New AMD Chipset Driver Adds A Sweet Feature Upgrade For Ryzen 6000 Laptops

As gamers and creators are both well aware, AMD's CPUs have been at-least competitive for a few years now, and for a while, roundly superior—at least, depending on your workload. However, there's been one sticking point for several years preventing a certain market segment of users from giving AMD a shot.

That sticking point, believe it or not, is lack of Thunderbolt support. Sure, it was possible to build a DIY AMD machine with Thunderbolt ports, but in the lucrative laptop market, such options were very few and far between. Laptop users love Thunderbolt for its ability to be a single-plug connection tethering the mobile machine to myriad external devices, including input, storage, network, and output.

USB4 isn't a perfect analog of Thunderbolt, of course; while it can be just as capable as the brand-new Thunderbolt 4 standard, it doesn't require the same level of certification. So saying, just like with HDMI, a device saying "USB4" doesn't necessarily tell you much about its capabilities. Still, it does guarantee at least a 20-Gbps data rate, meaning sneakernet might really be faster than your LAN now.

The driver isn't the only thing required to make use of USB4 on supporting systems; notably, the laptop vendor needs to have actually built out the physical USB4 ports as well as added support for the feature to the system's firmware. If you've got a Ryzen 6000-family laptop and your USB4 ports aren't working after this driver update (link to download), make sure to check for a BIOS update from the laptop vendor.