3 ms·

I’ve actually worked with Ryzen SoCs myself (I do board design). This is the problem with all the marketing BS. When I talked about “top clocks”, I wasn’t refe

I’ve actually worked with Ryzen SoCs myself (I do board design). This is the problem with all the marketing BS. When I talked about “top clocks”, I wasn’t referring about “boost” clocks. I’m talking of the clocks that the SoC is designed for (that won’t appear on the box), i.e. a lot of laptops are not leaving “performance gaps” due to bad cooling, those SoCs are designed for that level of performance and attaching a fat copper heatsink won’t do much difference. I had a lot of trouble with a client that complained that our board was not properly designed because the performance they were seeing was not “as advertised”. In the end we had to ship the whole thing to AMD, and have them test the system with a thermal sink. Everything was as expected. If anyone is interested in this kind of stuff, your explanation is really good, so I won’t add anything because I’d probably do a terrible job :)

lhl 6y ago
I agree that there's a lot of misunderstanding on clocks - I've been on the other end - evaluation and validation of embedded boards, including V1000 Ryzen SoCs, but I think I'd disagree somewhat with the characterization of clocks as purely "marketing BS." Back in the day, most CPUs had had a fixed clock, but these days modern Intel and AMD chips simply don't - they all clock opportunistically, which depends on powers, thermals, but also workload (try running an AVX-512 loads for example). How do you characterize "clock" in this context? Base (minimum) and Boost (hard limit, now split to Max Turbo <2C and All Boost MC) seem to be reasonably sensible numbers. Now we can argue semantics all day, but to bring it back around if you're just going to say "top clocks" is what the SoC was designed for at a specific workload/power envelope (In AMD's PB, that'd be PPT, TDC, and EDC) then every laptops will "hit their top clocks with no issues," but I'd say that argument (statement?) is a bit circular/pointless. ;P

lhl 6y ago

I agree that there's a lot of misunderstanding on clocks - I've been on the other end - evaluation and validation of embedded boards, including V1000 Ryzen SoCs, but I think I'd disagree somewhat with the characterization of clocks as purely "marketing BS." Back in the day, most CPUs had had a fixed clock, but these days modern Intel and AMD chips simply don't - they all clock opportunistically, which depends on powers, thermals, but also workload (try running an AVX-512 loads for example). How do you characterize "clock" in this context? Base (minimum) and Boost (hard limit, now split to Max Turbo <2C and All Boost MC) seem to be reasonably sensible numbers. Now we can argue semantics all day, but to bring it back around if you're just going to say "top clocks" is what the SoC was designed for at a specific workload/power envelope (In AMD's PB, that'd be PPT, TDC, and EDC) then every laptops will "hit their top clocks with no issues," but I'd say that argument (statement?) is a bit circular/pointless. ;P