Yep, pretty much this. :)
Keep in mind that AMD has a very wide profit margin and are totally capable of lowering prices on their chips significantly if market forces and competition warrant it. That's just not happening at the present moment. Intel is definitely making improvements to their designs to become more competitive over time, but AMD isn't sitting on their hands doing nothing either. AMD is driving forward full force and for the first time in as long as I can remember we have actual strong competition between these two companies which means we ultimately all win in the end.

All of the major semiconductor vendors are making new fabs currently in various places in the world, including Intel, TSMC, Samsung and others. Intel is only operating at about 70% capacity for a while now anyway from what I've read so increasing their capacity isn't going to make them suddenly outpace other companies in capacity in any meaningful way.

The TSMC markup sucks but it isn't going to affect the market right now at all likely. If Intel lowers their prices AMD will most likely still sell every chip they make at current prices so will have no reason to lower prices. The only reason AMD will lower prices is if competition from Intel actually starts negatively affecting the sales of their products and they end up having to lower prices to be more competitive. It is definitely possible that could happen over the course of 2022 but there's no sign of it happening right now for sure.

Intel's Raptor Lake is coming later this year, as is AMD's much anticipated Zen 4 which is looking pretty incredible so far both from leaks as well as official AMD information that has now confirmed a bunch of prior leaks.

Things will really start to get interesting some time in the fall this year when all of the next gen CPUs and GPUs (including Intel's discreet GPUs) launch and competition really ramps up.between them all alongside all the new fabs going online and greatly increasing capacity. If we don't see greatly increased supply and lower prices start to happen by the end of 2022 then it'll almost certainly start to occur in 2023 I believe. Time will tell though.

It's a great time for tech... minus the shortages and scalping/mining that is going on kind of ruining it a bit. :)

[Update: Fixed typo for Raptor Lake]

There are two problems at heart. One is that the BIOS contains tables of data for every single CPU that can be supported by the board and the sheer number of CPUs and amount of data can't fit every supportable CPU's data, so they have to be careful about deciding what CPU support will get axed as they add support for new ones in order to make room in the BIOS image. This is likely because they never intended for this many CPUs to ever be supported on the AM4 platform originally or that they'd run out of space in the BIOS.

The second problem from what I understand, is that because many of these much much older boards are so many years old, they existed long before these new CPUs existed in silicon so they could never be actually tested on these boards, and there could be a variety of timing problems, or other issues.

I've had this happen myself on a motherboard before where the board vendor claimed the board would support CPUs up to 3GHz even though no such CPU existed at the time so there's no way they could actually test that. When we tried several 3GHz CPUs in the board, nothing we could do would get them to work other than lowering the clock. We got it to run stable at 2.8GHz, but anything above that and it would crash. I had to fudge CPU and memory timings and voltage manually on the board just to get it to work at 2.8GHz reliably even, and this was with the vendor's newest BIOS image.

The reason that happens is that they can not test such boards for problems with actual CPUs that wont exist for 4 years into the future. Fast forward to today, and some of those old boards *might* manage to work with the newer CPU but there is no guarantee that it will either and it does take time and cost money and other resources to go through all of the old products and test them broadly enough to see what works or does not work, and potentially have to make other adjustments to the BIOS other than just updating the detection/configuration tables and whatnot.

Hopefully any boards that can actually support the new CPUs do end up getting updated BIOSes and tested well and people are able to have the option though. But it would not make sense to just blindly update the BIOS for every board out there and release them and hope for the best without proper testing and validation.

Intel's making a foray into the GPU space and that's where I expect things to get really interesting. Ryzen 7000 is not that far off. 3D cache is interesting, but I think that Ryzen 7000 is what could help AMD reclaim the performance crown. Let's wait and watch. I only wish that imagination also made a foray into the x86 discrete GPU space as they already have ray tracing. Having 4 players in the GPU segment would have really stirred things up in terms of prices.

Nevertheless, Intel is expected to price their new GPUs very aggressively to garner market share.

Also, Ryzen 7000 would herald a new platform and if AMD gets things right then that's what I am going to upgrade to. AMD's upcoming GPUs look very interesting. AMD may not win in terms of pure performance but it could in terms of performance per watt. It's good to see Intel and AMD come up with interesting products.

So, I am expecting the second half of 2022 to hit the sweet spot in terms of prices, in the past 2 years.

Intel's problem was that they had everything on their 14nm process for ages, so much so that they had to start using 22nm for chipsets again to drop the congestion down a bit. Now that 10nm (or 'Intel7' per rebranding) is working a bit better they've theoretically got a decent amount of excess capacity- but it isn't really translating to practical excess since the process is only more reliable, not reliable in an absolute sense.

The first 10nm chips were all limited to 4 cores and laptop applications since the process was so broken, they've got the reliability up a lot more so they can economically do higher core count CPUs. But the reliability is still too poor for them to do GPUs with their 10nm, so all their new GPUs will be made by TSMC and competing with AMD for space there. Unfortunately it's unlikely they will add much in the way of new competition because they'll just be competing for the same production with AMD. The issue with that (and the BIOS size) is that support has been added for some budget board lines, ie 320 series boards despite those problems. Those boards are really pretty cheap and nasty with poor components, have outright bad VRMs etc. If they can cope with a 5000 series CPU then a 350/370 definitely should be able to as well. It would still be a big improvement even if they locked overclocking.

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370%20Pro4/index.asp#BIOS
V7.10 Vermeer (aka zen 3) Support.

Regarding the second point, wasnt it because of memory constraints of the bios ? Its more than a artificial limitation. But either way, maybe just hold on for a bit, and see if gigabyte releases a patch.

https://www.hwcooling.net/en/gigabyte-and-msi-b350-x370-boards-support-ryzen-4000-5000/

GOOD LUCK BROTHER :)
Hope you get it!
i wanted to throw a quick question into the mix...

how is zen1/zen+/zen2 support for b550 and x570?
has it improved since launch?

Yep, they struggled for years with their 10nm node and still have a ways to go with it and newer nodes.

Well, yes and no... AMD has bought wafers at TSMC years in advance, so they've already secured everything they need on TSMCs various nodes at least for what they originally intended to produce. They're also buying up as much more space on TSMC's various nodes as they can based on the unexpectedly huge demand and massive profit they've made over the last year or so as it becomes available. Both Intel and Nvidia have secured some wafers on TSMC 5nm and I think Intel has some 4nm or 3nm there also, but AMD's already one of TSMC's biggest customers and secured what they need for quite some time now. So there is some competition in the sense that I'm sure AMD would like to have got allocation of what Intel or Nvidia got, but it is quite small compared to what AMD has booked. AMD is allegedly booking at Samsung also for some future products as well.

VIrtually all semi fab companies are building new fabs in a number of countries all slated to start coming online in 2023 or thereabouts so we should see production capacity virtually everywhere increase in 2023. We'll probably see the shortages continue on some products throughout 2022, but in 2023 we should see supply start to keep up with demand everywhere if it hasn't already by then. I don't think AMD's going to have any problems nailing down access to silicon personally as they've booked it long in advance.

Sure, but it still has to be adequately tested and work or it is a disservice to the customer. There also has to be enough business incentive for the companies to expend the effort also and they might feel there is on some products and not on others. I doubt we'll see universal support added retroactively to every motherboard as it wont make good business sense on every single product out there. Hopefully it does happen everywhere it does make sense though.

Lets face it though too, the AM5 platform has survived an extremely long time now and AMD has delivered way more than anyone ever expected including themselves. They shouldn't be attacked by people with angst if some of the processors don't get supported on some boards, they should be praised for allowing it to even live this long at all IMHO which is a testament to their commitment to their consumers. I don't think they can be expected to stretch it out forever though or be seen as being bad otherwise, it's not realistic to me to expect that level of support for this long but it is a nice thing when they go out of their way to do it where most other companies would never even consider it.

I speculate that AM5 will support processors for 3 generations before moving on to AM6 or whatever though, I don't think we'll see it last as long as AM4 did, as there are way too many changes occurring in semiconductor manufacturing right now that probably can't all be anticipated this far in advance to keep a socket+platform optimized for products much longer than that.

Either way, I think it's a great time for tech and competition, minus the GPU shortages and scalping and elevated pricing in general.

TSMC was always overbooked for 7nm though, so whatever orders AMD originally placed would not have been as large as they actually wanted.

AMD did get its original orders, plus a big upgrade from others switching nodes (eg Apple to 5nm) and from others being cut off (Huawei, though they bought up all the available space beforehand to get inventory). But they're still supply constrained and selling every chip they make, and still buying up any capacity that becomes available- and now a decent amount of newly available capacity is instead going to make Intel GPUs.

If Intel were making the GPUs on their own process it would certainly help competition wise, but as it stands they're competing for the same space.TSMC is expensive too; so Intel will have exactly the same issues that AMD has with regard to lowering prices- why would you, if you're selling every chip already at the higher price point? You'd just lose money without gaining any extra market share. They will provide some competition certainly, but to get proper competition there has to be a lot more capacity so supply approaches saturation.

(The intrinsic problem is that only TSMC had a good, on time, 7nm class node this time. AMD started planning at a time when they had a supply agreement with Global Foundries and they were still going to have a 7nm node based on IBM's research. When GloFo's owners baulked at spending billions having not paid off the investment in 14/12nm they were out- retrospectively, and potentially, one of the worst business decisions of all time. Samsung's 7nm equivalents had fairly major problems (performance applications ran very hot, low yields/ unreliable) and were later than TSMC, and while Intel's 10nm was meant to be ready in... late 2015? it's only now getting into a properly usable state 6 years on. Having gone from 4 companies with good 14nm class nodes to only 1, belatedly 2, with a 7nm class things were always going to get constrained)

ill be honest, i was shocked by those claims, and saw some 770 benchmarks, and ill now modify my original comment,
intel graphics is "meh" at best (still great for quicksync tho..dont get me wrong)

the 5700g iGPU (which is still on vega mind u), is still give or take 2X faster than the UHD 770. it already low key replaces a entry level cheapo graphics card, and when zen 4 hits, with the rdna iGPU, it will just blow all current iGPU/entry gpus out of the water....

and thus, when meteor lake launches, it will at best be on par with what amd would have achieved a year prior (ie 2022), not that im complaining, that could light a fire under amd's ass to keep improving their tech...

in the end, we all win....YAY US!
I am really excited....finally...MY BODY IS READY!!

as long as we win, i aint complaining....
also its raptor lake, not rocket lake, a small typo (lets not ever discuss rocket lake >-< )

not my place to tell, but u might wanna wait for ryzen 8000 and b750/x770 (whatever they end up calling their mobos), IFF they dont offer ddr4 boards for zen 4 and ddr5 prices dont go down by then .

also, im hopeful that theyve learned from the bad pr surrounding b350/x370 support for zen 2/3, and i hope AM5 lives a long life, even the first generation boards.

Oops, thanks! Fixed the typo.