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AMD Ryzen 9 5980HS Cezanne Review: Ryzen 5000 Mobile Tested

143 points by pella 6y ago

Guthur 6y ago
I know there must be some reason but I can't put my finger on why AMD are continuing to use Vega for their Mobile/APU range. Vega seems decent within the power range but I would have assumed Navi was more than mature enough for it now; potentially it's just economics and any performance upside for a Navi GP is not worth the extra cost.
- spqr0a1 6y ago
  iGPU performance is currently limited by memory bandwidth. Not much point in upgrading from Vega until DDR5 is used.
  - tumblewit 6y ago
    Also in the article it is clearly mentioned that time to market using vega was much shorter than reinventing the wheel which was important i'm guessing since AMD is still small compared to intel in mobile space and they have struggled in the past in this segment.
    - Guthur 6y ago
      Yes, though I'm pretty sure the same rationale was used for the 4000 series APUs as well. I have a feeling that the particular market these chips are aimed at that improving the iGPU by even something like 50% is not that meaningful, it's still not going to be competitive with discrete and will nearly always be pair with one if gaming is an option on the particular laptop. And so I suppose the rationale might be that it's just easier to stick with Vega and the current power draw for the iGPU as acceptable for the required graphics horsepower. Maybe one day we'll see an APU powerful enough to remove the need for discrete GPU in laptops, not for awhile yet though :).
  - paulmd 6y ago
    Navi improves delta compression for memory, which improves effective memory bandwidth for a given "raw" bandwidth. So switching to Navi would have alleviated the memory bandwidth bottleneck to some degree and improved performance. It is a puzzling decision and perhaps the "wasn't ready when they taped out" explanation is the correct one. Cezanne seems to have been ready for a while now and just waiting for fab capacity - meaning it would have had to have been taped out in parallel with the RDNA2 architecture chips. So a design flaw in RDNA2 might have blown the Cezanne launch. They could have used RDNA1 though and it still would have improved compression over GCN/Vega. Or ported over just the delta compression. I guess maybe they just wanted to port Zen3 over straight, use the memory controller they'd already proven with Renoir, and not take any risks? It's definitely puzzling and I haven't heard an explanation I would consider 100% satisfactory.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    How can that be true when DDR5 is only 2x as fast as DDR4 and even a low end dGPU vastly outperforms an iGPU?
    - ben-schaaf 6y ago
      Unlike DDR, GDDR is optimised for high-bandwidth (over latency), which is why dedicated GPUs can be so much faster. HBM even more so. DDR5 does 6.4Gbps, whereas HBM2E does 2.5Tbps (per stack).
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    Memory bandwidth is but one aspect of GPU performance, and also memory bandwidth is substantially upgraded in this APU. It has support for LPDDR4X-4267 68.2 GB/s, up from DDR4 3200's 51.2 GB/s. But the Vega 8 in this is definitely not the peak that you can squeeze out of DDR4. If that was the case then we wouldn't have had things like the Vega 11 in the 3400G. Also RDNA2's "Infinity Cache" helps reduce memory bandwidth requirements, which would also be a relevant upgrade. This was just a time-to-market strategy to reduce risk. Not an optimal engineering decision. This let them avoid trying to make a power-optimized version of RDNA2 at the same time they were trying to release any version of RDNA2.
  - fulafel 6y ago
    Citation needed. Doesn't seem to be borne out by benchmarks comparing chips with varying iGPU resources and same memory setup. Sure, they're going to be meomry bound some of the time, and it depends on what kind of bw/compute balance the GPU code is tuned for... but we didn't stop putting more cores and wider SIMD on chips either just because then current SW didn't fully utilize them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- toast0 6y ago
  memory bandwidth as spqr0a1 said is probably a good reason, but also, the design pipeline probably made it hard to do Zen2 with Navi. Both of those came out in 2019; if Navi had gotten delayed, it would have delayed Renoir as well. Now for the Zen3 APUs, AMD is emphasizing pin for pin compatibility; possibly switching the GPU would have needed different pins; or they just wanted to make sure they got Zen 3 APUs out quickly to keep making inroads into the laptop market. There's a leaked AMD roadmap floating around that has a Van Gogh chip with Zen2 + Navi coming out sometime this year. But that roadmap didn't show the Lucienne Zen2 + Vega chips AMD recently announced (Ryzen 5{3,5,7}00U} to ensure model numbers stay confusing.
- shmerl 6y ago
  Especially since they are already using RDNA 2 in console APUs.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    Console APUs don't need to be particularly power-optimized. If the RDNA 2 GPU in the PS5 can't idle below 10w, nobody will care. If the RDNA 2 GPU in your laptop can't idle below 10w, that's unshippable. A decent laptop doesn't draw 10w total at idle including screen & all that.
    - shmerl 6y ago
      Well, they are working with Samsung to put some generation of RDNA in their Exynos chips. So surely they should care about power efficiency.
      - kllrnohj 6y ago
        And I'm sure at some point there will be an RDNA-something APU from AMD, too, but there also isn't any existing power-optimized RDNA cores sitting around either to point at and just be like "but why didn't you use that instead?"
- hmottestad 6y ago
  The article touches on this. Anandtech assumes that it's because it was faster to go to market with Vega. Something about the modular design of the chip. They also mentioned that AMD would likely upgrade the GPU in a next version, without upgrading the CPU. Maybe a minor mhz bump of the CPU together with a new GPU.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  It seems to be strategic. A few helpful excerpts from different parts of the article (the rest of each paragraph is also useful): > Users may be upset that the new processor range only features Vega 8 graphics, the same as last year’s design, however part of the silicon re-use comes in here enabling AMD to come to market in a timely manner. > As mentioned on the previous page, one of the criticisms leveled at this new generation of processors is that we again get Vega 8 integrated graphics, rather than something RDNA based. The main reason for this is AMD’s re-use of design in order to enable a faster time-to-market with Zen 3. The previous generation Renoir design with Zen 2 and Vega 8 was built in conjunction with Cezanne to the point that the first samples of Cezanne were back from the fab only two months after Renoir was launched. > With AMD’s recent supply issues as well, we’re of the opinion that AMD has been stockpiling these Ryzen 5000 Mobile processors in order to enable a strong Q1 and Q2 launch of the platform with stock for all OEMs.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  Cranking up the APU horsepower when ddr4 ram can't throw enough data at it doesn't do you much good.
- fulafel 6y ago
  One reason for depriorizing it might be that they realized iGPU performance isn't as relevant as they hoped in recent history. AMD spent years betting heavily on concepts like the APU, HSA, tight coupling with coherent virtual memory access from GPU and CPU side etc. They tried to do a "build it and they will come" but the software didn't come and Intel ate their lunch with low effort iGPUs. Advances of GPU programming slowed industry wide, especially software & dev experience / programming language wise, and the GPU world remained far from CPU programming productivity. (And you can still get 2 orders of magnitude of parallelism staying on the CPU, from SIMD, multicore and SMT). They learned their lesson, and this time around came back with a product that can beat Intel in their own game.
deleted 6y ago
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fsiefken 6y ago
Would it run SteamVR games at 20 fps and decent resolution I wonder?
- taspeotis 6y ago
  ASUS has the Zypherus which pairs up one of these with a mobile 3080 so ... it should play them at 90 FPS which is fine for a VR headset.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  You're almost certainly going to find this paired with something like an RTX 3060 maxQ in a bunch of laptops (similar to last year's Zephyrus G14) which would be a much better option for SteamVR or any gaming. VR at 20 fps is going to be nauseating to say the least. Reprojection helps, but not that much. For example Oculus won't let your game into the store at all unless the minimum spec system can sustain 45 FPS, and the recommended must be 90 FPS.
- LegitShady 6y ago
  >SteamVR games at 20 fps I'm curious what you're doing that 20fps is a minimum target
  - fsiefken 6y ago
    playing neanderthal or gaia project solo in tabletop simulator.. 20 fps is the bare minimum I can imagine myself playing it with
algorithm314 6y ago
And still no Desktop APU since ZEN+.(Except Renoir which is only for OEMs). Maybe AMD wants you to buy non APU cpus so that you also buy a GPU from them.
- Nursie 6y ago
  If they had any stock available that might be more reasonable!
  - algorithm314 6y ago
    The most probable thing is that APU are low margin products and if they released an 8-core APU like in mobile they would have cannibalized the non APU parts
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago
  If you really want it, you can buy Renoir on AliExpress.
- 3np 6y ago
  I'm sure it's coming. This market timing is frustrating, though. Especially as it gives mobo vendors (looking at you ASROCK) more slack with getting all their BIOS/UEFI of last-gen models up to date to support them, ever.
- paulmd 6y ago
  APUs and GPUs are relatively low-margin for AMD on a per-wafer basis. It takes a lot of silicon to produce a product which sells for a not a lot of money. Consoles exercised options to increase their orders by 50% from the expected amounts during 2020, and reportedly consoles are now consuming up to 80% of AMD's wafer allocation. So they are in a defensive mode to maximize their returns on their remaining wafers. https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21325260/sony-ps5-oculus-stock-orders-manufacturing-increase https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21325260/sony-ps5-oculus-... https://twitter.com/nerdtechgasm/status/1332115920144146432 https://twitter.com/nerdtechgasm/status/1332115920144146432 Monolithic dies need to have IO for memory/etc, which doesn't shrink well on modern nodes, so it consumes a lot of space. The iGPU also consumes a pretty large amount of space. On chiplet based CPUs, all of that is pushed off to a separate, older process which is not in shortage (GloFo 12nm/14nm), so only the CCDs themselves are on 7nm. This is a very efficient way to use silicon compared to the monolithic APU dies. GPUs are not a great situation for AMD either. NVIDIA is using a cheaper, worse process, but as is customary they have much better silicon engineering and have matched AMD's core efficiency despite the worse process - the only real advantage AMD has is that they use less memory which saves them about 30 watts out of a 300W budget. And at the top end they are exceeding their performance, plus they have tensor cores to accelerate DLSS and provide additional performance, plus more raytracing performance. So AMD is paying more for an expensive process and hasn't managed to beat NVIDIA. NVIDIA is essentially forcing AMD to cut their own throats on margins in the GPU segment, if they want to remain competitive. There is very much a reason that AMD is no longer wildly undercutting NVIDIA like they used to and it has nothing to do with mindshare/etc, AMD has been using more expensive technology just to try and stay performance competitive for years now. As such, APUs and GPUs have been the products that get the shit end of the stick. To wit: as far as cutdowns go, a 5600X die is 80mm2, they sell that for $300 MSRP, and they keep most of that for themselves (let's say $50 chip cost/manufacturing/packaging, $50 for retailer/distribution, they make $200 a chip). A 6800 die is 520mm2, the MSRP is $580, and they have a significant BOM cost, and they have to incorporate a profit margin (even if slim, it's not great being an AMD partner). So let's say $100 chip cost/manufacturing/packaging, $300 BOM, $50 for the partner, $50 for the retailer, they make $80 per card. But it uses 6.5 times as much silicon per chip, so they make the equivalent of $12 on this GPU versus $200 on the CPU! It's literally an order of magnitude more profitable to make the chiplets than to make a GPU. Or an APU, Cezanne is 175mm2 for an 8-core die, they can sell that for maybe $50-75 more than the iGPU-less chip, so $350-375. The chip costs them let's say $25 more, so they make $250, but it's 2.2x as big as the chiplet. Just made up numbers pulled out of my ass, but you can see the math heavily disfavors making APUs and GPUs. Which is why AMD has actually been shunting production away from those throughout 2020, it is not a coincidence that they were announced in January and didn't show up until maybe May in actual products, and then you had reports from partners that they were getting their allocated (basically confirmed and accepted) orders pushed back a quarter or more. https://videocardz.com/newz/xmg-facing-serious-amd-ryzen-7-4800h-renoir-cpu-shortage https://videocardz.com/newz/xmg-facing-serious-amd-ryzen-7-4... (this eventually ended up with the orders from August getting pushed back into November if you read the series of threads from XMG) TSMC just doesn't have enough capacity to go around, and right now they are an effective monopoly, people basically pre-write the obituary of products that choose processes that aren't TSMC. And unfortunately the situation is only getting worse this year and next year - there are products that have been waiting for consoles that will immediately soak up all that capacity. Intel is launching GPUs and potentially laptop CPUs (?) on TSMC now. Automakers have been clamoring for more and have had to shut down lines because they can't get enough chips. NVIDIA is reportedly moving a few of their high-end consumer products to TSMC late this year to supplement their Samsung capacity and allow a "refresh" like 3000 Super with higher performance at the top. Apple is moving all of their laptop and desktop products from Intel products (made at Intel foundries) to TSMC, so I expect they will continue to squat the 5nm node for a longer period of time (desktop/laptop will probably stay 5nm and phones/tablets move to 3nm once that's available), and this will echo right down the conga line, products from other brands that would have transitioned to 5nm will be stuck consuming 7nm instead. https://www.techpowerup.com/270355/tsmc-allocation-the-next-battleground-for-intel-amd-and-possibly-nvidia https://www.techpowerup.com/270355/tsmc-allocation-the-next-... https://www.techpowerup.com/273302/nvidia-reportedly-moving-ampere-to-7-nm-tsmc-in-2021 https://www.techpowerup.com/273302/nvidia-reportedly-moving-... https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/12/04/intel-outsource-atom-xeon-processors-to-tsmc/ https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/12/04/intel-outsource-atom-x... https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319301-report-intel-will-outsource-core-i3-production-to-tsmcs-5nm-node https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319301-report-intel-wi... https://www.tweaktown.com/news/74549/intels-next-gen-xe-hpg-gaming-gpu-will-be-made-by-tsmc-on-6nm-in-2021/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/74549/intels-next-gen-xe-hpg-... https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/intel-dg2-gpu-will-be-fabbed-on-latest-tsmc-7nm-fabrication-process.html https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/intel-dg2-gpu-will-be-fabb... https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/13/business/global-chip-shortages-carmakers/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/13/business/global-chip-shortage... https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/18/business/ford-auto-chip-shortage/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/18/business/ford-auto-chip-short... https://www.sourcengine.com/blog/automotive-semiconductor-shortage-continues-through-first-half-2021-01-23 https://www.sourcengine.com/blog/automotive-semiconductor-sh...? Everyone thought it was some snub from TSMC that NVIDIA switched to Samsung, like there is a persistent narrative (which nobody credible will actually get behind) that NVIDIA tried to demand a discount from TSMC and got told to pound sand. It is now very clear that TSMC was not going to be able to deliver the capacity (and certainly not at a price anyone liked) and it's now looking like NVIDIA switching to Samsung was a masterstroke. They've been able to ramp Ampere faster than Pascal (3080 is at the same % marketshare in Steam Hardware Survey as 1080 was at the equivalent point in its lifecycle and the market is >2x as big) and AMD can't get product on shelves. And now NVIDIA can supplement their Samsung capacity with a few higher-performing chips on TSMC at the top of their stack to help broaden their production capacity. It really says it all that AMD hasn't officially launched Milan yet. That's a chiplet-based product (so, good utilization of their wafers) but higher-margin than consumer products. So basically strictly better margins than consumer dies in all respects. But they just can't deliver enough capacity yet to be credible. That is the next thing on AMD's docket, it'll be launching in March. So far hyperscalers have samples and probably small production runs and that's it. Unlike NVIDIA, unlike Intel, AMD has no second-source to run to, it's TSMC or bust (or go back to shitty 12nm/14nm Zen+ chips from GloFo). (which, btw, long story short, is why "only Zen+ APUs on desktop"! those APUs are manufactured at GloFo on an older node and thus do not compete for precious TSMC capacity.) This article is just a marketing teaser to try and divert attention from the Tiger Lake-H launch. AMD had a core count advantage over Tiger Lake-U which they could point to (and which gave them a performance and efficiency advantage in highly-threaded tasks), Tiger Lake was faster per core but AMD had more of them. Well, now Intel has 8 cores coming up in March, and they're still faster cores than Zen2-based Renoir. AMD has been sitting on these Zen3-based Cezanne chips as long as possible so they could preserve their margins on chiplet products, with Tiger Lake-H coming they don't have a choice but to at least flash them around to show what they can do. The APUs launching in March are gonna be a paper launch. Milan is where all their wafers are going in Q2, it's way higher margin and they need to hit that market (especially if they can beat out Ice Lake-SP since they have been making good inroads in server). But they need to show the flag in mobile because Intel is about to surpass Renoir in the mobile-workstation market, not just the ultrabook market. They have to show their successor now and hope to keep people on the hook long enough. It will probably be Q3 if not Q4 before these Cezanne processors show up in any number - there are just too many other companies who booked TSMC's capacity and too many products within AMD that need to go first before APUs. It's no coincidence these articles are showing up 2 months before the launch event. Hardware Unboxed had one too. It's AMD's last chance to try and get benchmarks against 14nm 8-core chips and 10nm 4-core chips that they can make an argument against. This is "look at the shiny, please pay no attention to that Intel product launch that reviewers will have in-hand within a month or so". And Intel laptops have hard-launched to a much greater extent than AMD. I wonder what Sony and MS are paying AMD for console chips to get them to push off Milan and their APUs, it's got to be considerable. Milan probably would have at latest launched alongside Vermeer if not before, so they have delayed it 6+ months. It must have been an absolute pile, Milan is a high-margin high-volume product. tl;dr: fab capacity is fucked, maybe things will be better in 2022
hmottestad 6y ago
For those who didn't notice. ASUS is using Liquid Metal instead of regular paste! It's not mentioned in the article, but you can tell from the header picture. It will be very interesting to see if it will hold after 5 years or if it will "dry up" (eg. amalgamate with the heat sink).
- hosteur 6y ago
  What kind of metal? Mercury?
  - AbacusAvenger 6y ago
    Gallium, Indium, and Tin, I believe.
    - trishmapow2 6y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galinstan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galinstan
  - Strom 6y ago
    ASUS is using Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut. [1][2] The metals it contains are tin, gallium and indium. This is the market leader in liquid metal thermal solutions and in high power desktop uses can reduce the CPU temperature by 20C compared to bog standard solutions, and 10C compared to high end pastes. -- [1] https://www.thermal-grizzly.com/en/products/26-conductonaut-en https://www.thermal-grizzly.com/en/products/26-conductonaut-... [2] https://rog.asus.com/articles/technologies/patented-process-brings-exotic-liquid-metal-thermal-compound-to-new-rog-gaming-laptops/ https://rog.asus.com/articles/technologies/patented-process-...
- ilogik 6y ago
  Sony did the same with the PS5
  - judge2020 6y ago
    And that's a console sold nearly at-cost[0], so it's in Sony's best interest to keep it working for a long time so you keep buying games on it. 0: https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/14/21137615/ps5-cost-price-point-playstation-5 https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/14/21137615/ps5-cost-price-po...
guerby 6y ago
Interesting that when limited at 15W on geekbench multithread this ryzen 9 5980HS is faster than Apple M1 (and even faster at 35W), but below in single thread.
- top_sigrid 6y ago
  Well several things. The M1 does not have 8 equally performant cores. The M1 has only 4 of those who are faster in single core performance. Also it performs at 10W, not at 15W and does so without a fan (in the case of the MacBook Air). Hence I don't know if your comparison makes sense.
  - merdadicapra 6y ago
    > Also it performs at 10W, not at 15W and does so without a fan (in the case of the MacBook Air The comparison is with a Mac Mini that uses a fan. 15W is not far from 10W, considering Ryzen are still 7nm IMO even 35W is not much at all, for 18 hours on battery and that kind of performances (especially the multi core). The difference is negligible for users, assuming 8 hours a day for 365 days straight the 15W APU would consume 15KW more, in Italy it would cost about one euro more.
  - kllrnohj 6y ago
    In this case the 15w was actual measured power draw not made up marketing numbers (actual measurement was 12W though I assume Anandtech opted to round up there in the other slides). The M1's actual multicore power draw is more like 20W, at least in the Mac mini being compared against here.
- hu3 6y ago
  And that's with 7nm. Still faster than desktop mac mini M1 despite both having fans and AMD having to deal with x86 cruft. I can wait to get my hands on one of these speed demons for my compilation workloads.
- ksec 6y ago
  Few things. 1. M1 in Mac Mini is estimated to be 20W to 25W. 2. M1 is 4 Performance Core + 4 Efficient Core. Compared to 8 Performance Core in Ryzen 3. Ryzen is 8 Core 16 Thread. M1 is 8 Thread. 4. Worth mentioning again, M1 is on 5nm, Ryzen is on 7nm.
holtalanm 6y ago
honestly, this would make a kickass mobile dev machine, imo.
neogodless 6y ago
I commented on the previous post of this article so I won't copy it here, but if you are interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25919189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25919189 Since then, I've read several reviews and watched videos. In a lot of cases, the update from Ryzen 4000 to Ryzen 5000 mobile is not super impressive (and certainly less so than Ryzen 3000 to Ryzen 4000 mobile, but more so than most of Intel's previous generational improvements), and I do worry there's not a big improvement in battery life, despite what AMD claims in this article. I've also looked at some RTX 3070 results, and they are not blowing me away either. If anything, the best things to come out of 2021 laptops will probably be screen improvements, and in some cases (ahem Asus) better cooling solutions (though many Asus laptops still lacking webcams!) I'm surprised that moving from 2 CCX to 1 CCX, doubling the L3 cache, and other Zen 3 improvements aren't having a bigger effect on Ryzen mobile, but as seen here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjFc5ZRtwP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjFc5ZRtwP4 ) in this direct comparison of Ryzen 7 5800H to Ryzen 7 4800H, some things that Intel was previously excelling at (like Excel ;)!) will now be better handled by AMD.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  the l3 cache wasn't doubled, the amount any 1 core can access at once was doubled. However that also came with a small latency penalty.
  - SaltySolomon 6y ago
    Yes the l3 chache was doubled, on mobile it was only 8 MB total (split 4+4) now it is 16 MB shared by all cores.

143 points by pella 6y ago

I know there must be some reason but I can't put my finger on why AMD are continuing to use Vega for their Mobile/APU range. Vega seems decent within the power range but I would have assumed Navi was more than mature enough for it now; potentially it's just economics and any performance upside for a Navi GP is not worth the extra cost.

spqr0a1 6y ago
iGPU performance is currently limited by memory bandwidth. Not much point in upgrading from Vega until DDR5 is used.
- tumblewit 6y ago
  Also in the article it is clearly mentioned that time to market using vega was much shorter than reinventing the wheel which was important i'm guessing since AMD is still small compared to intel in mobile space and they have struggled in the past in this segment.
  - Guthur 6y ago
    Yes, though I'm pretty sure the same rationale was used for the 4000 series APUs as well. I have a feeling that the particular market these chips are aimed at that improving the iGPU by even something like 50% is not that meaningful, it's still not going to be competitive with discrete and will nearly always be pair with one if gaming is an option on the particular laptop. And so I suppose the rationale might be that it's just easier to stick with Vega and the current power draw for the iGPU as acceptable for the required graphics horsepower. Maybe one day we'll see an APU powerful enough to remove the need for discrete GPU in laptops, not for awhile yet though :).
- paulmd 6y ago
  Navi improves delta compression for memory, which improves effective memory bandwidth for a given "raw" bandwidth. So switching to Navi would have alleviated the memory bandwidth bottleneck to some degree and improved performance. It is a puzzling decision and perhaps the "wasn't ready when they taped out" explanation is the correct one. Cezanne seems to have been ready for a while now and just waiting for fab capacity - meaning it would have had to have been taped out in parallel with the RDNA2 architecture chips. So a design flaw in RDNA2 might have blown the Cezanne launch. They could have used RDNA1 though and it still would have improved compression over GCN/Vega. Or ported over just the delta compression. I guess maybe they just wanted to port Zen3 over straight, use the memory controller they'd already proven with Renoir, and not take any risks? It's definitely puzzling and I haven't heard an explanation I would consider 100% satisfactory.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  How can that be true when DDR5 is only 2x as fast as DDR4 and even a low end dGPU vastly outperforms an iGPU?
  - ben-schaaf 6y ago
    Unlike DDR, GDDR is optimised for high-bandwidth (over latency), which is why dedicated GPUs can be so much faster. HBM even more so. DDR5 does 6.4Gbps, whereas HBM2E does 2.5Tbps (per stack).
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  Memory bandwidth is but one aspect of GPU performance, and also memory bandwidth is substantially upgraded in this APU. It has support for LPDDR4X-4267 68.2 GB/s, up from DDR4 3200's 51.2 GB/s. But the Vega 8 in this is definitely not the peak that you can squeeze out of DDR4. If that was the case then we wouldn't have had things like the Vega 11 in the 3400G. Also RDNA2's "Infinity Cache" helps reduce memory bandwidth requirements, which would also be a relevant upgrade. This was just a time-to-market strategy to reduce risk. Not an optimal engineering decision. This let them avoid trying to make a power-optimized version of RDNA2 at the same time they were trying to release any version of RDNA2.
- fulafel 6y ago
  Citation needed. Doesn't seem to be borne out by benchmarks comparing chips with varying iGPU resources and same memory setup. Sure, they're going to be meomry bound some of the time, and it depends on what kind of bw/compute balance the GPU code is tuned for... but we didn't stop putting more cores and wider SIMD on chips either just because then current SW didn't fully utilize them.
deleted 6y ago
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toast0 6y ago
memory bandwidth as spqr0a1 said is probably a good reason, but also, the design pipeline probably made it hard to do Zen2 with Navi. Both of those came out in 2019; if Navi had gotten delayed, it would have delayed Renoir as well. Now for the Zen3 APUs, AMD is emphasizing pin for pin compatibility; possibly switching the GPU would have needed different pins; or they just wanted to make sure they got Zen 3 APUs out quickly to keep making inroads into the laptop market. There's a leaked AMD roadmap floating around that has a Van Gogh chip with Zen2 + Navi coming out sometime this year. But that roadmap didn't show the Lucienne Zen2 + Vega chips AMD recently announced (Ryzen 5{3,5,7}00U} to ensure model numbers stay confusing.
shmerl 6y ago
Especially since they are already using RDNA 2 in console APUs.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  Console APUs don't need to be particularly power-optimized. If the RDNA 2 GPU in the PS5 can't idle below 10w, nobody will care. If the RDNA 2 GPU in your laptop can't idle below 10w, that's unshippable. A decent laptop doesn't draw 10w total at idle including screen & all that.
  - shmerl 6y ago
    Well, they are working with Samsung to put some generation of RDNA in their Exynos chips. So surely they should care about power efficiency.
    - kllrnohj 6y ago
      And I'm sure at some point there will be an RDNA-something APU from AMD, too, but there also isn't any existing power-optimized RDNA cores sitting around either to point at and just be like "but why didn't you use that instead?"
hmottestad 6y ago
The article touches on this. Anandtech assumes that it's because it was faster to go to market with Vega. Something about the modular design of the chip. They also mentioned that AMD would likely upgrade the GPU in a next version, without upgrading the CPU. Maybe a minor mhz bump of the CPU together with a new GPU.
chrismorgan 6y ago
It seems to be strategic. A few helpful excerpts from different parts of the article (the rest of each paragraph is also useful): > Users may be upset that the new processor range only features Vega 8 graphics, the same as last year’s design, however part of the silicon re-use comes in here enabling AMD to come to market in a timely manner. > As mentioned on the previous page, one of the criticisms leveled at this new generation of processors is that we again get Vega 8 integrated graphics, rather than something RDNA based. The main reason for this is AMD’s re-use of design in order to enable a faster time-to-market with Zen 3. The previous generation Renoir design with Zen 2 and Vega 8 was built in conjunction with Cezanne to the point that the first samples of Cezanne were back from the fab only two months after Renoir was launched. > With AMD’s recent supply issues as well, we’re of the opinion that AMD has been stockpiling these Ryzen 5000 Mobile processors in order to enable a strong Q1 and Q2 launch of the platform with stock for all OEMs.
gameswithgo 6y ago
Cranking up the APU horsepower when ddr4 ram can't throw enough data at it doesn't do you much good.
fulafel 6y ago
One reason for depriorizing it might be that they realized iGPU performance isn't as relevant as they hoped in recent history. AMD spent years betting heavily on concepts like the APU, HSA, tight coupling with coherent virtual memory access from GPU and CPU side etc. They tried to do a "build it and they will come" but the software didn't come and Intel ate their lunch with low effort iGPUs. Advances of GPU programming slowed industry wide, especially software & dev experience / programming language wise, and the GPU world remained far from CPU programming productivity. (And you can still get 2 orders of magnitude of parallelism staying on the CPU, from SIMD, multicore and SMT). They learned their lesson, and this time around came back with a product that can beat Intel in their own game.

deleted 6y ago

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fsiefken 6y ago

Would it run SteamVR games at 20 fps and decent resolution I wonder?

taspeotis 6y ago
ASUS has the Zypherus which pairs up one of these with a mobile 3080 so ... it should play them at 90 FPS which is fine for a VR headset.
kllrnohj 6y ago
You're almost certainly going to find this paired with something like an RTX 3060 maxQ in a bunch of laptops (similar to last year's Zephyrus G14) which would be a much better option for SteamVR or any gaming. VR at 20 fps is going to be nauseating to say the least. Reprojection helps, but not that much. For example Oculus won't let your game into the store at all unless the minimum spec system can sustain 45 FPS, and the recommended must be 90 FPS.
LegitShady 6y ago
>SteamVR games at 20 fps I'm curious what you're doing that 20fps is a minimum target
- fsiefken 6y ago
  playing neanderthal or gaia project solo in tabletop simulator.. 20 fps is the bare minimum I can imagine myself playing it with

algorithm314 6y ago

And still no Desktop APU since ZEN+.(Except Renoir which is only for OEMs). Maybe AMD wants you to buy non APU cpus so that you also buy a GPU from them.

Nursie 6y ago
If they had any stock available that might be more reasonable!
- algorithm314 6y ago
  The most probable thing is that APU are low margin products and if they released an 8-core APU like in mobile they would have cannibalized the non APU parts
read_if_gay_ 6y ago
If you really want it, you can buy Renoir on AliExpress.
3np 6y ago
I'm sure it's coming. This market timing is frustrating, though. Especially as it gives mobo vendors (looking at you ASROCK) more slack with getting all their BIOS/UEFI of last-gen models up to date to support them, ever.
paulmd 6y ago
APUs and GPUs are relatively low-margin for AMD on a per-wafer basis. It takes a lot of silicon to produce a product which sells for a not a lot of money. Consoles exercised options to increase their orders by 50% from the expected amounts during 2020, and reportedly consoles are now consuming up to 80% of AMD's wafer allocation. So they are in a defensive mode to maximize their returns on their remaining wafers. https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21325260/sony-ps5-oculus-stock-orders-manufacturing-increase https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/15/21325260/sony-ps5-oculus-... https://twitter.com/nerdtechgasm/status/1332115920144146432 https://twitter.com/nerdtechgasm/status/1332115920144146432 Monolithic dies need to have IO for memory/etc, which doesn't shrink well on modern nodes, so it consumes a lot of space. The iGPU also consumes a pretty large amount of space. On chiplet based CPUs, all of that is pushed off to a separate, older process which is not in shortage (GloFo 12nm/14nm), so only the CCDs themselves are on 7nm. This is a very efficient way to use silicon compared to the monolithic APU dies. GPUs are not a great situation for AMD either. NVIDIA is using a cheaper, worse process, but as is customary they have much better silicon engineering and have matched AMD's core efficiency despite the worse process - the only real advantage AMD has is that they use less memory which saves them about 30 watts out of a 300W budget. And at the top end they are exceeding their performance, plus they have tensor cores to accelerate DLSS and provide additional performance, plus more raytracing performance. So AMD is paying more for an expensive process and hasn't managed to beat NVIDIA. NVIDIA is essentially forcing AMD to cut their own throats on margins in the GPU segment, if they want to remain competitive. There is very much a reason that AMD is no longer wildly undercutting NVIDIA like they used to and it has nothing to do with mindshare/etc, AMD has been using more expensive technology just to try and stay performance competitive for years now. As such, APUs and GPUs have been the products that get the shit end of the stick. To wit: as far as cutdowns go, a 5600X die is 80mm2, they sell that for $300 MSRP, and they keep most of that for themselves (let's say $50 chip cost/manufacturing/packaging, $50 for retailer/distribution, they make $200 a chip). A 6800 die is 520mm2, the MSRP is $580, and they have a significant BOM cost, and they have to incorporate a profit margin (even if slim, it's not great being an AMD partner). So let's say $100 chip cost/manufacturing/packaging, $300 BOM, $50 for the partner, $50 for the retailer, they make $80 per card. But it uses 6.5 times as much silicon per chip, so they make the equivalent of $12 on this GPU versus $200 on the CPU! It's literally an order of magnitude more profitable to make the chiplets than to make a GPU. Or an APU, Cezanne is 175mm2 for an 8-core die, they can sell that for maybe $50-75 more than the iGPU-less chip, so $350-375. The chip costs them let's say $25 more, so they make $250, but it's 2.2x as big as the chiplet. Just made up numbers pulled out of my ass, but you can see the math heavily disfavors making APUs and GPUs. Which is why AMD has actually been shunting production away from those throughout 2020, it is not a coincidence that they were announced in January and didn't show up until maybe May in actual products, and then you had reports from partners that they were getting their allocated (basically confirmed and accepted) orders pushed back a quarter or more. https://videocardz.com/newz/xmg-facing-serious-amd-ryzen-7-4800h-renoir-cpu-shortage https://videocardz.com/newz/xmg-facing-serious-amd-ryzen-7-4... (this eventually ended up with the orders from August getting pushed back into November if you read the series of threads from XMG) TSMC just doesn't have enough capacity to go around, and right now they are an effective monopoly, people basically pre-write the obituary of products that choose processes that aren't TSMC. And unfortunately the situation is only getting worse this year and next year - there are products that have been waiting for consoles that will immediately soak up all that capacity. Intel is launching GPUs and potentially laptop CPUs (?) on TSMC now. Automakers have been clamoring for more and have had to shut down lines because they can't get enough chips. NVIDIA is reportedly moving a few of their high-end consumer products to TSMC late this year to supplement their Samsung capacity and allow a "refresh" like 3000 Super with higher performance at the top. Apple is moving all of their laptop and desktop products from Intel products (made at Intel foundries) to TSMC, so I expect they will continue to squat the 5nm node for a longer period of time (desktop/laptop will probably stay 5nm and phones/tablets move to 3nm once that's available), and this will echo right down the conga line, products from other brands that would have transitioned to 5nm will be stuck consuming 7nm instead. https://www.techpowerup.com/270355/tsmc-allocation-the-next-battleground-for-intel-amd-and-possibly-nvidia https://www.techpowerup.com/270355/tsmc-allocation-the-next-... https://www.techpowerup.com/273302/nvidia-reportedly-moving-ampere-to-7-nm-tsmc-in-2021 https://www.techpowerup.com/273302/nvidia-reportedly-moving-... https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/12/04/intel-outsource-atom-xeon-processors-to-tsmc/ https://www.gizmochina.com/2020/12/04/intel-outsource-atom-x... https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319301-report-intel-will-outsource-core-i3-production-to-tsmcs-5nm-node https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319301-report-intel-wi... https://www.tweaktown.com/news/74549/intels-next-gen-xe-hpg-gaming-gpu-will-be-made-by-tsmc-on-6nm-in-2021/index.html https://www.tweaktown.com/news/74549/intels-next-gen-xe-hpg-... https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/intel-dg2-gpu-will-be-fabbed-on-latest-tsmc-7nm-fabrication-process.html https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/intel-dg2-gpu-will-be-fabb... https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/13/business/global-chip-shortages-carmakers/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/13/business/global-chip-shortage... https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/18/business/ford-auto-chip-shortage/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/18/business/ford-auto-chip-short... https://www.sourcengine.com/blog/automotive-semiconductor-shortage-continues-through-first-half-2021-01-23 https://www.sourcengine.com/blog/automotive-semiconductor-sh...? Everyone thought it was some snub from TSMC that NVIDIA switched to Samsung, like there is a persistent narrative (which nobody credible will actually get behind) that NVIDIA tried to demand a discount from TSMC and got told to pound sand. It is now very clear that TSMC was not going to be able to deliver the capacity (and certainly not at a price anyone liked) and it's now looking like NVIDIA switching to Samsung was a masterstroke. They've been able to ramp Ampere faster than Pascal (3080 is at the same % marketshare in Steam Hardware Survey as 1080 was at the equivalent point in its lifecycle and the market is >2x as big) and AMD can't get product on shelves. And now NVIDIA can supplement their Samsung capacity with a few higher-performing chips on TSMC at the top of their stack to help broaden their production capacity. It really says it all that AMD hasn't officially launched Milan yet. That's a chiplet-based product (so, good utilization of their wafers) but higher-margin than consumer products. So basically strictly better margins than consumer dies in all respects. But they just can't deliver enough capacity yet to be credible. That is the next thing on AMD's docket, it'll be launching in March. So far hyperscalers have samples and probably small production runs and that's it. Unlike NVIDIA, unlike Intel, AMD has no second-source to run to, it's TSMC or bust (or go back to shitty 12nm/14nm Zen+ chips from GloFo). (which, btw, long story short, is why "only Zen+ APUs on desktop"! those APUs are manufactured at GloFo on an older node and thus do not compete for precious TSMC capacity.) This article is just a marketing teaser to try and divert attention from the Tiger Lake-H launch. AMD had a core count advantage over Tiger Lake-U which they could point to (and which gave them a performance and efficiency advantage in highly-threaded tasks), Tiger Lake was faster per core but AMD had more of them. Well, now Intel has 8 cores coming up in March, and they're still faster cores than Zen2-based Renoir. AMD has been sitting on these Zen3-based Cezanne chips as long as possible so they could preserve their margins on chiplet products, with Tiger Lake-H coming they don't have a choice but to at least flash them around to show what they can do. The APUs launching in March are gonna be a paper launch. Milan is where all their wafers are going in Q2, it's way higher margin and they need to hit that market (especially if they can beat out Ice Lake-SP since they have been making good inroads in server). But they need to show the flag in mobile because Intel is about to surpass Renoir in the mobile-workstation market, not just the ultrabook market. They have to show their successor now and hope to keep people on the hook long enough. It will probably be Q3 if not Q4 before these Cezanne processors show up in any number - there are just too many other companies who booked TSMC's capacity and too many products within AMD that need to go first before APUs. It's no coincidence these articles are showing up 2 months before the launch event. Hardware Unboxed had one too. It's AMD's last chance to try and get benchmarks against 14nm 8-core chips and 10nm 4-core chips that they can make an argument against. This is "look at the shiny, please pay no attention to that Intel product launch that reviewers will have in-hand within a month or so". And Intel laptops have hard-launched to a much greater extent than AMD. I wonder what Sony and MS are paying AMD for console chips to get them to push off Milan and their APUs, it's got to be considerable. Milan probably would have at latest launched alongside Vermeer if not before, so they have delayed it 6+ months. It must have been an absolute pile, Milan is a high-margin high-volume product. tl;dr: fab capacity is fucked, maybe things will be better in 2022

hmottestad 6y ago

For those who didn't notice. ASUS is using Liquid Metal instead of regular paste! It's not mentioned in the article, but you can tell from the header picture. It will be very interesting to see if it will hold after 5 years or if it will "dry up" (eg. amalgamate with the heat sink).

hosteur 6y ago
What kind of metal? Mercury?
- AbacusAvenger 6y ago
  Gallium, Indium, and Tin, I believe.
  - trishmapow2 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galinstan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galinstan
- Strom 6y ago
  ASUS is using Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut. [1][2] The metals it contains are tin, gallium and indium. This is the market leader in liquid metal thermal solutions and in high power desktop uses can reduce the CPU temperature by 20C compared to bog standard solutions, and 10C compared to high end pastes. -- [1] https://www.thermal-grizzly.com/en/products/26-conductonaut-en https://www.thermal-grizzly.com/en/products/26-conductonaut-... [2] https://rog.asus.com/articles/technologies/patented-process-brings-exotic-liquid-metal-thermal-compound-to-new-rog-gaming-laptops/ https://rog.asus.com/articles/technologies/patented-process-...
ilogik 6y ago
Sony did the same with the PS5
- judge2020 6y ago
  And that's a console sold nearly at-cost[0], so it's in Sony's best interest to keep it working for a long time so you keep buying games on it. 0: https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/14/21137615/ps5-cost-price-point-playstation-5 https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/14/21137615/ps5-cost-price-po...

guerby 6y ago

Interesting that when limited at 15W on geekbench multithread this ryzen 9 5980HS is faster than Apple M1 (and even faster at 35W), but below in single thread.

top_sigrid 6y ago
Well several things. The M1 does not have 8 equally performant cores. The M1 has only 4 of those who are faster in single core performance. Also it performs at 10W, not at 15W and does so without a fan (in the case of the MacBook Air). Hence I don't know if your comparison makes sense.
- merdadicapra 6y ago
  > Also it performs at 10W, not at 15W and does so without a fan (in the case of the MacBook Air The comparison is with a Mac Mini that uses a fan. 15W is not far from 10W, considering Ryzen are still 7nm IMO even 35W is not much at all, for 18 hours on battery and that kind of performances (especially the multi core). The difference is negligible for users, assuming 8 hours a day for 365 days straight the 15W APU would consume 15KW more, in Italy it would cost about one euro more.
- kllrnohj 6y ago
  In this case the 15w was actual measured power draw not made up marketing numbers (actual measurement was 12W though I assume Anandtech opted to round up there in the other slides). The M1's actual multicore power draw is more like 20W, at least in the Mac mini being compared against here.
hu3 6y ago
And that's with 7nm. Still faster than desktop mac mini M1 despite both having fans and AMD having to deal with x86 cruft. I can wait to get my hands on one of these speed demons for my compilation workloads.
ksec 6y ago
Few things. 1. M1 in Mac Mini is estimated to be 20W to 25W. 2. M1 is 4 Performance Core + 4 Efficient Core. Compared to 8 Performance Core in Ryzen 3. Ryzen is 8 Core 16 Thread. M1 is 8 Thread. 4. Worth mentioning again, M1 is on 5nm, Ryzen is on 7nm.

holtalanm 6y ago

honestly, this would make a kickass mobile dev machine, imo.

neogodless 6y ago

I commented on the previous post of this article so I won't copy it here, but if you are interested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25919189 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25919189 Since then, I've read several reviews and watched videos. In a lot of cases, the update from Ryzen 4000 to Ryzen 5000 mobile is not super impressive (and certainly less so than Ryzen 3000 to Ryzen 4000 mobile, but more so than most of Intel's previous generational improvements), and I do worry there's not a big improvement in battery life, despite what AMD claims in this article. I've also looked at some RTX 3070 results, and they are not blowing me away either. If anything, the best things to come out of 2021 laptops will probably be screen improvements, and in some cases (ahem Asus) better cooling solutions (though many Asus laptops still lacking webcams!) I'm surprised that moving from 2 CCX to 1 CCX, doubling the L3 cache, and other Zen 3 improvements aren't having a bigger effect on Ryzen mobile, but as seen here ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjFc5ZRtwP4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjFc5ZRtwP4 ) in this direct comparison of Ryzen 7 5800H to Ryzen 7 4800H, some things that Intel was previously excelling at (like Excel ;)!) will now be better handled by AMD.

gameswithgo 6y ago
the l3 cache wasn't doubled, the amount any 1 core can access at once was doubled. However that also came with a small latency penalty.
- SaltySolomon 6y ago
  Yes the l3 chache was doubled, on mobile it was only 8 MB total (split 4+4) now it is 16 MB shared by all cores.