this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Big Fan of AMD seemingly going down the same route as with AM4 when it comes to longevity of AM5 (though only time will tell to which extent truly)
However I feel like they're watering down the meaning of their chipsets. The regular old X870 chipsets has the exact same PCIe lane spec as B650E which just seems like a weird downgrade in an upgrade to me. On one hand the chipset has more PCIe 5 lanes than X670 but with it having 8 less lanes in total I think X670 would still be the more attractive option in a lot of cases. A similar problem with X870E imo where the only distinguishing factor from X670E is the USB4 support, like seriously this is not going to be competitive. People will just pick up an X670E motherboard for cheaper.
Mandatory USB4 is an up but I feel like the motherboard manufacturers and vendors are not happy at all with these specifications, it will make it extremely difficult to up-sell customers to the new and "better" chipsets
Their chipset naming scheme is more about setting a minimum spec that mainboard manufacturers have to meet so that they're allowed to call their mainboards X670E for example.
A620 aside, B650, B650E, X670 and X670E all use the same actual chipset, with the X670 models using essentially two chipsets daisy-chained. The PCIEe 5.0 requirements for appending the "E" actually don't even require any chipset whatsoever, as PCIe 5.0 is directly wired to the CPU anyway.
With X870/X870E it's much of the same. I wouldn't even be surprised if the actual chipset is the exact same. All the requirements listed in the slide (PCIe 5.0 NVMe and GPU, USB 4, memory OC support) don't have anything to do with the chipset anyway (unless they wire USB 4 via the chipset).
EDIT: I think this is mainly a marketing thing so manufacturers can update their B650E boards with USB 4 and rename them to X870. It's easier to sell a board with the higher-end name "X870" for $300 than it is to sell a B650E board for $300.
You know the more I think about this the better this change seems to me. The original X670 and X670E distinctions were already pretty useless if I recall correctly and by basically moving up the B650E spec to X870 they removed that useless spec. Only thing left open for question is what happens with the gap now, are they just going to pull the entire stack up or will there simply be no B850E? Also granted I'd rather have seen a larger improvement from the X670 and X670E spec than them putting a previous mid-range chip into the high-end but at least there is some form of sensible difference between X870 and X870E, albeit the differences to the previous gen are suffering a bit from this weird diagonal upgrade.