Expected is nice but I am looking for official commitment from AMD not just an expectation.
You see Steve here while otherwise very fair in this piece is actually in my opinion, making light of the "small hiccup" with AMD almost dropping backwards compatibility for Ryzen chips.
Then this is Lisa's statement:
So instead of what I would expect in terms of AMD giving us assurance they will support the platform all the way through to confirm by implication that they won't have these 'technical hiccups' where they were basically bullied by press and supporters into supporting the earlier chipsets, now we have an extremely soft and non-committed statement telling us the opposite "Sure we'll make sure to support the platform for a while, but we won't actually make it spec for partners to put large enough UEFI to support many large updates so if they run into space limitations like we did in AM4 this time I did not promise support so you'll just have to buy a new motherboard"
Sorry but I don't want this thread to be just a big old rainbow and flower orgy praising AMD: they're not perfect just because they're better than intel and they won't ever be unless the press and the users demand a more firm commitment than "You should expect..."
Valid points indeed, and their attempt at locking out budget Ryzen boards from 5xxx support was indeed some sketchy b.s. which I even disagreed with, the staggered support of what would work with what CPU on what chipset board also had me raising eyebrows at them.
Sure, they caved, but only after so much pressure due to the platform doing well, so agreed there...while they do put up a front of 'consumer first' they're obviously still a business and making bucks is their ultimate goal.
I'm just not one to tend to go out an build a new system every 2 or 3 years. Hell, I rode my Athelon II x3 CPU out for over 10 years, well into Ryzens first generation before finally upgrading to the r5 2600 build.
Suppose there's nothing stopping me from going Intel in that case, but having the option to just swap out a CPU after 3 or 4 years for a performance gain over building an entire new machine is the enticement I need to keep me with them.
If I were chasing pure performance and had the ability to afford to do so with a new build for whatever the top performing CPU at the time is, yeah I'd swap back and forth between the two vendors. I can't afford that luxury (just my current build alone was quite a long time of saving for it all, thanks GPU prices), so the option for 'budget friendly' longevity outweighs having to have the absolute in performance for me.
But yes, even with Ryzen it hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows for AMD users, thankfully it's still been a far better ride than the FX line ended up being (I feel for my friend still using his).