AMD is pushing a ton of competitive measures in 2020 to help shore up its efforts against rival Intel. AMD has been spring big wins against Intel these last couple of years. The advent of Ryzen series of processors has led to a big gain in market share and profit for AMD. AMD’s Zen 3 microarchitecture and the previous iterations have offered a solid bedrock for the red team to build on, and it looks like they’re pushing harder to keep the setup competitive. And with the new Ryzen 4000 series CPUs coming, it’s a big shot across the bow on Intel.
AMD recently committed to the AM4 socket until 2020, and the Ryzen 4000 series was left in a bit of a state of flux. The Ryzen CPUs were not confirmed for certain features, like support for older or newer socket types. XMG has now confirmed that Ryzen 4000 desktop processors will support AM4. This is good news for PC gamers. As PCs get faster and more efficient, there’s a constant battle to keep on top of hardware improvements for gamers and enthusiasts.
The issue with this constant development is the loss of support for older technology when CPU sockets or other motherboard elements change. As CPUs get faster and more efficient, gamers often have to rebuild their systems every few years to maintain a bleeding-edge system. Intel and AMD have both fluctuated between a strategy of keeping older features relevant in new CPU iterations over the years, and now AMD looks to be doubling down on the AM4 socket going into 2020 and beyond.
As for the specifics, The older B450 chipset will be getting a patch to allow for higher-end CPUs to work with the socket. This will likely mean that the new CPUs will also be supported on X470 and X570 chipsets via microcode updates.
This update adds a bit more life to AMD’s Zen 3 microarchitecture, which gives them yet another edge over Intel. Many gamers have criticized Intel for not continually supporting older sockets with each CPU iteration. It’s kind of understandable why they would take this approach in some cases, as new sockets sometimes need a completely new setup. Although AMD will certainly be exploiting the gap by offering a bit more market potential for the older architecture.
