AMD X570S Motherboard Listings Suggest Impending Chipset Refresh

Today, Gigabyte (via Komachi_Ensaka) registered a ton of X570S motherboards with the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC). The new submissions hint to a potential chipset refresh on AMD's part.

EEC listings are a bit hit or miss. Vendors often register their products with the organization, but not all of them make it to the market. Sometimes companies just want to get dibs on the model names. This is the first time that the X570S chipset has come up, so take the information with some salt. However, there are a few theories to existence of the X570S chipset.

Manufacturers, including chipmakers, typically release a new chipset when a new wave of processors are on the horizon. Since AMD's Zen 4 chips are still a long way off, the closest candidate that could warrant a new chipset is the rumored Zen 3+ (Warhol) refresh. We haven't seen anything concrete that backs the rumor, but there is talk that Zen 3+ could drop before the year is over. If Zen 3+ is real, it will in all likelihood retain the same feature set as Zen 3. The improvements will probably come in the shape of a small frequency bump.

Gigabyte X570S Motherboards

Another theory is that X570S may just be an optimized version of the X570 chipset. One of X570's novelties is PCIe 4.0 support. However, it also means that the X570 chipset draws more power in comparison to the previous X470 chipset. Consequently, X570 motherboards come with active cooling for the chipset in the form of a small fan. Of course, many enthusiasts aren't fond of that solution, and AMD later released a new AGESA code that ushered in support for passive chipset solutions.

Obviously, the biggest unknown is what the "S" in X570S stands for. By logic, one would think that it means Silence or Silent and maybe alludes to the possibility of an X570 chipset that doesn't require a cooling fan to keep the temperature under control. The idea isn't far-fetched, considering that are already X570 motherboards on the market that don't rely on a chipset fan, such as Asus' ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero or Gigabyte's own X570 Aorus Xtreme. But those tend to rely on larger heat sinks, rather than a power optimized chip that produces less heat to begin with.