Reports claim that AMD’s 3rd Gen Threadripper CPUs will require new motherboards

Before Threadripper Intel offers 10-core Broadwell-E i7-6950X processors for over £1500, and now, Intel has been forced by the market to release the cost of their 18-core Cascade Lake-X i9-10980XE for under £1,000. Times have changed, and Threadripper helped to make that happen. 

Today, rumour has it that AMD’s X399 series motherboards will lack support for Ryzen 3rd Generation Threadripper processor. The same sources also say that AMD’s planned TRX40 series motherboards will no be backwards compatible with 1st and 2nd Generation Threadripper CPUs. Note that this has not been confirmed by AMD officially; at least not yet.  

Unlike AM4, AMD has not committed to supporting X399/TR4 until 2020. AMD has made no public commitments to supporting next-generation processors on their existing TR4 socket motherboards. Also, given the off-roadmap design of Threadripper, there is a lot of room for technical limitations to prevent backwards compatibility. Moving from AMD’s multi-die approach with Threadripper (1st and 2nd Gen) to AMD’s new Zen 2 multi-die structure could be a step too far for X399. Yes, AMD’s EPYC motherboards can support Zen 2 EPYC processors, but the same doesn’t necessarily apply to Threadripper.     

ReHWolution recently stated that ASRock plans to release TRX40 Taichi and Creator series motherboards this November, both of which lack support for existing Threadripper series processors. They also claimed that 3rd Generation Threadripper processors would not be supported on X399.  

At this time, AMD has not confirmed or denied this information.