AMD confirms that PCIe 4.0 will not be available on older 300/400-series AM4 motherboards

AMD confirms that PCIe 4,0 will not be availabile on older 300/400-series AM4 motherboards

AMD confirms that PCIe 4.0 will not be available on older 300/400-series AM4 motherboards

AMD’s upcoming ‘Matisse’ series of Zen 2 processors will be the first consumer-grade CPUs to deliver support for PCIe 4.0 to the masses, enabling other manufacturers to create faster M.2 NVMe storage devices, or otherwise, develop products that can take advantage of the standard’s 2x increase in bandwidth over PCIe 3.0. 

Technically speaking, older AM4 motherboards could support PCIe 4.0, assuming that motherboards meet the PCIe signalling requirements of the standard. While AMD’s ‘Matisse’ series processors will be backwards compatible with AMD’s X470/B450 and X370/B350 series of motherboards, PCIe 4.0 support will not be added to these older platforms. 

While some boards could support the new standard, all older AM4 series motherboards would be running outside of their intended specifications to do so. Beyond that, there is no guarantee that all older AM4 series motherboards would be compliant. In simple terms, AMD cannot guarantee that their older motherboards can reliably run PCIe 4.0 devices. To prevent confusion within the PC market, AMD’s Robert Hallock has stated that “Pre-X570 motherboards will not support PCIe Gen 4”.

This is a safe position for AMD to take, as it lays down some guarantees for consumers. Now, owners of existing AM4 motherboards should not expect BIOS updates that enable PCIe 4.0 support when using AMD’s latest processors, rather than sit with their fingers crossed with a vague hope that their motherboard may be one of the few to offer limited PCIe 4.0 support. 

If AMD allowed their older motherboards to support PCIe 4.0, they ran the risk of getting blamed for any and all PCIe 4.0 related issues on their older motherboard designs. Signalling issues would result in data corruption, instability and other issues, problems which AMD would prefer to avoid. While some customers will call this move a mistake, it must be remembered that running any piece of technology outside of its original specifications is always inherently risky. 
    

AMD confirms that PCIe 4,0 will not be availabile on older 300/400-series AM4 motherboards  

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