It's official support. I know the mobo manufacturers can work around it as they have for 300 series and Zen2, but it's a bit of a blow to those of us who would like to rely on some warrantied-ish ability to use a 4700X on a B450 for instance.
As was said, its about motherboard support. I have a 3900x running on a x370 Taichi, no problem.
Decoupled means decoupled, as in "not connected". As such the "ratio" for Renoir only exists in that any two numbers can be made into a ratio. Renoir as such never runs at a 1:1 ratio as there is no such mechanism in place in the system. Renoir can scale its IF clock up/down entirely unrelated to DRAM clock. This is necessary to support IF power saving alongside DDR4 (which doesn't vary its clock speed whatsoever) and LPDDR4X (which varies its clock speed, but goes far too high for IF to follow suit reliably - 1:1 goes to 3600-3800 (1800-1900 FCLOCK) on a good desktop chip, so 4233 (2133 FCLOCK) isn't happening). The issue is that mismatched speeds introduces latency in the data path as a signal coming from one bus moves onto the other, causing performance inconsistency - but obviously not enough for it to seriously hamper Renoir. And who knows, maybe hitting 3:1 around (~4800) with (LP)DDR5 will be better than some weird non-integer ratio?
I suppose you can always write a bios that removes support for Zen1. Not good for new sales however.
... Or they are going forward exactly like they did last year with no word on desktop APUs until after the summer despite laptop ones being announced at CES. If Vermeer doesn't launch until late Q3 or even Q4 there is little reason to think APUs will be held back until then (unless they are facing very serious production shortages (which there shouldn't be now that Apple has left TSMC's 7nm node) and laptop demand is absolutely overwhelming).
It makes sense to hold back on desktop APU's so that they can press the advantage Renoir has at present by concentrating on laptop.
Another 4-5 months for an already long overdue product? Ouch.
Given that B550 "technically" launched yesterday (though no boards have been announced yet) it would be utterly unheard of for boards to not arrive until late Q3 or Q4 alongside Vermeer. I would expect B550 boards to trickle out as summer arrives, with the weird launch likely being due to various OEMs being hit by Covid-19 in different ways, necessitating a weird, staggered paper launch.
I agree that it makes some sense, but considering how small the consumer desktop APU market is the impact of allocating a few thousand dice to the desktop would be minimal. A quick and dirty dice-per-wafer calculation based on Anandtech's measurements gives ~384 total Renoir dice per 300mm wafer (including defects), so they really don't need to set aside many wafers to cover initial global consumer desktop APU demand should they want to appear as if they care about this market. Not to mention that desktop APUs could use chips that are otherwise too power hungry to fit 15W or 45W mobile bins. After all, these chips have been in mass production since late '19 so even if the roll-out in laptops is slow, that doesn't mean AMD doesn't have a significant stock of chips.
As I said above, while that does happen, it isn't common, and it's more expensive and less flexible for OEMs - so they tend to avoid it if possible in normal form factors. But I was talking specifically DIY consumer sales, not OEM sales (of course OEM SFF like the tiny Dells and Lenovos out there universally use laptop parts, but those also rely exclusively on bespoke motherboards and generally don't have PCIe expansion). I doubt there's enough of a market for consumer facing OEM dekstops based on APUs (or enough attention paid to them) that AMD would prioritize those over the rather loud DIY market for something like this.
Isn't it pretty much confirmed at this point that Vermeer is slated for an "end of 2020" release? If that falls within Q3, it definitely isn't July - I would be very surprised even if we saw Vermeer launched in September. AMD's desktop CPU release cadence so far has been a year and a few months, so unless Zen 3 is arriving significantly faster than previous generations it won't be here until fall at the earliest, though late fall or "holiday" is more likely IMO. Thus I would assume desktop Renoir arrives first, possibly alongside (or more likely during the slow trickle out of) B550.
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