AMD: Zen 3-based CPUs will need 500-series motherboard

Today reviews hit the web of the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and 3300X processors. There's also a bunch of information about the new AMD B550 chipset. TechPowerUp lists the highlights here and notes that there's now official confirmation from AMD that the future Zen 3-based processors will need a 500-series (or newer) motherboard.

AMD B550 motherboards will feature partial PCI-Express gen 4.0 support. The main PCI-Express x16 slot, and one of the M.2 NVMe slots that are wired to the "Matisse" processor will be PCI-Express gen 4.0, however, all downstream PCIe lanes put out by the B550 chipset are gen 3.0. This is still a step up from 400-series "Promontory" chipsets, which are limited to gen 2.0. B550 puts out eight PCIe gen 3.0 lanes, which combine with the 20 usable processor lanes from "Matisse" to take the platform's total PCIe budget to 28 lanes (x16 gen 4.0 + x4 gen 4.0 + x8 gen 3.0). The B550 chipset itself connects to the "Matisse" processor via a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 connection.

AMD also notes that the B550 only supports 3rd generation Ryzen "Matisse" processors. There's no support for the Ryzen 3000 "Picasso" APUs nor or older Ryzen CPUs. AMD claims these chips aren't suppored due to ROM size limitations.