Will Every AMD 600 And 800 Series Motherboard Support Zen 6? Here's What To Expect

AMD's Socket AM4 launched way back in September 2016, and it's still getting new CPUs released to this very day. However, some of the earliest boards may not have ever gotten the necessary BIOS updates to support newer-generation CPUs, while others that did receive the necessary BIOS updates had to drop support for earlier generations of Socket AM4 CPUs to do so. Is that going to happen with Socket AM5?

Some people feared that this would be the case after both ASUS and ASRock started crowing about being able to support AMD's next-generation Zen 6 processors thanks to the presence of a double-sized 64MB BIOS ROM chip. If these boards needed the extra space for Zen 6 microcode, does that mean that boards with only 32MB of BIOS ROM capacity would be forced to drop support for Ryzen 7000 Zen 4 processors to add support for the new chips.

This would, in theory, not really be a big deal; the firmware for AMD's Ryzen 7000 CPU is quite mature by this point, and if you have a newer CPU, you probably won't revert back to an older one. It could still cause major inconveniences for board vendors, OEMs, and customers alike, though. Fortunately, it seems like that's not going to be the case, at least if well-known enthusiast and occasional insider HXL is correct:


Replying to our colleagues over at German hardware site ComputerBase, HXL says that, in fact, any Socket AM5 motherboard with a 600 or 800 series chipset—which is all Socket AM5 motherboards—can support Zen 6. ComputerBase then asked HXL about whether we'd see the exact situation described above, where some AM4 motherboards were forced to drop support for older chips, and HXL responded as follows:


This isn't official confirmation, of course, so as always, take this pre-release information with a grain of salt. Still, HXL is pretty reliable, and does seem to have insider sources on occasion. It makes sense that both 32MB and 64MB boards can support the full range of required CPU firmware; the board with larger BIOS ROMs can probably include additional software for the pre-boot UEFI environment, like network drivers for network booting and cloud-based update utilities.

AMD's Zen 6-based Ryzen processors are expected to launch in the second half of next year, with mobile parts landing before desktop CPUs. We expect to hear about the parts at CES in January, and maybe earlier, as AMD's Financial Analyst Day is coming up on November 11th; it's possible the company will share roadmap details there, giving us a more concrete idea of when to expect the new parts.