Completely disagree. Keep in mind, I've only been in the game for 2 months. I've been an Intel user for the past 10 years. And have only recently switched (haven't built my system yet). But I've done a lot of catching up in the last 2 months, it's almost been like a full time job in terms of the catching up on so many things that have changed (like M2 drives), but I feel like I have a pretty good finger on the pulse at the moment. It's all become pretty predictable in the last few weeks and there's been nothing shocking since the release on July 7. Except for maybe the performance of the bang for buck CPU's (3600, 3700X) when it comes to the CPU's they are competing with and how little their power consumption is. The 3800X appears like it will be useless and the 3900X is powerful yet pretty decent in terms of power consumption.
Based on everything I've seen (and it's been so much, but I could quote charts or whatever if I needed to).. the AMD roadmap is..
Zen (1000 series, 12nm, X370), Zen+ (2000 series, 12nm+, X470), Zen 2 (3000 series, 7nm, X570), Zen 2+ (4000 series, 7nm+, X670) and then that will be the end of the AM4 platform. The end of DDR4 memory support. If this occurs in this way, it falls inline with AMD saying they will support AM4 until 2020.
And then the 5nm processors will start the following year with AM5 platform, DDR5 memory etc. I assume it will be called the 5000 series but who knows. These things are subject to change.. but for now it seems if one is to guess, it's as good as any. I guess there's a chance they skip 7nm+, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that, where as there's been charts that do indicate that they are doing that. If it occurs this way, the 4000 series will be the ones to hold on to long term, because they'll hold their value on the used market the best, since they'll be the most powerful/efficient CPU's for AM4.
In terms of the VRM, I don't think there's anything controversial or risky. These processors are using even less power than expected. I was very worried about this a few weeks ago, I even bought some expensive thermal pads.. but if anything it's gone the other way. The 7nm node means that power consumption is reduced.. the clock speeds are less than expected, and the overclocking is extremely poor. It's pretty much a max overclock straight out of the box, and the power consumption isn't even very high. The 3900X is using the same power (or slightly less) as 2700X despite 4 more cores. Good for those with cheaper motherboards, bad for those chasing Intel higher clock speeds. Lower end cheap junky boards should be careful with 12 or 16 core parts, but 8 and 6 core parts are fine with pretty much any board (except the very cheapest but even those DO work). The chart lays it out perfectly in terms of colour codes, and if anything is actually a bit on the conservative side. The person who made that chart, their info correlates with what I had discovered in my own independent research.
The chipset is pretty irrelevant in terms of memory speeds. The chipset is more to due with Sata, USB etc. The memory is all about the CPU itself since it's related to the onboard memory controller. The IMC paired with the microcode that the BIOS is running. The 3000 series CPU has a big IMC improvement, and can handle 3200-3600 easily, regardless of whether it's X370 or B450 or X570. There is minimal performance gain going from X370 to X570. Maybe 3-5% at best. Sometimes the older chipset is actually faster in certain situations. There still needs to be verification of this, in the real world with lots of different board makers but these are the early indications. This was also the trend of X370 vs X470. There's teething problems with BIOS right now but those will be ironed out regardless of whether you are using X370, X470 or X570. All are struggling with bugs right now, but all will be ironed out in a few months, the same way they were on 1000 and 2000 series CPU's.
It's a good point mentioning the space of the flash ROM of the BIOS. It is definitely an issue and a lot of motherboard makers messed up (by accident, or deliberately to entice people to always buy the latest thing). Believe it or not, there's even some X570 boards that use 16MB BIOS capacity. What excuse can there be for that? It's a $1 part vs a $2 part, and since it was made during this year, they can't say they weren't aware of it. The X370 Asus Crosshair board I mentioned has this problem and I suspect Asrock Taichi X370 does as well. The X370 Taichi also has a problem of lower memory speeds that can't be fixed due to trace layout on the PCB. But it will work, as long as you don't buy super expensive RAM thinking you'll get high speeds. It also has the best VRM of any X370 board. The X470 Asus Crosshair board has 32MB BIOS and solves this problem. But the motherboard makers are working around this problem of limited BIOS capacity and 16MB BIOS will still work. They are trimming down the BIOS (MSI even made a Lite version that has an uglier UI). Some boards are losing RAID support, and also losing support from the very old CPU's. But if you don't use RAID and if you're looking at running a 2000 or 3000 series CPU, you won't be affected. It's an unfortunate situation and they are having to work to trim out the bloat.. but the motherboard will still be usable. It's just more work on the BIOS makers in order to squeeze things in and make them fit.
This has all been a hypothetical for me in the last month, I've watched a lot of Buildzoid videos trying to figure out how all of this works. But now since July 7, there's starting to be some real world examples and testing. We are in the habit of Intel for the last 10 years, and needing new motherboards every 2 years, but AMD is breaking that trend. And the consumer is benefiting from it. It's just a shame that the motherboard makers couldn't have thought things through a bit better. On X370 boards Gigabyte and MSI really cheaped out on VRMs. Pretty much all of them cheaped out on the BIOS ROM because they aren't used to trying to fit so many versions of CPUs on one BIOS. But just in the last 24 hours I've seen some videos running the 3700X on the cheapest A320 boards, and they do work. The 3600 could pretty much run on anything. A B450 Tomohawk is the recommendation a lot of people are doing for bang for buck plus solid performance. But for a high end board, it seems ASUS Crosshair VI (X370), most of the X470 boards, or any of the X570 boards will work, but the X570 boards are ridiculously over engineered and super expensive. The chipset fan doesn't work well either, except on the MSI boards. Because it's starved of airflow due to the GPU sitting right above it. And that's without factoring in dust that might accumulate in future years. It runs 10 degrees hotter and a lot louder, due to it's positioning and cramping of space. Some of them are vibrating and making wierd noises already after 2 days. The MSI one seems to be ok.
VRM's aren't really an issue like I thought they would be. Even on the X370 ASUS Crosshair.. it can handle 300A, but it's sweet spot is 200A for peak efficiency and the 3900X is only approaching 140A at peak load. At 220W.. the VRM is only running at 45-50C and that's with a water cooler without airflow. If you have an aircooler, the VRM's are further cooled. And the VRM's on that board aren't affected by temperature (temps don't affect their performance). It's just that if they run too hot, the heat puts extra stress on the capicitors nearby and can reduce their life. And for me, I always want a high end board to last at least 5 years.. preferably 10 years (as a hand me down to someone else). So temps are very important to me.. not for overclocking or bragging rights, but just to run cool and quiet and be reliable. That's why I always try to recommend to people to try and get the highest end board you can... because all of the minor components are usually of higher quality. I would also recommend ASUS in terms of BIOS, but it seems with Ryzen there is always complaints about the BIOS regardless of which board maker you chose. A BIOS update will fix one thing and break something else, and then 3 revisions later, it's finally smooth in all areas. Apparently Asrock is the worst for BIOS. But I do think there is a benefit in a high end X370 or X470 compared to a B350 or B450 board for example. If you want to blow out the caps/VRM after 2 years and throw it away, buy the cheapest you can find. But for me personally, I'm avoiding X570 like the plague, there's no way that chipset fan lasts 5-10 years inside of a warm dusty PC. If there's a X670 maybe it can be better, maybe they can relearn how to cool a 15W chip without needing a fan. But if they keep their current trend, it'll have 600A VRM and will have 3 chipset fans.