Future am4 motherboards could bypass bristol ridge

Several motherboard manufacturers report that they may remove support for Bristol Ridge APUs in their future versions of AM4 motherboards. The reason is that the BIOS must support all processors, including a microcode for them, and the amount of space available to store this data is limited.

Support for Bristol Ridge would be sacrificed due to lack of space in BIOS flash chips

Currently, AMD AM4 motherboards basically support four platforms: the new Ryzen 2000 processors, the Ryzen 2000G with integrated graphics, the first generation Ryzen, and the Bristol Ridge APUs. Bristol Ridge was the latest generation of AMD processors before the Zen era. Supporting more CPU models would increase the BIOS size beyond 16MB, exceeding the capacity of flash chips used by most vendors, and would force them to use higher capacity models, which are more expensive.

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A 16MB flash chip costs less than half that of a 32MB chip, a cost that motherboard vendors seem reluctant to cover, especially given Bristol Ridge's poor commercial success. We are talking about price differences of 3-4 dollars, which at first glance seem to be nothing, but turn into millions if we take into account all the motherboards sold.

Rather than abandoning Bristol support, motherboard vendors could release special versions of BIOS that only support these chips, but not Ryzen, and vice versa. This seems highly unlikely as it would significantly increase the complexity for BIOS qualification and maintenance.

Another solution would be to simplify the aesthetics of the UEFI BIOS to save space, because at the end of the day we do not need as many colors and all the flourishes that are usually included, and that take up their part of space. Although doing this in the middle of the RGB era also seems unlikely.

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