Their chipset naming scheme is more about setting a minimum spec that mainboard manufacturers have to meet so that they’re allowed to call their mainboards X670E for example.
A620 aside, B650, B650E, X670 and X670E all use the same actual chipset, with the X670 models using essentially two chipsets daisy-chained. The PCIEe 5.0 requirements for appending the “E” actually don’t even require any chipset whatsoever, as PCIe 5.0 is directly wired to the CPU anyway.
With X870/X870E it’s much of the same. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the actual chipset is the exact same. All the requirements listed in the slide (PCIe 5.0 NVMe and GPU, USB 4, memory OC support) don’t have anything to do with the chipset anyway (unless they wire USB 4 via the chipset).
EDIT: I think this is mainly a marketing thing so manufacturers can update their B650E boards with USB 4 and rename them to X870. It’s easier to sell a board with the higher-end name “X870” for $300 than it is to sell a B650E board for $300.
You know the more I think about this the better this change seems to me. The original X670 and X670E distinctions were already pretty useless if I recall correctly and by basically moving up the B650E spec to X870 they removed that useless spec. Only thing left open for question is what happens with the gap now, are they just going to pull the entire stack up or will there simply be no B850E? Also granted I’d rather have seen a larger improvement from the X670 and X670E spec than them putting a previous mid-range chip into the high-end but at least there is some form of sensible difference between X870 and X870E, albeit the differences to the previous gen are suffering a bit from this weird diagonal upgrade.
Their chipset naming scheme is more about setting a minimum spec that mainboard manufacturers have to meet so that they’re allowed to call their mainboards X670E for example.
A620 aside, B650, B650E, X670 and X670E all use the same actual chipset, with the X670 models using essentially two chipsets daisy-chained. The PCIEe 5.0 requirements for appending the “E” actually don’t even require any chipset whatsoever, as PCIe 5.0 is directly wired to the CPU anyway.
With X870/X870E it’s much of the same. I wouldn’t even be surprised if the actual chipset is the exact same. All the requirements listed in the slide (PCIe 5.0 NVMe and GPU, USB 4, memory OC support) don’t have anything to do with the chipset anyway (unless they wire USB 4 via the chipset).
EDIT: I think this is mainly a marketing thing so manufacturers can update their B650E boards with USB 4 and rename them to X870. It’s easier to sell a board with the higher-end name “X870” for $300 than it is to sell a B650E board for $300.
You know the more I think about this the better this change seems to me. The original X670 and X670E distinctions were already pretty useless if I recall correctly and by basically moving up the B650E spec to X870 they removed that useless spec. Only thing left open for question is what happens with the gap now, are they just going to pull the entire stack up or will there simply be no B850E? Also granted I’d rather have seen a larger improvement from the X670 and X670E spec than them putting a previous mid-range chip into the high-end but at least there is some form of sensible difference between X870 and X870E, albeit the differences to the previous gen are suffering a bit from this weird diagonal upgrade.