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AMD Zen 2 (Ryzen 3000) - *** NO COMPETITOR HINTING ***

Soldato
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Why not? The PCI-E controller is on the CPU.

It's all very well and good putting the it in the CPU, but the reason it works faster is the design of the whole end-to-end bus, not just one part of it. The board design is unlikely to be compliant with PCI-E 4.0 standards, and the chipset certainly isn't for the rest of the system.
 
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Soldato
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That's what I was getting at a few posts ago; it would likely take some level of physical incompatibility to prevent PCI-E 4 from working on older boards. Not that "working" does not mean "optimal", much like dropping an Ivy Bridge CPU into a 80 series motherboard.

Less than optimal means it drops back to PCI-E 3.0, so I am not sure what you are getting at?
 
Soldato
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Forgive me if im wrong but surely the CPU, Motherboard and GPU all need to be PCIE4 compliant, if one of these is not then no PCIE4? So therefore the Zen2 chips might be PCIE4 compliant but the X370 and X470 motherboards for instance are not and wont support PCIE4 Graphics cards... you would need to buy a new motherboard that features PCIE4, Zen2 CPU and then a PCIE4 rated GPU.
 
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Forgive me if im wrong but surely the CPU, Motherboard and GPU all need to be PCIE4 compliant, if one of these is not then no PCIE4? So therefore the Zen2 chips might be PCIE4 compliant but the X370 and X470 motherboards for instance are not and wont support PCIE4 Graphics cards... you would need to buy a new motherboard that features PCIE4, Zen2 CPU and then a PCIE4 rated GPU.

Yes that's right.

Maybe in motherboards it's something they can upgrade with a bios update as it just down to lanes on the board rather than controllers, not sure on that part.
 
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Sorry what's shocking? PCI-E 4.0 and 5.0 have been developed alongside each other, and it has been know for a very long time that 4.0 is very short term.

That 3.0 is very old - 2010 technology, really?, that 4.0 was introduced but approaching 2019 there are 0 products on the market with it.
 
Soldato
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That 3.0 is very old - 2010 technology, really?, that 4.0 was introduced but approaching 2019 there are 0 products on the market with it.

The dates given are when it was finalised by PCI-SIG, not when items were available to buy. The final draft of PCI-E 5.0 is due next year with a view to having products on the shelves by 2021 at the latest. From your perspective as a consumer it might seem strange, but it has not been until very recently that PCI-E bandwidth has been so heavily constrained, and is forcing big data to buy in extra racks just for that bandwidth/extra lanes which raises costs dramatically. Consider that if you want to run a 40Gbps network link, that it almost entirely saturates a 16x PCIE 3.0 connection, and now think about how much more data is being moved about compared with 2010, so those 40Gbps links are full, and you need to add more of them, and more storage all of this need PCI-E bandwidth, and that is why 4.0 is being succeeded so quickly.
 
Soldato
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Current boards won't be able to deliver PCI-E 4 speeds for new chips.

This is not for certain but its quite likely.

Like I said, if there's a physical reason the boards can't do PCI-E 4 when you drop in a CPU with a PCI-E 4 controller then they won't do it. That's all I was suggesting. Ivy Bridge did it with 80 series motherboards back in the day so it could be done with a new Ryzen. The attenuation issue @ToTheMax pointed out will likely prevent PCI-E 4 just being a drop-in upgrade. If some of the super high-end boards have their PCBs over-engineered so attenuation isn't a problem (for example) then it could be a possibility.

It's not a 100% certainty, that's all I was saying.
 
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Like I said, if there's a physical reason the boards can't do PCI-E 4 when you drop in a CPU with a PCI-E 4 controller then they won't do it. That's all I was suggesting. Ivy Bridge did it with 80 series motherboards back in the day so it could be done with a new Ryzen. The attenuation issue @ToTheMax pointed out will likely prevent PCI-E 4 just being a drop-in upgrade. If some of the super high-end boards have their PCBs over-engineered so attenuation isn't a problem (for example) then it could be a possibility.

It's not a 100% certainty, that's all I was saying.
So in simple terms, and how it was in the past and how it will be:
X470+zen2=pcie3 mode
X570+zen2=pcie4 mode
X570+zen+=pcie3 mode

This is assuming zen2 has pcie4
 
Soldato
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So in simple terms, and how it was in the past and how it will be:
X470+zen2=pcie3 mode
X570+zen2=pcie4 mode
X570+zen+=pcie3 mode

This is assuming zen2 has pcie4

Yes it will be fully backwards compatible, AMD after all said they would support the socket until 2020, so Zen2 should even work perfectly fine with B350 and X370 motherboards too with a bios update, again it will be limited to PCI-e 3, unless X570, B550 etc bring anything new to the table other than PCI-e 4 then there will be no point upgrading to those boards as there are no PCI-e 4 devices about yet to take advantage of it, im sure they will add things like XFR 3 and Precision boost 3 though just like they did with X470 and B450, although the Zen+ CPU's worked fine in X370 and B350 boards, they missed out on these features and others like StoreMi.

Lets see how many people buy an X370, B350, B450 or X470 motherboard with a Zen2 CPU next April and complain that it doesn't work lol, if you don't have the previous generation of chip then don't buy the previous generations boards.
 
Soldato
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Lets see how many people buy an X370, B350, B450 or X470 motherboard with a Zen2 CPU next April and complain that it doesn't work lol, if you don't have the previous generation of chip then don't buy the previous generations boards.

Yes unless you can update via USB a la C6H and C7H but why buy an older board with a new CPU range, I agree.
 
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