AMD 600-Series Chipset Expected to Land Before 2020 Ends

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The B550 and A520 chipsets aren't out yet, but there are already whispers of the 600-series.

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AMD's upcoming 600-series chipsets might not be as far off as we think, based on a DigiTimes report today. The Taiwanese news outlet's unnamed "industry" sources claimed that the next wave of AMD chipsets should arrive at the end of 2020.

As The China Times reported earlier this month, ASMedia is expected to start producing AMD's budget-focused B550 and A520 chipsets in Q1 of this year. According to today's DigiTimes report, ASMedia has already secured orders from AMD for the upcoming 600-series chipsets as well. ASMedia and AMD have been buddies for years now, so it was anticipated that ASMedia would land the orders.

Rumored time frames for AMD's new chipsets and processors align. The China Times estimated that Zen 3 desktop processors, which will probably be called the Ryzen 4000-series (codenamed Vermeer), are likely to drop in the second half of this year. 

DigiTimes also reported that ASMedia's USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 controller chip should see a rise in demand. The reasoning shared was that the integrated chip inside Intel's current chips is only capable of supporting USB 3.2 Gen 2 transmission speeds up to 10 Gbps, while ASMedia's solution offers double the performance at speeds up to 20 Gbps.

ASMedia is also cooking up a USB 4 controller chip, which it plans to commercialize this year. 

According to DigiTimes, the U.S., China trade war resulted in clients turning to ASMedia for "packet conversion ICs and USB 3.2 host controller chips for server CPUs," so its revenue is expected to grow "gradually" throughout the next three years. It pegged its net profits as growing 13.48% year-on-year during the first three quarters of 2019. 

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Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
News Editor and Memory Reviewer

Zhiye Liu is a news editor and memory reviewer at Tom’s Hardware. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

29 Comments Comment from the forums
  • paul prochnow
    Did you not write the last 2/3rds of the story? WTF...why rename a chipset if all they do is put in a USB upgrade. NOBODY really is that USB oriented.

    You talk about a honestly UNLOCKED 3xxx CPU multiplier chipset and ears will perk up.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    If AMD is launching the 4000-series this year as everybody is expecting, then it would make sense that updated/refreshed chipsets would come out alongside them. Makes identifying out-of-the-box compatible motherboards much easier.
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    paul prochnow said:
    Did you not write the last 2/3rds of the story? WTF...why rename a chipset if all they do is put in a USB upgrade. NOBODY really is that USB oriented.

    You talk about a honestly UNLOCKED 3xxx CPU multiplier chipset and ears will perk up.
    Virtually every release of a new generation of CPUs is accompanied by new chipset(s). There are many examples where the new chipsets offered little to no improvements over the old ones, other than guaranteeing out of the box support for the new CPUs as mentioned above. I don't think they're expecting people with the previous chipset to upgrade motherboards just to get the new chipset.

    All B and X series chipsets already allow CPU multipliers to be adjusted, what exactly are you looking for?
    Reply
  • alextheblue
    TJ Hooker said:
    All B and X series chipsets already allow CPU multipliers to be adjusted, what exactly are you looking for?
    My first thought was "not a Ryzen owner, or has a prebuilt with a cheap A series chipset".
    Reply
  • Makaveli
    What is the point if this is another AM4 socket.

    When we should see new socket and DDR5 and possibly PCIe 5 in sometime in 2021?

    Even if they offer USB4 on this and its chipset is passively cooled instead of active like x570.

    You won't have a upgrade path!
    Reply
  • Soaptrail
    I would not expect to see these or Ryzen 4000 series until Q4.
    Reply
  • Makaveli
    Soaptrail said:
    I would not expect to see these or Ryzen 4000 series until Q4.

    Which is fine.

    You still have no upgrade path. I don't really see what they will add to the chipset to make it a must buy.

    Would you buy one of these boards knowing a replacement socket is like 1-1.5 years away?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    paul prochnow said:
    Did you not write the last 2/3rds of the story? WTF...why rename a chipset if all they do is put in a USB upgrade. NOBODY really is that USB oriented.
    They could also be more power-efficient, perhaps being made on a 7 nm process.

    The big news will be when AMD introduces a new socket. They said AM4 would span 4 generations. However, then they ported some older, pre-Ryzen APUs to the socket. So, technically, I think maybe the 4000 series & 600 chipset could introduce a new socket.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    Makaveli said:
    possibly PCIe 5 in sometime in 2021?
    No PCIe 5. That's going to be server-only, for the foreseeable future.

    Makaveli said:
    You won't have a upgrade path!
    For a lot of people, upgrade path doesn't matter much. If you buy in with a slower chip, and upgrade to a faster one in the next gen, that makes sense. But, if you buy in with an upper-end chip, then the generational improvement isn't enough, from one generation to the next, for most people. And if you skip multiple generations of CPUs, then you're going to want faster RAM and possibly even encounter some CPU/chipset compatibility issues. Maybe you'll want beefier VRMs, too.

    In any PC I've built, I've never done just a CPU upgrade. I always wait long enough between upgrades that I end up replacing CPU, motherboard, and RAM. Video cards are a different matter.

    However, I can also afford to buy the system I think I need, at the outset. So, I see that an upgrade path will make sense, for some.
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    Makaveli said:
    You still have no upgrade path. I don't really see what they will add to the chipset to make it a must buy.

    Would you buy one of these boards knowing a replacement socket is like 1-1.5 years away?
    Intel has been replacing sockets every two generations (so every ~2 years, even less recently) for a decade at least, doesn't seem to stop people from buying their boards.

    With regard to making 600 series chipset boards a "must buy", if you want a Ryzen 4K CPU and 600 series chipsets guarantee out of the box support for Ryzen 4K that seems like reason enough for me. The 600 series chipset boards will (hopefully) be priced similarly to previous generation boards, so it may not be 'must buy' so much as 'might as well'.
    Reply