In a report by ChinaTimes, it is reported that AMD's upcoming B550 and A520 chipset production for the 3rd Gen Ryzen platform is expected in Q1 2020. The B550 and A520 chipsets would power budget and entry-tier motherboards and would be outsourced to ASMedia rather than developed by AMD themselves as in the case of the X570 chipset.
AMD's Budget B550 & Entry Tier A520 Chipset Production Commences in Q1 2020 - More Budget AM4 Motherboards For 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs
The two chipsets that would be produced include the budget tier B550 and the entry-tier A520. The AMD Ryzen platform currently features the X570 chipset based AM4 motherboards which come in at a much higher price due to their high-end / enthusiast positioning. We have seen a significant price hike for X570 tier motherboards compared to X470 and X370 and while motherboard makers are targetting the sub $200 US market aggressively with their new X570 designs, there's still a large market under the $150 US that needs to be covered.
It is stated by ChinaTimes that ASMedia would be fulfilling orders for the Supermicro B550 and A520 chipset and would enter mass production in the first quarter of 2020. It is expected that the retail products based on these chipsets would be available on shelves within the first half of 2020 so we could see them in action at this year's Computex. It won't be the first time we will get to see budget options on display at Computex as back in 2018, several AMD board partners unveiled their B450 lineups for (at that time new) 2nd Gen Ryzen CPUs.
Computerbase has further reported on this and talking to their sources, it was revealed that the ASMedia roadmap is targetting the availability of B550 chipset-based products around Computex. It is expected that the use of PCIe 3.0 which offers more than enough bandwidth for this market tier and no extra chipset cooling would lead to more optimized costs than what we got to see on the X570 series.
AMD's 600 series chipset orders including the flagship X670 chipset is also expected to go in mass production in the second half of 2020. The new platform chipsets would be fully PCIe 4.0 compliant from top to bottom. This also puts pressure on motherboard vendors as 3rd Gen Ryzen has been out for a good 10-11 months (depending on the market region), and as such, users would be more interested in the newer chipsets. But then again, with an enthusiast-focused launch first, the X670 products would be out of reach from the budget and entry-level consumers.
With the recent launch of AMD's 7nm, Zen 2 based Renoir APUs for notebooks and upcoming 4th Gen Ryzen 4000 APUs for the desktop market, the B550 and A520 chipsets would make a good combo and even with PCIe 3.0 onboard (versus PCIe 4.0 on X570), the lower tier chips would offer far better value proposition than the X570 high-end motherboards.
