The X570 chipset is AMD's flagship offering for motherboard vendors this year and is a completely PCIe Gen4 platform. The Ryzen 3000 processors already house necessary controllers such as PCIe x16, SATA, USB 3, audio, SPI, etc. on die so the X570 is relatively free to offer the maximum bandwidth for peripheral connections such as additional USB 3.1 Gen2, Wi-Fi 6, 10 Gb LAN, and SATA. As a result, we find OEMs endowing their high-end offerings with considerably high numbers of USB Gen2 ports and headers. The X570 chipset communicates to the CPU via a PCIe Gen4 x4 connection.

Several OEMs have started issuing BIOS updates for PCIe Gen4 support on the PCIe x16 slot closest to the CPU for X470 and B450 motherboards as well. This means if you pair a new Ryzen 3000 processor with the above last-gen chipsets after a corresponding BIOS update, you should be able to get PCIe Gen4 support from the CPU at least. The new X570 chipsets come with 40 native PCIe Gen4 lanes (CPU + chipset) that promise 2x the bandwidth of PCIe Gen3 (up to 32 GB/s per x16 slot). There are currently no consumer GPUs that can harness this potential, but future-proofing is always a good thing.

Storage is a key benefactor of the move to Gen4. Phison has already announced the first Gen4 NVMe 1.3 controllers and we are seeing many PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs at Computex 2019 already hitting 5 GB/s read speeds.

In case you were wondering, there is no Thunderbolt 3 support on X570 likely due to higher costs and supposed difficulty in certification process with Intel that requires sharing CPU microcode.



Also, unlike before, AMD is developing the new chipsets in-house by licensing appropriate technology instead of outsourcing them to ASMedia as was the case with the X370 and the X470.