Smart Access Memory available for Ryzen 1st gen?

ASUS seems to have enabled AMD Smart Access Memory on first generation Ryzen processors on a B450 motherboard, at least that’s what one user on Reddit seems to want to demonstrate. He has published images showing not only that the technology works with his motherboard and 1700 processor, but he has also published figures on the performance achieved.

The Smart Access Memory with a Ryzen 1700?

For the record, AMD was the first to offer support for this feature on its 500-series motherboards coupled with a Zen 3 processor, but card manufacturers quickly extended support to AMD 400-series motherboards and also to Intel’s 400-series. The potential gain in performance using this technology can range from 3 to 15% on average, depending on the situation. There were recent rumors that older generation AMD processors could not enable SAM support due to a lack of full speed PDEP instructions. However, after digging and digging around the subject, Dr Ian Cutress of Anandtech received a response from AMD saying that PDEP is not the limiting parameter for enabling or disabling SAM technology.

Got a response from AMD about PDEP and SAM:

'Smart Access Memory does not depend on the performance of the PDEP instruction.'

The speculation about accelerated PDEP on Zen3 being a factor seems to not be the case.

— 𝐷𝑟. 𝐼𝑎𝑛 𝐶𝑢𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑠𝑠 (@IanCutress) December 11, 2020

So it seems that the SAM will be activatable with any Ryzen on 400 and 500 series motherboards.

No miracle with an “old graphics card

However, the performances published by this user are not really convincing since no real gain is observed. It should be noted that the graphics card used here is an RX 580. It is likely that if the user had used a Radeon RX 6000 graphics card, he would have been able to see an improvement in performance with his Ryzen 1700 / B450 platform. While AMD is not expected to add full support for GPUs that are not part of its Radeon RX 6000 family (as is the case with NVIDIA’s RTX 30 series), it seems certain that owners of a Ryzen gen 1 or 2 and 400 series motherboard can still get the same performance boost that a high-end platform offers today.