Ryzen 1000 and X570 motherboards, wedding in sight?

In June AMD announced that the new platforms X570 would not have supported i First generation Ryzen, disproving previous claims on backward compatibility guaranteed until 2020 for socket AM4. It seems, however, that the latest AGESA firmware for motherboards with AMD X570 chipset will change the cards on the table.

The purpose of the new AGESA microcode 1.0.0.4 is to make significant improvements to the Ryzen 3000 series CPU platforms, reducing boot times by about 20% and increasing the frequencies of the all-core turbo boost processors.

This week, however, the German site Planet 3D Now got its hands on the 1103 beta BIOS (based on AGESA 1.0.0.4b) intended for the motherboard Asus Crosshair VIII Hero (Wi-Fi) and paired it, rather strangely, with a Ryzen 3 1200.

A combination that should not have “worked”, but that actually started, so as to show the validation with Cinebench and CPU-Z. Planet 3D Now has also tried motherboard and CPU with an older BIOS without having the same success.

What this experiment means in terms of backward compatibility along the entire offer of the various manufacturers is still to be determined. It is possible that multiple X570 models support the Ryzen 1000, although we doubt that many interests combine an old CPU with a new motherboard, if not the opposite, that is to use new CPUs on previous motherboards (X370 / B350). The latter pairing is already allowed by several manufacturers, however it is something on which AMD has never taken an official position, leaving the ball to the partners.

Robert Hallock, AMD's Senior Technical Marketing Manager, said in June: “If we look at the existing motherboard ecosystem, we can certainly make BIOS updates available to our partners for support on the different levels of motherboards they have in their offer, but I don't expect every motherboard to be updated by our partners for compatibility with Ryzen 3000. That will be their decision based on their portfolio, where they choose to distribute the updates and where they decide otherwise. “