AMD X590 High-End Ryzen 3000 Chipset To Slot Above X570 With Key Upgrades
AMD has come out swinging with its Ryzen 3000 series of desktop processors, based on its Zen 2 architecture, and accompanying X570 chipset with PCI Express 4.0 support. Users will soon be able to build a burly PC based on the company's latest and most advanced technologies. But as intriguing as the announcements have been so far, as we saw at AMD's Next Horizon Gaming Event at E3, the company likes to surprise us with follow-up launches, like its 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 3950X. So, what else might AMD have in store?
Rumor has it there is an even higher end X590 chipset around the corner. To be clear, X570 is already a premium chipset, and is the successor to X470, which itself was a successor to X370. The addition of PCie 4.0 support is the biggest upgrade over the previous chipsets, which AMD recently confirmed will not finding its way to X470 and X370, but it also introduces better power delivery for AMD's latest processors.
As a natural progression of AMD's Ryzen ecosystem, we fully expect there to be B550 and A520 motherboard options as well, with fewer bells and whistles and lower price tags to boot. But on the other end of the spectrum, X590 could kick things up a notch. While nothing of the sort has been announced, rumors heated up when a teaser photo emerged on Twitter.
"AMD X590 and more possibilities, coming soon...", the post read, before it was taken offline. In addition to the Twitter post, which has since been deleted, a member of the ComputerBase forum did some digging in Gigabyte's BIOS files for its upcoming X570 motherboards. Those BIOS files contain references to "X570/X590" (as shown above) and they appear in numerous places, which suggests it's not a typo.
It's not clear what X590 would introduce over X570, though one possibility is more PCIe 4.0 lanes. This may or may not tie in with reports of ASMedia being on pace to finish tape-outs for PCIe 4.0 chip solutions by the end of the year. It is entirely possible that X590 would utilize ASMedia's upcoming PCIe 4.0 chips, but like everything else, this is speculation. As it stands, PCIe 4.0 is already having an impact on the products being developed, with several SSD makers having announced new PCIe 4.0 drives with read speeds of around 5,000MB/s.
An X590 chipset could also be more of a workstation solution, designed primarily for the Ryzen 9 3950X. Previously, a user would need to either buy a workstation CPU (Xeon or EPYC) or a Threadripper chip to get into the core/thread category of the 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 3950X.
There are several possibilities, in other words, and we'll just have to wait and see what transpires.
