Asus have recently released a slew of BIOS updates to their AM4 motherboards which deliver an upgrade to the AGESA 1071 standard specifically “for new upcoming processors.” AMD haven’t officially announced any new desktop chips, so could this change be for the AMD Raven Ridge APUs or for next year’s 12nm Ryzen update, Pinnacle Ridge?
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Tom’s Hardware spotted the updates last night though, as they point out, AGESA microcode changes are not in of themselves unexpected. But what is strange is that Asus are explicitly stating that this is purely so their boards can support the new processors. The AGESA procotcol is the bit of code built into the BIOS which gets the processors running with all their cores, threads, and that lovely, lovely memory.
The big question though is, what are these new processors? The smart money would be on the new AGESA update being required to get the new Raven Ridge APUs working happily on the desktop AM4 platform. Because they’re a hitherto unused desktop mix of Vega and Zen cores they’re definitely going to need some fresh microcode to get them operational on the existing AM4 chipsets.
They’re also more likely to be ready sooner than the 12nm Pinnacle Ridge update to the Ryzen processor range. Raven Ridge has already hit the shelves, under the guise of Ryzen Mobile, in a small selection of laptops and so it would make sense for the discrete APUs to be on their way soon.
But there have been rumours of Pinnacle Ridge arriving in our motherboards as early as February 2018, so maybe Asus are just laying some very early groundwork.