With the second-generation of AMD's Ryzen processors expected to show up in early 2018, it would be a surprise if AMD wasn't beavering away fastidiously on the 400-series chipset to support them. It turns out we need not be surprised as we have our first sighting in the wild, with the "AMD 400 Series Chipsets [...] Promontory 400 series" appearing on the PCI-SIG integrators list.
For the uninitiated, the PCI-SIG integrators list is a collection of the latest products that have completed their rigorous testing and are effectively ready to hit the market, though there will no doubt be a few more months of packaging, binning and integrating the chipsets into actual motherboards to go.
Recent additions to the list include Intel's own eighth series processors in late August this year, with AMD's Ryzen Raven Ridge chips showing up at the end of September. Most recently though is AMD's 400 series chipsets, which were certified as recently as December 19. That should mean they aren't far away.
Although we don't know a lot about the 400 series chipsets, we can draw a little information about it from the listing. While the X300 generation of chipsets offers PCIExpress 2.0 support with 5GT/s bandwidth, the new 400 series fully support PCIExpress 3.0 running at 8GT/s. This would suggest that the 400 series doesn't support DDR5 memory nor PCIExpress 4.0, but it's possible that niche models in that range just have yet to be tested yet.
Are you guys excited by AMD's potential in 2018? It had a raucous 2017, so here's hoping it continues.
