We could soon see AMD launch its 400-series chipset close to Ryzen 2000's launch early next year. Existing 300-series boards will, however, continue to be compatible with the next generation Ryzen CPUs.

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AMD's 400-series chipset has been spotted in a PCI-SIG listing implying that new motherboards featuring the chipset could be on track for an early 2018 launch around the time when AMD would unveil the successor to the current Zen1 CPUs — the Zen+/Ryzen 2000. Although the PCI-SIG listing does not list specific product variants, going by the current 300-series 'Summit Ridge' chipsets, we could very well expect AMD's partners to unveil X470, B450, and A420 boards.

One thing to note here is that the current 300-series chipset boards will continue to support the upcoming Zen+ CPUs, which will be based on the 12nm process. Also, the listing confirms a full PCIe 3.0 specification support, which is welcomed. Although Zen1 has support for PCIe 3.0 lanes from the CPU, the 300-series chipset's Southbridge supported only PCIe 2.0 speeds.

We have also reported earlier that the upcoming 'Pinnacle Ridge' Zen+ chips will be an incremental iteration to the existing Zen CPUs. The Zen2 chips, which are slated to make their debut sometime in 2019, will be the ones that will offer substantial improvements to the Zen/Zen+ CPUs in terms of increased IPCs and higher clock speeds.

The Ryzen CPU platform turned out to be a great success story for AMD in 2017. Desktop Ryzen chips based on the Zen architecture met with much enthusiasm and didn't disappoint in terms of performance. Mobile Ryzen also performed admirably when compared to Intel's offerings. It will be surely interesting to see what Zen+ brings to the table in 2018.