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Update 19/05: AMD later clarified some new plans but they come with plenty of caveats.


If you're keeping an eye on the latest AMD processors coming, you might want to sit down and take a look at a recent post from AMD detailing their support plans for socket AM4 and Zen 3 compatibility.

Writing in a post on their community forum, AMD developer Robert Hallock announced their plans. Going over a little history, how in 2016 they said they would support socket AM4 until 2020 and since then processors have expanded a lot across the Excavator / Zen / Zen+ and Zen 2 architectures.

Starting off with the big question answered: the upcoming Zen 3 will be compatible with the X570 (2019) and B550 (2020) motherboards through a BIOS update. While they also mentioned "no plans" to have Zen 3 support older chipsets so if you were waiting on it you're likely going to need to spend more.

They've also provided a picture of their support status and plan:

For the full details, see here.

Curious about their upcoming Zen 3? AMD stated recently that it and their next-generation GPU architecture with RDNA 2 are on target for this year.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: AMD, Hardware
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Pangaea May 9, 2020
Looks like it was a good decision to postpone a bit. Had I bought back when I looked at prices, it would have been a B450 motherboard, since X570 were stupidly expensive. Hopefully their prices will be more reasonable whenever the new hardware is out. Intention right now is to get an AMD CPU + GPU.

May not have mattered all that much tbh, because I tend to keep whatever hardware I buy for 5+ years and not upgrade a CPU for example, but it's nice to have the option, and to be more future proof.
Pangaea May 9, 2020
Not sure if it's possible to directly link to the interactable chart (probably not?), but this development is rather interesting:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends#CPUVendor-top
lejimster May 9, 2020
Quoting: PangaeaNot sure if it's possible to directly link to the interactable chart (probably not?), but this development is rather interesting:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/index.php?module=statistics&view=trends#CPUVendor-top

I think the CPU sales are largely down to just how good Ryzen has been since it's release, at the same time the open source graphics drivers have seen some amazing development over the last 5 years. So that too has been trending in AMD's direction on Linux. If they are able to bring out products that are clearly ahead of Intel/Nvidia the adoption will increase. Nvidia is going to be hard to dethrone though.

Respect to Intel though, they've been very good with open source support.. And they do have discrete GPU's on the horizon too.
Dragunov May 13, 2020
This is why I like MSI, AMD was late to the game on releasing the B550 series, so MSI released a line of boards called the Max series. The B450 Max series has a larger ROM chip installed, and they claim it will support any AM4 CPU including zen3 with a full featured Click-Bios. Not a slimmed down version.

I bought my B450 board before the max series was released, but I don't plan on upgrading any time soon.
I simply didn't want to pay the prices they were asking for the x570 boards.


Last edited by Dragunov on 13 May 2020 at 5:02 pm UTC
Diable May 15, 2020
Quoting: subI bought a B450 not too long because every "expert" out there claimed AMD will definitely support it with at least Zen 3. :/

Those AMD experts led many down that path. They just knew AMD would support Zen 3 cpus on b350 and b450 boards based entirely on comments made years ago. So they spread this fact everywhere and to everyone looking for upgrade advice. The hoops board makers had to jump through to get Zen 2 cpus working on some b350, b450 and x370 boards should have told them that future cpu support isn't 100% guaranteed but AMD could/would do no wrong.
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