Representatives for Advanced Micro Devices confirmed on Wednesday that to support AMD Athlon 64 processors revision E will need a BIOS update. The company did not reckon any other obstacles to support the upcoming central processing units that support SSE3 technology among other advantages. "Mainboards need fresh BIOS revisions to support the new revisions of AMD Athlon processors. The new rev parts are 90nm, with SSE3 support, and a few tweaks to the memory controller and a different OPN," AMD's spokesman Damon Muzny told X-bit labs.
A web-site last week published a number of news-stories in regards compatibility of the AMD Athlon 64 revision E0 with different mainboards shipping today, particularly those based on popular NVIDIA nForce3 and 4 chipsets. NVIDIA, who said there were no compatibility issues between its chipsets and AMD's new processors, pointed out that "a couple" of mainboard makers – ABIT and EPoX products included – did not follow AMD requirements, but were still able to tackle compatibility, at least on some of their mainboards, issue with BIOS update.
News source: X-bit labs
