At the Computex trade show, AMD unveiled two chipsets for the new 800 series motherboards – X870 and X870E, alongside their desktop processors Ryzen 9000 based on a Zen 5 architecture. Choosing to skip the 700 series, the manufacturer designed these chipsets not just for the Ryzen 9000, but also for the previous Ryzen 7000 and 8000.
AMD only released a few details about the new X870E and X870 chipsets. Specifically, all motherboards with these chipsets will support the USB4 interface as AMD made this a standard. Moreover, these motherboards will now support Wi-Fi 7, an upgrade from Wi-Fi 6E on the 600 series chipset motherboards. Furthermore, they will mandatorily have at least one PCIe 5.0 slot for NVMe drives. According to a previous Gigabyte leak, these new chipsets will also offer support for a faster AMD EXPO RAM overclocking profile with speeds up to 8000 MT/s.
AMD also noted that motherboards based on X870E and X870 will offer a total of 44 PCIe lanes: 24 supported by the central processors and the remaining 20 by the chipsets themselves.
The key differences between X870E and X870, as was with X670E and X670, lies in their construction. The former is based on two ASMedia Promontory 21 chips and the latter on one. As a result, the X870E will support more distinct ports. However, more details will likely be revealed in July when the Ryzen 9000 processors launch.
AMD also announced future support for the Socket AM5 platform beyond 2027. This means that new processors for this socket will still be launched for at least three more years, if not longer. The transition to a new processor socket will not occur until the company is ready for the production of chips based on the Zen 6 or even Zen 7 architecture.
