The Z490 chipset was popping up on various benchmark websites earlier this year hinting that AMD will soon be rolling out the chipset in the market. However, turns out AMD has canceled/killed the Z490 Chipset altogether.
Various motherboard manufacturers confirmed to Hardwareluxx that AMD killed the Z490 Chipset just a few days before the Computex 2018.
While the reason for killing off the Z490 Chipset hasn’t been confirmed by AMD or any motherboard manufacturer but reportedly AMD canceled it due to its high cost.
The Z490 was to feature more PCI-E lanes compared to the X470 and to achieve that AMD intended to integrate PEX chip on the motherboard featuring the Z490 chipset. However, this very act would have driven up the cost of the motherboard and this is probably the reason why AMD killed it.
According to leaked documents, the Z490 Chipset was not much different from the AMD’s flagship X470 chipset except for the PCIe lanes as the Z490 featured 4 additional PCIe 3.0 lanes which is something that would have benefited those who like to use multiple GPUs.
Speaking of AMD, the company has confirmed that it is skipping the 12 nm Zen+ architecture and is going with 7 nm Zen2 architecture for its 2nd-gen AMD EPYC CPUs.
AMD noted that has the 7nm silicon ready in the lab to be used for the 2nd-gen EPYC CPUs and will begin sampling it in the second half of 2018 and these 2nd-gen AMD EPYC CPUs will start to roll out into the market in 2019.
Not only that, AMD has also announced the 32 cores/64 threads 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen Threadripper which will be based on the 12 nm process.
Aside from featuring 32 cores and 64 threads, these Ryzen Threadripper CPUs will be compatible with the already existing TR4 socket on X399 motherboards.
What do you think of AMD killing off its Z490 chipset? Let us know in the comments below.
