In fact, there have been rumors a long time ago that AMD’s X670 motherboard will use a dual-chip design. But there are actually many forms of dual chips, and there are also various speculations within the industry. Now MSI has disassembled the FCH radiator on the PRO X670-P WIFI motherboard in the
MSI Insider live broadcast. It seems that AMD has chosen the most space-consuming and cost-effective method.
After removing the radiator, we can see that two chips are placed one above the other in the original FCH position. However, this is not the previous north-south bridge design, because the north bridge is the IOD inside the CPU, and these two are south bridge chips. However, even if two chips do not need to use active heat dissipation like the X570, MSI’s PRO X670-P WIFI motherboard has a very short heat pipe hidden under it so that the heat of the two chips is evenly distributed on the aluminum heat sink.
As for how the CPU and these two south bridges are connected, judging from the AM5 platform topology map leaked a long time ago, the AM5 processor has only 4 PCI-E 4.0 buses for connecting to the chipset. So basically there is only this method of connecting two chips in series, that is, the IOD is directly connected to one of the FCHs, and then the FCH is connected to the other FCH.
AMD’s approach is completely different from Intel’s. Intel first makes a complete PCH and then shields some functions of this PCH to subdivide it into different grades of products. AMD made the small FCH first this time and stacked two FCH directly on the high-end motherboard. Of course, NVIDIA has already done this kind of thing.
It is not known how many PCI-E, USB, and SATA ports the X670 can provide. It is certain that the Ryzen 7000 processor can provide 24 PCI-E 5.0 buses.