A list of PCI-SIG integrators has unofficially confirmed the upcoming 400-series chipset revision for AMD Ryzen motherboards. It does not reveal much beyond just listing the product. In fact, it is not even using the chipset’s codename. Simply using the same “promontory” placeholder as with previous early, pre-NDA PCI-SIG listings. For the most part, AMD promised that the AM4 socket will remain unchanged even for Ryzen 2 and they do not plan to pull “an Intel”. Forwards and backwards compatibility is expected for the desktop CPUs. Although the 2nd gen Ryzen flagships are still going to be 95W TDP CPUs.
This should give some users who purchased or built a Ryzen system some peace of mind. According to Digitimes, X470 and B450 motherboards are on schedule, with chipsets still designed by ASMedia. However, these will not be available until March 2018.
400-Series Chipset Features
The listing on the PCI-SIG website shows PCIe 3.0 at 8GT/s. In comparison, the current Ryzen chipsets listed PCIe 2.0 at 5GT/s earlier in 2016. This is an improvement, but not PCIe 4.0 as some expected. Since AMD promised to support the AM4 socket well into 2020, both PCIe 4.0 and DDR5 will most likely not be used until after then. PCIe 3.0 itself doubles the performance for storage devices, so a leap to PCIe 4.0 is not really necessary at this point.
