AMD X970E Chipset Leaks: PROM21 Silicon May Return with Native CUDIMM Support

It probably won't surprise you to hear that AMD might be announcing new products at Computex. What might surprise you is that it's all but confirmed thanks to a slip-up at Biostar PR. The company posted a press release announcing its presence at the show, and included in the PR was the phrase "BIOSTAR will present its next-generation AMD and Intel 800 series motherboards". Don't get too excited, though, because it seems like the next-generation AMD motherboards might be pretty similar to the current-generation parts.

We'd show you a screenshot of the Biostar PR, but it has since been amended to remove "next-generation". You can tell it was edited because there's a double-space in the PR now between "its" and "AMD". Clearly AMD wasn't ready to announce the announcement yet, or perhaps, less excitingly, Biostar may simply have corrected some overly enthusiastic wording in the original PR. Not every edited press release is evidence of a secret launch waiting in the wings, especially this close to a major trade show.


That's not the really interesting part of this story, though. According to occasional leaker and self-described "GPU lover" MEGAsizeGPU, there's a possibility that AMD's next-generation Socket AM5 motherboards will re-use the same "Promontory 21" chipset as all extant Socket AM5 motherboards. This isn't as bad as it might have been a long time ago; the really interesting parts, like the memory bus and PCI Express, mostly connect to the CPU directly these days. The "chipset" mostly serves as a port replicator, offering extra PCIe and USB functionality for desktop systems that expect more than the CPU itself can provide.


Conveniently, we already have this comparison on hand comparing the extant AMD chipsets to the current and potentially future Intel chipsets. The Intel data here is based on a leak, but it's perfectly plausible. It's a bit awkward as a direct comparison, because the AMD chipsets can have everything listed on a line while the Intel chipset USB numbers are presented as maximums but actually a bit more limited (e.g. you can have "up to 20" USB 5Gbps ports, but that depends on how many 10Gbps and 20Gbps ports you want.)

While the "just stick two of them on there" solution of the X870E (and X670-family) chipsets is hilarious in concept, it really doesn't have many downsides for users. You get more I/O on the board, and the latency penalty for devices hanging off the second daisy-chained Promontory 21 chip is ultimately very small, as we proved a while back. If this rumor is true, the more interesting part of the next-generation AM5 platforms will be to see if motherboards show up with support for newer memory types like CUDIMMs (or even LPCAMM2 or SOCAMM2) and exotic features like "back to front" connections.

That said, even if AMD is preparing something new for Computex, it's worth keeping expectations in check. Next-generation AMD desktop processors aren't really expected until very late this year at the absolute earliest, and more likely sometime in 2027. That means any Computex reveal would probably be more of a teaser or platform preview than a full product launch with retail availability right around the corner. We'll definitely know more in two weeks, even if what we get at Computex is just an early look at hardware that's still many months away.