AMD has refrained from commenting and therefore addressing any of our questions at this point, but we have had some interesting conversations with a few of their partners.

Again to be perfectly clear on this point, board partners cannot support Ryzen 4000 series processors on 400-series motherboards without AMD’s help, it’s simply not possible. So don’t expect an AIB to crack the code and open up support, again without AMD’s support it’s not going to happen.

It does seem as though this was a recent decision by AMD and their partners found out the same time we did, so that’s truly bizarre, but then given the last few product releases from AMD it’s getting harder and harder to be suprised by this stuff.

I’ve also had industry contacts confirm that the AMD BIOS excuse is rubbish and that simple workarounds are possible, just like the one I discussed. In one example there would be a single large BIOS file that you download, then upon flashing you select the CPU series you want to support and it flashes the appropriate code.

So at this point it’s now up to the rest of the community to pressure AMD into changing this decision and to open up support for 400-series boards. You guys had better believe that if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile and we’ll be back to where we were just a few years ago.