Just seen this excerpt from Digitimes about the upcoming chipsets for coffee lake: So from Intel we'll have Z370, H370, B360, and H310. And from Amd we'll get X370, X300, B350, A320 and A300. Jesus. Titty. _______. Christ. A: Is the naming done to purposefully be almost the same? If so why? It's not like an uniformed person could get an Intel Cpu and then get tricked into buying an am4 board. I mean they could, but uninformed laypeople would buy a system not the components and even if they did they wouldn't work together so would be returned and they'd pissed off and buy some overpriced fruit. B: Why in God's name are there so many chipsets in the first place? Surely there has to be a better way, like disabling unwanted features, lanes, ports or what-nots. Or just not using all the ones available to create a featurerice gradient. Even within say the current z270 lineup there are so many boards it's ridiculous. 10-12 boards per aib on full atx alone, plus mate and itx boards. There's really no need for that many. And don't even get me started on how they name them, with your Asus rogtufstrixprimemaximustooth.....
The naming is done purposefully. AMD launched a 3xx to be ahead of Intel's 2xx series, so it appeared to be 'newer'. This is partly why Intel has pulled in its 3xx by 4 months so it can be on naming parity. And yes it is confusing for that reason. There are so many chipsets because of silicon recycling and because the market demands segmentation. AMD A series is specific to small form factor/mobile though.
It'll be even more confusing once they both launch their new HEDT platforms... especially on the Intel side with it looking like 2-series (X299) and them switching the hierarchy between Skylake-X and Kabylake-X (just whyyyy?!). Honestly, Intel's current product roadmap is a hot mess right now. EDIT: But yes, the amount of motherboards per chipset, per manufacture is obscene. MSI in particular like to launch a board for every £10 price jump it seems!
People are still buying "but this time it's red!" minor motherboard variants, so manufacturers are going to keep making them. On the Intel side, Bxxx and Qxxx chipsets are dead outside of OEM prebuilds, so can be basically ignored. Zxxx and Hxxx are now mostly the same apart from overclocking, so if you don't need that you can pick either. Xxxx is the big-die single-socket chipset for non-workstation use. On the AMD side, X3090 and A300 'non chipsets' appear to be dead thus far. That leaves three chipsets actually worth bothering with: X370, B350 and A320, which drop the number of SATA and PCIe 2.0 ports and presence of overclocking as you go down the list.
