News AMD backtracks on Zen 3 support for B450 and X470 motherboards

I consider myself confident when updating a bios but this sounds pretty risky that I don't see many people actually taking that route. In particular, no ability to flash back to a previous bios version could cause a lot of headaches (2nd hand market will be a mess also).

 

What's to stop you flashing back to an older BIOS then? Didn't see that mentioned, but haven't read around it anywhere else.

 

Something I saw on the reddit post from AMD but I confess I may have misread it.

 

I would make sense to me that the process for rolling back would work the same way as updating.

 

Point 3 of this post. You also need to be a verified owner of a Zen3 cpu.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/gmp45o/the_zen_3_architecture_is_coming_to_amd_x470_and/

 

I like AMD's response to the community outcry, but it seems to me there is a good technical reason why AMD took the stance in the first place. As for the restriction on the process it strikes me as AMD's method of discouraging the majority from taking this action, to me suggests they are expecting it to not work 100%. I remember when BIOS flashing was treated as a last resort as there was a perceived risk of bricking the computer. Not sure if the reputation was justified or not.

 

See that coming a mile off

 

Gamers Nexus did a very good piece about why AMD initially went the way they did. TLDR is there are some very good technical reasons for changing support, particularly for first gen 4XX boards. But AMD made a rod for it's own back by appearing to promise support before they knew if it was technically or economically reasonable.

 

Thanks for the link.

 

My understanding was that the risk was mostly if power was interrupted during the EEPROM write. You'd be left with a corrupt BIOS.
It could still be fixed if you had a socketed BIOS and an EPROM writer, but... if we had EPROM writers, we wouldn't be upgrading it in place to start with.

 

Its not really how many people are going to do it, it's their brodozer beer pong marketing team saying one thing and their products division saying another

 

The slide that seemed to get AMD in trouble said "AM4 support through 2020" IIRC. And it actually cut off at the start of 2020, rather than the middle or the end.

Well, it's half-way through 2020 and it's still being supported. Ryzen 4000 isn't out - yet. I don't really have a horse in this race, though; the X370 board I have still has the Ryzen 1700 I dropped in it originally, the X470 board got an upgrade from a 2700X to a 3900X... I could upgrade the X370 board to a Ryzen 3000 if I wanted - which I kind of do, but I also want dual M.2 slots, which the current board doesn't have, so I'm debating waiting and going for a "whole hog" upgrade when Ryzen 4000 and the new nVidia cards are out... ah, the eternal quandry.