New Ryzen 3000 Stepping Emerges, AMD Adds Support With Updated BIOSes

Recently, AMD released a new AGESA update for its motherboard partners' BIOSes, which have been pushed out over the past few days. These new BIOS revisions reveal that AMD has moved on to the second stepping (B0) of its Ryzen 3000 series processors, meaning the company has revised the design and appears to be on track for a release in the coming months.

Thanks to some digging on the part of @KOMACHI_ENSAKA (who you might recognize for finding similar tidbits), we now know that these new BIOSes will contain support for AMD's upcoming Ryzen 3000 series per ASUS's description that reads "update AM4 ComboPI 0.0.7.2A for next-gen processors and to improve CPU compatibility."

Additional digging within the BIOS by Komachi revealed an important detail: Matisse is on a B0 stepping, which means AMD has revised or updated the chips.

This is normal, though. As processors are developed, manufacturers refine them and produce newer versions, which come with different steppings. A0 is typically the very first silicon that comes out of the lab, and a minor revision to that would be A1 and then A2, and so on. In @Komachi's opinion, the CES demo CPU would have been an A0 or slightly more revised CPU. B0 means AMD has made a significant, perhaps final, revision to what AMD will release as Ryzen 3000.

ASUS did not update all of its motherboards with this new BIOS, but it did update some boards with the A320, B350, X370, and B450 chipsets, which is a good sign for compatibility, since AMD technically never guaranteed chipset compatibility with future CPUs, just socket compatibility.

This is not the first Ryzen BIOS to contain coding for Zen 2 processors such as Matisse (the microarchitecture that AMD uses for the Ryzen 3000 series), but it is the first time a BIOS update has been released explicitly for the upcoming CPUs. Since Ryzen 3000 still does not have a concrete launch date, this is possibly a good sign the new CPUs are just around the corner. Computex will likely see AMD reveal at least some more details about Ryzen 3000, perhaps even a launch date or the launch itself (which is somewhat unlikely as AMD promised we'd be seeing Ryzen 3000 in the summer).

With summer quickly approaching, it seems unlikely AMD will have the time to possibly make a C0 revision before launch, meaning Ryzen 3000 could be arriving sooner rather than later, and with such a small amount of updates, it's possible that development for Matisse has gone smoothly for AMD.