Last week, a slightly surprising rumour surfaced claiming AMD was preparing a new X870 chipset to launch alongside Ryzen 9000 series processors. The report was surprising considering AMD has never skipped a digit so far in its AM4 and AM5 naming scheme. Today, at Computex 2024, AMD has confirmed that the rumours had substance with the launch of new X870E and X870 chipsets.
The naming scheme aside, AMD typically does release a new series of chipsets alongside a new generation of Ryzen processors and these generally bring new features. It is no different this time as well. AMD says the new chipset focuses on features like USB4 and faster DDR5 RAM speed support via EXPO.
Currently, AMD systems tend to run well at around 6000MT/s and despite many improvements to the memory training issues, users still run into them from time to time. It is possible that the new Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPUs have improved memory controllers and thus better memory speed handling capacities. The chipset, of course, plays a part in that too.
USB4 will also finally get widespread adoption by motherboard manufacturers with these new chipsets. While USB4 is not new on AMD"s socket AM5. there weren"t that many options to consider in case some one wanted one. Therefore it looks like USB4 will finally be much democratised now for AMD desktop users.
Aside from wider USB4 support, PCIe 5.0 will start getting more common too as previously with the 600-series, only the X670E and perhaps some expensive X670 boards came with Gen5.
AMD also bragged about the longevity of its platforms and rightly so, as it has been supporting AM4 since 2017 with not just driver support and security updates, but also with new CPUs. In fact, alongside the Ryzen 9000 series, AMD has also announced new Ryzen 5000XT processors. If you are wondering about what AMD has in store for laptops, the company has released new Ryen AI 300 chips for Copilot+ PCs.
Keep in mind that the new chipsets will work with Ryzen 7000 CPUs and 8000 G-series APUs as well, and vice versa. Likewise, Ryzen 9000 is also compatible with older 600-series chipset mainboards.
You can check out our entire Computex 2024 coverage in these articles here.