Written by Metal Messiah

In a surprise move made by “Gigabyte Japan”, the company has just confirmed on Twitter that the Ryzen 5 1600 AF and Ryzen 3 1300 AF CPUs are compatible with their current X570 motherboards.

X570 chipset launched last year, and AMD made it very clear that the X570 motherboards won’t support the “first generation” of Ryzen processors (codenamed “Summit Ridge”).  Even though the Ryzen 1000-series chips have worked on “some” of the X570 chipsets, it did come with a huge risk factor.

So how is Gigabyte offering support now ? The answer lies within the “Silicon”.

Despite the fact the Ryzen 5 1600 AF and Ryzen 3 1300 AF carry the 1000-series nomenclature, AMD has manufactured them differently. The “original” models were based on AMD’s “Zen microarchitecture” fabbed on  GloFo’s 14nm manufacturing process. The AF models, on the other hand, are based on the “Zen+ microarchitecture” and a 12nm process node.

This makes them different. Even though AMD may never officially confirm this, but both the Ryzen 5 1600 AF and Ryzen 3 1300 AF processors are essentially just “underclocked” SKU versions of the Ryzen 5 2600 and Ryzen 3 2300X respectively.

These CPUs might not be official members of the “Pinnacle Ridge” family, aka the Ryzen 2000-series, but they meet most of the requirements.

In case you were not aware, AMD still offers support for Pinnacle Ridge processors to be used  on the X570 chipset so, “technically” speaking, Gigabyte isn’t breaking any of AMD’s rules.

On the contrary, AMD is fully aware that these AF models might work on “some” of the X570 motherboards, and the company is okay with it. But since AMD can’t guarantee that these processors will work without any issues or trouble, so that is why the chipmaker doesn’t publicly advertise it either.

AMD has recently confirmed that the 500-series chipset is ready for the future Zen 3 4’th GEN processors. Though, AMD’s decision on Summit Ridge also remains firm as it was revealed that the B550 chipset only supports the Ryzen 3000-series (codename “Matisse”), or newer chips. So support for Ryzen 1000-series AF models will never happen.

Without having proper support for the Zen+ arch, the B550 motherboards will never work with the Ryzen 5 1600 AF or the Ryzen 3 1300 AF, officially that is. But Gigabyte is offering support and backwards compatibility on the X570 chipsets.

Source: Gigabyte Japan.