Hacker News Reader

Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

> Support for new and evolving technologies like PCIe® Gen 5 and DDR5 memory empowers users to grow with their Socket AM5 solution, which AMD will support with platform longevity through 2025

Does it seem like sockets are getting less and less years of support? Just 3 years of "longevity" doesn't seem that long, I probably upgrade my CPU once per 3 years and that would mean if I now move to AM5, I'm gonna have to yet again get a new motherboard when AM6 gets launched in ~2026.

View on HN

Intel have been doing two generations of support for absolutely ages. AMD doing four generations on AM4 was the outlier rather than the norm, and it sounds like they are giving themselves wiggle room this time to do similarly, but potentially cut it a bit shorter if they feel they need to. Given how many reviews talked about AM4 chips being a no-brainer upgrade choice if you had an existing board, they have incentive to do it. AM4 being on DDR4 and older motherboards being PCIe 3 really limited it. Given DDR5 is new and PCIe 5 is brand new, it feels like AM5 has plenty of potential to go longer, but I can understand not wanting to tie themselves too far ahead.

I think it's more a matter of target: Intel probably care most about the pre-built market where people just buy a new computer, so there isn't much value. AMD focused on taking the enthusiast crowd and getting the mindshare that way, and long socket support definitely benefited them there.

AM4 being supported for that long caused more trouble than it was worth IMO. When buying a new CPU+motherboard, you had to make sure you got a motherboard with a new BIOS, since BIOS updates were required to support new CPUs. AMD would even send out older CPU models just to help consumers update their BIOS of necessary. A lot of cheaper motherboards didn't have enough flash memory to support both the last and the first CPUs, so you had to make sure not to install the wrong BIOS update or your CPU wouldn't work anymore.

Intel's approach, which means you can always count on the BIOS supporting your CPU if the CPU physically fits, and which meant a BIOS update would never remove support for your CPU, is honestly arguably the more consumer friendly approach.

Eh, it's a trade-off for sure, but "consumer friendly" is a stretch. Intel still have the issue of requiring BIOS updates for new CPUs, and the issue with having to remove BIOS support can be solved by just telling motherboard manufacturers to spec larger for it so they have room for more.

In contrast, the upside of being able to slot a Ryzen 5000 CPU into a machine that you bought for first gen is a big deal in terms of the lifetime of those other components, and gives consumers a lot of flexibility. I get some people just won't utilise that and will buy fresh, but just because it isn't worth it for you personally doesn't mean it isn't a good feature more generally.

> and the issue with having to remove BIOS support can be solved by just telling motherboard manufacturers to spec larger for it so they have room for more.

I think I've read somewhere that the cause of that issue was that the SPI block on older AM4 CPUs can only address up to 16 megabytes of the SPI ROM chip. There's not much the motherboard manufacturers can do, when it's hardware on the CPU itself which does the reading directly from the ROM chip.

I'm not sure requiring a new motherboard vs flashing a bios is consumer friendly, unless you assume the consumer is loaded and technically illiterate. If someone paid me $150 to flash a MB, I'd probably take that deal every time.

Sure, but if I'm buying a new CPU+motherboard combo anyways, I'd prefer if that just worked and I didn't have to acquire a temporary old CPU for the purposes of flashing BIOS with the CPU I actually want to use.

Having the option > not having the option.

In isolation, yes. But that wasn't the discussion we were having, so I'm not sure why you're telling me this.

Being able to buy a new CPU and put it in your old motherboard is better than having to buy both a new CPU and a new motherboard, even if you have to spend five minutes googling which BIOS you need to flash.

You seem to have missed the point because the original discussion claimed that it was somehow "consumer friendly" to require the purchase of a motherboard as well. You've somehow morphed that into, "if I'm buying both a CPU and motherboard". The whole point was that you don't need to buy a new motherboard.

> AM4 being supported for that long caused more trouble than it was worth IMO.

Note that AM5 was deliberately designed to fix those issues. All AM5 boards are capable of doing a bios upgrade without a CPU in the socket (the spec requires a USB port connected to the chipset which has a microcontroller that does it). AM5 motherboards also have a much higher minimum BIOS flash chip size.

But the option was there.

With Intel it was cough up $$$ for a complete new system or nothing. Saying that is more consumer friendly is pretty silly - it's worse in every way.

In reality only a geek is going to upgrade their CPU, and a geek worth their salt should be able to sort out these issues.

>Intel have been doing two generations of support for absolutely ages.

It's worth noting that most of that was artificial; just enough electrical incompatibility to make you buy a new motherboard if you wanted a new processor (it's ultimately all just slightly different configurations of LGA1156 anyway- look up ASRock's P67 Transformer for more conclusive proof).

Back when they were competing against AMD (pre-2007) they only had one socket, that being LGA775 running from Prescott Pentium 4s all the way through the last Core 2 systems, and supported it for a very, very long time. Sure, it'd require your mainboard manufacturer to keep up to date with BIOS updates to support the new CPUs, but they were ultimately all compatible.

Not really, Intel has been rolling out a new socket every 2 years (give or take) for pretty much all of the 2000s.

AM4 was very much a departure from the norm, and it’s also the case that compatibility was a pain in the ass. Whenever you wanted to upgrade you needed to read data sheets, watch reviews, wait for AMD to change their mind^, and then flash the AGESA on your board and hope.

^ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/03/amd-reverses-course-...

They are committing to minimum 2025. This gives them the flexibility to either continue support or make changes if new CPUs require new sockets.

Regardless it’s still better than intels 2 generation change. With AM5 you should get 4-5 generations of cou minimum.

AMDs roadmap says Zen 5 in 2024, so you’ll be more likely to get 2 or possibly 3 generations.

Hmm I thought the roadmap for zen 5 was 2023? But also we will get Zen4 3d, there will prob be Zen5 3d, and if Zen6 is AM5, that makes 4-5 generations.

In the event yesterday they "confirmed that Zen 5 was on track for 2024".

This is probably exactly what their marketing people will try to say, yes. “No no, we added some cache, new generation!” I’m waiting for them to call each chip it’s own generation, and then we can add another generation for the APUs, and now we’re probably well into the double digits.

I know AMD had a lot of trouble with the interposer after Zen2 or so, due to being stuck on the same socket. Keeping compatibility became more and more expensive. Though Zen 1 was a much different product than the later generations (no I/O die) so maybe that was an unusually bad situation.

That quote ends with "and beyond", which you cut off.

And deservedly so, since it’s just marketing fluff. Like how having 7 foo in your bar suddenly became “over 7 foo”. Take the difficult upgrade history with zen 3 and older boards, add the roadmap with Zen 5 in 2024, and what this estimate says is they’re planning on AM5 for Zen 4 and 5.

especially since mobo manufactures were not happy with this longevity either

A good observation! That does feel pretty short. One thing to note, PCIe's regular cadence is three years (3.0 lasted way way longer.):

> The group responsible for developing and updating the PCI Express standard, the PCI-SIG, aims to update that standard roughly every three year. [1]

PCIe 6.0 is already released & uses the same transmission rate, but is PAM4 to send two bits per tick. Which I expect AM5 will be able to handle. Samsung is already making DDR6 ram. By 2026, there almost certainly will be pressure to advance the platform.

This platform feels amazing & fresh right now, & hearing it'll only have 3 years life does feel short. AM4 lasted >5 years. It'd be neat if AMD would back-release new processors on older sockets in the future, but I can also imagine the bios support for these scenarios being tangled & gross.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/06/months-after-finaliz...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com