Why do I bring this up?

Well, to put it simply: It means that the chipset barely serves a purpose. On Zen 1, Zen , and Zen 2, here's what the chipset did, on the user's side:

• 1. Add additional USB 3.1 ports
• 2. Add additional SATA ports.
• 3. Work as a relay to boost the signal of PCIe 4 (Zen 2 only).
• 4. Give a user interface to change CPU settings.

After POSTing, if you are not using these USB ports or the SATA ports, the chipset is doing nothing. All the chipset would need to do to allow a Zen 3 processor to work is to let it POST. It actually takes more work to have the chipset test the CPU to see if the chipset is the right one before it can let the CPU work. Hell, the IO die is reused as a chipset, showing that the chipset is built directly into Zen 2 from the start. (Edit: Also, there's A300. It's a chipset defined by the lack of a chipset, letting the CPU do everything on its own, guided only by a ROM for POST. It never went anywhere except in the deskmini, but then again you could consider every AMD APU laptop to be running A300.)

"What about the issues Zen 2 had?"

The issues Zen 2 had on launch were incorrect boosting, and crashing on certain games. However, this was an issue across every single board and chipset.

In summary: Every Zen processor is an SoC, and has a direct connection to PCIe, RAM, SATA, USB, and even 10Gbit ethernet. All AMD has to do is put the CPU on a whitelist in an AGESA update, and it would work across every motherboard because every motherboard lets the CPU connect directly to every one of the vital components.

There is no excuse for AMD. The chipset is nothing but a PCIe expansion device, and as a PCIe device it has the exact same information exchange protocol as every other PCIe device. All it has to do is let the CPU POST, and they've got that figured out by virtue of the AM4 socket having the exact same electrical connections from one chipset to the other.

Edit: There's also a discussion about BIOS chip size, and the response to that can be boiled down to:

• What about 32MiB chips? Why are they being blocked?

• Why not just remove the fancy GUI for the BIOS, so that you get back 90% of the ROM space? Make it as bare-bones as a laptop BIOS, or the BIOS of yesteryear. Only what you want, nothing more.

• Why not drop support for older CPU's when the user upgrades from their old CPU, and make it an update only offered online through downloads? The issue is that that people at home looking for an upgrade are locked out, not that you won't be able to buy a brand new A320 and expect it to work with Zen 3 out of the box.

Edit Again: /u/FewMail said it best.

Edit 3: It's 6:00AM, and I leave you all with this thread. I've been up all night trying to make sure that this post got off the ground, and I feel like this is the most important thread of the discussion so far.