Alongside the announcement of the Ryzen 3000 desktop processors based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture, AMD officially revealed details about the X570—a new logic chipset for flagship Socket AM4 motherboards. The main innovation in this chipset is the support for PCI Express 4.0, but there are also some other interesting features that were discovered.
It is worth emphasizing that the new motherboards based on X570, which will soon hit store shelves, are designed to work with the PCI Express 4.0 bus from the outset. This means that all slots on the new boards will be able to operate with compatible devices in this new high-speed mode without any reservations (when a Ryzen third-generation processor is installed in the system). This applies to both slots connected to the PCI Express bus processor controller and those slots managed by the chipset controller.
The X570 chipset itself can support up to 16 PCI Express 4.0 lanes; however, half of these lanes can be reconfigured into SATA ports. Additionally, there is an independent SATA controller in the chipset with four ports, a USB 3.1 Gen2 controller supporting eight 10-gigabit ports, and a USB 2.0 controller supporting four ports.
However, it is important to understand that the operation of a large number of peripherals at high speed in X570-based systems will be limited by the bandwidth of the bus connecting the processor to the chipset. This bus uses only four PCI Express 4.0 lanes if a Ryzen 3000 processor is installed on the board or four PCI Express 3.0 lanes when installing processors from previous generations.
It is worth remembering that the Ryzen 3000 system-on-a-chip has its own capabilities: support for 20 PCI Express 4.0 lanes (16 lanes for the graphics card and 4 lanes for the NVMe drive), and 4 USB 3.1 Gen2 ports. All of this allows motherboard manufacturers to create very flexible and functional platforms based on X570 with a large number of high-speed PCIe slots, M.2 connectors, various network controllers, high-speed ports for peripherals, and more.
The heat dissipation of the X570 chipset is indeed 15W compared to 6W of the previous generation chipsets. However, AMD mentions a "simplified" version of the X570, in which heat dissipation will be reduced to 11W by cutting back on some of the PCI Express 4.0 lanes. Nevertheless, the X570 remains a fairly hot chip, primarily due to the integration of a high-speed PCI Express controller into the chip.
AMD has confirmed that the X570 chipset was developed in-house, while the design of previous chipsets was handled by an external contractor, ASMedia.
Leading motherboard manufacturers will showcase their X570-based products in the coming days. AMD promises that their lineup will consist of at least 56 models in total.
Source: 3dnews.ru
