If one of the reasons you were concerned about buying an AMD Ryzen CPU and motherboard was because you thought the platform might not last long, don't fear. AMD has now confirmed that not only will the upcoming refresh of its Ryzen CPUs be supported by existing AM4 motherboards, but that the planned 2018/2019 release of Zen 2 hardware will also be supported by it.
Confirmed by AMD senior product manager, James Prior in a chat with Overclockers UK, this news will be a boon to existing AMD Ryzen owners and a very good reason to invest in the platform for your next upgrade. Although there will be reasons to upgrade your motherboard over the next few years, AMD is effectively stating you won't have to do so until sometime in 2020 and you'll be able to upgrade your processor over the years.
Those CPU upgrades will be worth it too, we're told. Although Ryzen upped the ante in terms of multicore support and even got close to competing with Intel on the single threaded and low-core-count games and other softrware, the Zen refresh and Zen 2 will bring in better execution of existing commands, more energy efficieny and better per-core performance in the years to come.
By 2020, AMD plans to be introducing regular performance-per-watt gains, further improving efficiency and power across the range of Zen hardware.
Considering we've seen what it can do with Threadripper hardware, that bodes very well for AMD fans in the future.