AMD changes its mind on 300 series and 400 series motherboard Support

AMD has decided to go back and correct their earlier statements in which they stated that they would not be extending support for the upcoming Zen 3 CPU's on the B450 and B470 motherboards.

AMD has now decided to extend support to the 400 series of motherboards after much criticism was levelled against them by their fan base due to the lack on compatibility this would introduce to some 300 and 400 series motherboard owners.

AMD cited that the initial reason for not enabling Zen 3 support for the 400 series of motherboards was due to the memory limitations on those boards to store BIOS data that would not allow CPU compatibility below 500 series motherboards. Many called into question this explanation as there already existed motherboards that had been created specifically to ensure future compatibility. It is however not the first time AMD has however extended the compatibility of CPU's to older motherboards as the same was done to the 300 series motherboards although unofficially at first received surplus code to enable Zen 2 to work on those platforms via BIOS updates.

AMD has announced that the code to enable support Zen 3 on select 300 series motherboards will come by way of a beta BIOS update which means that support will not be instant while 400 series motherboards according to their slides will be supported at launch but this remains to be seen.

What this now means is that motherboard manufacturers possibly will have to pick and chose between the available motherboards they have in their inventory to enable certain BIOS. Meaning that in the future users will be given the freedom to update certain BIOS in order to run certain Generations of AMD's Zen line of CPU's although it remains to be seen if this support extends to all the 300 series motherboards. Which would fulfil AMD promise to keep the AM4 socket supported through 2020 which is an unprecedented value proposition when compared to the tick-tock-upgrade offerings being offered by Intel.