As much as I nearly fell asleep about ten times whilst struggling through his monotone voice Steve @ GN did a good video about it today.
He played Devil's advocate very well, first tearing into the glaring mistakes (of which MSI took the most flack for with their Max bios that supports everything that will ever go into AM4) as well as AMD, fairly I think.
It does all boil down to the ROM size. But, he also pointed out a reason I hadn't even considered. Stuff he had gotten directly from the factory.
Basically when AMD approached the board makers to get Ryzen boards made for the 1000 series they were all sick of being burned by AMD. Like, the big up (see above) that I pointed out with AM3+ and all of the confusion there (like I said, very confusing) and then AMD come along after several years and say "Hey, you need to buy all of this gear and tooling and make boards for us !".
That is why Asus kicked so much ass at the launch of R1. Because they were the only company to fully invest at that time. Gigabyte's early boards sucked, so did most others. The reason? they didn't commit. Also, because of being burned in the past most of them refused to use a 32mb ROM because they are not standard issue and thus very expensive. So they used 16mb, which are common place (and cheap). I mean gawd, even Biostar had a go.
Now? it's a different story, but you can't change history. Many companies were wary of spending big on low margin boards (and rightly so, BD and PD were a nightmare).
As for the ROM? yes, companies could reverse engineer the AGESA for the 4000 series and add support to older boards. But.... Basically then you have to release numerous BIOS files with different levels of support, and if a board does not have BIOS flashback you can expect a crap ton of RMA. Which is expensive.
Problem is with so many kids into PCs now (who honestly don't have a clue what they are doing*) this would end in disaster.
* I'm not playing the age card here. At all. When I learned how to use computers it was hardcore. Because "the easy way" did not exist. You had to write ini files, config files and all sorts of stuff for DOS. It was much more "low level" than now. Everything had to be done manually, even the addresses and IRQ for your sound card when you installed a game.
Now? nearly everything is automated. Like, driver updates are very easy. Installing multiple sound cards is a piece of pish now and so on. It still all goes on underneath of course, but it's all hidden. Since virtual IRQ nobody has had to deal with IRQ conflicts and so on. And that is what I mean when I say younger people don't know what is going on underneath. Which is why it would be quite likely they would download a BIOS file without realising what they are doing and brick a board.
And with every version of Windows 10 it becomes more and more dumbed down and automated. Which is good I guess, because you no longer need a degree in rocket science to build and maintain a computer's software etc (and yes, that is an exaggeration).
I am a bit peeved at AMD. I can't be a hypocrite and say I am not. But, there does come a point where you need to prevent madness (see also that CPU list above).
Plus with B450 boards being relatively cheap I would be amazed if any one with one has no upgrade path at all.
the way i see it AMD managed to support many generations of CPUs on a single socket, they had to draw a line somewhere
This decision mainly affects people who:
- bought a b450/x470 board after zen 2 was available
- planned to upgrade to zen 3 (actually though, not just "i might have wanted to eventually")
i get that there was some misleading information but if you don't fit the criteria above i don't really think you can justify being too irate
Their biggest crime, IMO, was dragging their heels on B550. That does suck, big time. That is why many got frustrated and bought a B450, mainly because companies like MSI (who will see lawsuits unless they get 4000 series working) were telling people that their MAX boards support anything that will fit, basically.
That's called making a rod for your own back. I just wish AMD would have warned people before. Again, I do hold them responsible for that.
