Msi removes bristol ridge support on some am4 motherboards

With the arrival of Ryzen 3000 on AM4 motherboards, motherboard vendors have been struggling with a lot of work to get the bracket ready for launch, with new BIOS updates for the 300 and 400 series. It's making it clear that at least some AM4 motherboards don't support all AMD Socket AM4 CPUs, as MSI has removed the Bristol Ridge support of at least one of its motherboards with the A320 chipset.

MSI removes Bristol Ridge support on some AM4 motherboards

This is similar to the recent discovery that ASUS has not offered any more Ryzen 3000 compatible BIOS updates for those boards with the A320 chipset.

ASUS and MSI probably have similar reasons behind their decisions, and possibly the capacity of the BIOS. As the collection of AMD CPUs on the AM4 platform grows, so does the size of the BIOSs that all AM4 CPUs must accommodate. Low-end motherboards typically have only 8MB of storage for the BIOS, while high-end motherboards have 16MB. Supporting Bristol Ridge (A-Series APUs), Summit Ridge (Ryzen 1000), Pinnacle Ridge (Ryzen 2000), and Raven Ridge (Ryzen 2000 APUs) has become difficult at the same time due to the capacity limitations of the chips. Now AMD is adding Matisse processors to the mix.

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For this, providers have two options. ASUS apparently chose one, which is simply to stop supporting upgrades for the cheaper A320 motherboards that didn't have the storage needed to store larger BIOSes. MSI has chosen the other, removing support for Bristol Ridge or other older architectures to accommodate newer ones.

AMD's promise to support the AM4 platform through 2020 was perhaps somewhat ambitious, and manufacturers are struggling to deliver on that promise, with some sacrifices.

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