Beginning January 4, 2021, Intel began to discontinue its 300 series chipsets. The company recently published a Product change notification detailing the end-of-life timeline of its chipsets that support the 8th and 9th generation Intel processors and, by the end of January 2022, the chipsets will be the history of silicon. The 2020 launch of Intel’s 10th generation CPUs and 400 series chipsets already predicted the retirement of the 300 series, but it is now official.
The last date anyone can place an order for 300 series motherboards is July 23, 2021, with the final shipping date being January 28, 2022. This affects the consumer desktop chipsets Z390, Z370, H370 , B365, B360, H310C and H310D, and the QMS380 consumer mobile chipset, which is based on an now old motherboard socket, the LGA 1151. (The Q370 chipset was not listed, but it is a business-oriented chipset that supports vPro versions of Intel 8th and 9th generation processors.)
From a production standpoint, this makes sense. Intel and other technology companies are having trouble getting the production resources they need to keep up with demand. CPUs, GPUs and other components have been or are still affected – and with Intel trying to catch up with AMD in support of PCIe 4.0, I can understand why it wants to focus on the latest improvements and be more innovative in its production approach. The 400 series chipsets are based on the new LGA 1200 socket, which supports the PCIe 4.0 standard that Intel plans to incorporate into its 11th generation desktop processors.
But it makes things complicated for consumers who want to stay with Intel. I have wrote about it before, but chipset compatibility is one of the biggest things AMD has about Intel at the moment. Depending on the CPU, AMD processors (not APU) run on several generations of motherboards. The Ryzen 2000 series works with 300, 400 and 500 series chipsets, and both Ryzen 3000 and The 5000 series works with 400 and 500 series chipsets. It is also worth noting that Ryzen 3000 APUs from AMD work with 300, 400 and 500 series chipsets.
Some earlier rumors pointed to AMD’s launch of a 600 series chipset before the end of 2020, but that obviously hasn’t happened – and I’ll be surprised if AMD announces a new chipset at CES. 500 series motherboards support PCIe 4.0 and have AMD’s Smart Access Memory (SAM) built into the BIOS level to work with the new Radeon graphics cards. (SAM is not owned by AMD, however. Nvidia is currently working on a similar update for your RTX 30 series cards.)
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At the hardware level, there doesn’t seem to be a reason for AMD to launch a new chipset yet. AMD kept its promise to support socket AM4 until 2020 and it looks like it will continue to do so until 2021, as motherboard manufacturers are still releasing BIOS updates to make 400 series motherboards work with 5000 series processors. AMD’s upcoming chipset releases could have an entirely new socket, which wouldn’t be too bad considering how many generations of CPU have remained in the AM4 – and it has not announced any end-of-life plans for its chipsets.
In contrast, Intel has been launching a new chipset and / or socket every one or two generations. In the case of 7th and 8th generation CPUs, the company released an update to its LGA 1151 socket that made version 2 incompatible with 7th and 6th generation processors, so anyone upgrading to a Core i-8000-whatever at the time needed to get a new motherboard. That was near the end of 2017 and early 2018, depending on when exactly each processor was released.
In 2020, Intel released socket 1200 that would require anyone interested in upgrading from a 9th or earlier generation CPU to purchase a new motherboard. Not only that, Intel discontinued its 8th generation CPUs in June 2020. And although AMD has discontinued its Ryzen 1000 and Ryzen 2000 at this point (or rather, I am assuming that it has discontinued the 2000 series, as there is no longer an option to purchase any of these CPUs directly from AMD on its site), if you still have one of these chips, you can easily find a motherboard that works with them.
Intel CPUs, sockets and chipsets have not been transferred from generation to generation in the same way that AMD designed its products – and now that Intel has started the EOL process for its 300 series chipsets, consumers and laptop manufacturers forced to adopt, minimum, 10th generation Intel processors until July 2021, which means lovely budget laptops like Acer Nitro 5 with a 9th generation processor it may soon be more difficult to find or it may become virtually non-existent. Intel has not launched any EOL plans for its 9th generation CPUs, or even its LGA 1151 socket, but the 300 series chipsets were the last to have socket 1151 – and socket 1151 is required for a 9th generation processor. When you pair the end of the 300 series with 8th generation Intel CPUs being discontinued … this could be the last step before Intel decides to discontinue its socket 1151 and 9th generation CPUs forever.
If you’re a DIY-er PC, planning to upgrade your PC just got a little more difficult. At this point, if you are still trying to find a 9th generation CPU, it is best to wait at least until after CES, when Intel is likely to reveal more information about its 11th generation processors.