get one PCIe slot at Gen4 from the chipset because there aren't enough lanes spare on Zen2/Zen3, meaning that the best X570 boards can only run two M.2 slots at PCIe 4.0 x4 unless the BIOS supports dropping the PEG x16 slot down to x8 to free up lanes. This is such a niche use case that only the MEG unify supports that (off the top of my head).

The change in Zen4's chipset bandwidth will likely just make the existing 2 or 3 M.2 slots faster, rather than crippling most of the chipset M.2 slots to PCIe 3.0 x2 speeds like many current implementations do.

 

[Assimilator]

I won't be surprised if it turns out that X670 systems have the ability to be split in two almost independent PCs, each using one CCD, one half of the I/O die (or one of two I/O dice?), one channel of RAM, and one half-chipset.

I will be. Because that would be the most pointlessly stupid feature ever.

 

[trsttte]

Notebookcheck has some extra info on the block diagram and unless I'm missing something I don't see the point of the dual chipset.

There's still people on x570 having USB dropout issues, I can only imagine the mess 2 separate chipsets could be. Also sharing those 4x lanes for all those USB and other peripherals between the 2 chipsets ooff I don't think that's such a great plan.

On the upside those extra x4 lanes for a USB 4.0 controller look really nice, maybe will see some boards with 2 m.2's connected to the cpu. Let's see what board manufacturers can come up with

 

[Aquinus]

Notebookcheck has some extra info on the block diagram and unless I'm missing something I don't see the point of the dual chipset.

There's still people on x570 having USB dropout issues, I can only imagine the mess 2 separate chipsets could be. Also sharing those 4x lanes for all those USB and other peripherals between the 2 chipsets ooff I don't think that's such a great plan.

On the upside those extra x4 lanes for a USB 4.0 controller look really nice, maybe will see some boards with 2 m.2's connected to the cpu. Let's see what board manufacturers can come up with

Didn't AMD's little event basically say that it's going to be PCIe 5.0 all the way around?