[GTALUG] AMD firmware update removes PCI 4.0 support on some motherboards

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

One of the features of the latest round of Ryzen chips is support for PCI 
4.0.

In practice, PCI 4.0 isn't very important yet: current video cards don't 
saturate PCI 3.x and neither do NVMe SSDs.  But NVMe SSDs that exploit PCI 
4.0 are starting to be announced.

There is a chicken and egg problem: until there are a lot of systems that 
can support PCI 4.0, few devices will be built to that spec.

I was very disappointed to learn that AMD, in a firmware update, has 
disabled PCI 4.0 support for all consumer motherboards except those based 
on the very expensive x570 chipset.

Their excuse was that some motherboards weren't built to reliably support 
PCI 4.0.  Surely they could have left that up to the discretion of the MB 
manufacturer (through whom these firmware updates flow).

The motherboard must be engineered for PCI 4.0.  But it could be built 
with the cheaper X470, X370, B350, and A320 chips.  No longer.

<https://old.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/buydi6/amds_robert_hallock_no_pcie_40_support_on_300_and/epn2c83/>

<https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-pcie-4.0-socket-am4-motherboard,39559.html>