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AMD Quietly Launches Recycled Xbox Series X APU as 4700S Desktop Kit
- lights0123 5y ago> AMD only provides drivers for Windows 10, meaning the AMD 4700S isn't compatible with prior versions of Windows, much less Linux. But how much does that actually matter on Linux? If it's just temperature sensors, that doesn't really matter.
- cmeacham98 5y agoIt's an APU, so if it doesn't work with AMDGPU in the Linux kernel that will be pretty bad.
- formerly_proven 5y agoThe speed of those GDDR6 chips probably doesn't matter at all, because in normal Zen 2 parts the fabric only does 32 bytes per cycle at up to ~1.8 GHz, which is just shy of 60 GB/s. The GDDR6 in the Xbox Series X (what a stupid name) does something like 600 GB/s - a 1:10 mismatch.
- wmf 5y agoIt's a shame IMO that AMD won't ship desktop APUs with a large GPU and GDDR6. They're willing to sell the tech to MS, Sony, and some random Chinese company, but not to consumers.
- dralley 5y agoIt almost certainly requires a heavily customized OS. Those chips are designed for the CPU and GPU to share a unified address space on the GDDR6, there is no traditional DDR memory.
- wmf 5y agoLike all iGPUs...
- dralley 5y agoMost iGPUs do not use a unified address space. They use system RAM, yes. But they get a partition of it to themselves, and the size of this partition is often tweakable in the graphics driver settings. The M1 Mac is one of the few laptops that actually does have fully unified memory. https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/11/how-unified-memory-blows-the-socs-off-the-m1-macs/ https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/11/how-unified-memory-blows...
- kcb 5y agoI don't believe that's true. And the driver/bios settings don't really do what people think they do. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000020962/graphics.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000... And zero copy buffers and unified address space are totally a thing on Intel, AMD, and Nvidia(Tegra) igpus. Sounds like there's more than a bit of "Apple Magic" in that blog post.
- formerly_proven 5y agoAMD APUs have had a unified address space for ten years or so.
- Animats 5y agoThat's a strange offering. An Xbox CPU with a broken GPU, no video, and a slot that only accepts weaker graphics cards. What's the target market?
- qbasic_forever 5y agoYeah... at least throw a couple fast network interfaces on it to make it a useful server. But as is, it's a head scratcher to figure out a good use.
- tus89 5y agoCheap OEM office PC? They don't need fancy graphics, will only run Win10, and the 8 core CPU is probably adequate. Maybe they had a high defect rate and this might avoid offset the fab costs, if they can sell them at a profit. And given the high cost of real CPUs and GPUs right now, this might have a place. That was probably the reasoning of whatever market analysis that went into this decision.
- toast0 5y agoEven cheap GPUs are $70+ these days though, sadly. Would be nice if someone would build something new for low end instead of gt 710 as well.
- accountofme 5y agoYeah its sad how bad GPU inflation has got :(
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago> the 8 core CPU is probably adequate What does a “cheap OEM office PC” need even 8 cores for? …I just realised I’m old now. People do actually use those cores for keeping loads of browser tabs open. *sigh*, remember when office PCs only needed to run Office 97 and maybe Netscape 4?
- rasz 5y agoLooks like AMD is copying Shenzhen fly by night factories now :) 7 Jan 2021 'We ran Windows on an Xbox! … Sort of' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf_YK2kSN_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf_YK2kSN_g A9-9820 ~Xbox One S by a chinese company calling itself "Funhouse"? https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/316299-amds-a9-9820-8-core-jaguar-apu-wont-offer-xbox-one-s-performance https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/316299-amds-a9-9820-8-cor...
- dogber1 5y agoThat is an extremely common practice in the industry. Every large chip design house does this to maximize line yield - it is called "binning" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning#Semiconductor_manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning#Semiconductor_...
- floatboth 5y agoOf course binning is common, but creating a retail SKU to sell the fail bin from a semi-custom (Xbox) is always newsworthy. There was something similar with the previous Xbox generation: https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/316299-amds-a9-9820-8-core-jaguar-apu-wont-offer-xbox-one-s-performance https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/316299-amds-a9-9820-8-cor...
- nom 5y agoHah it's always fun when some of the complex trade offs of chip manufacturing spills over to the general public. People always seem perplexed at first when you ask them if they really thought that anyone can place 15,000,000,000 transistors on millions of chips without any errors. Then you ask what they would do with the "broken" chips and suddenly they understand.
- stefan_ 5y agoSince most of the transistors go towards cache, what do they do with individual broken cache bits? Obviously they have size variants, but not that many.
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoOverprovision like SSDs I would imagine
- IshKebab 5y agoMemory is the easy bit. You just overprovision and then disable the broken cache blocks via fuses. Logic is harder because you might have to disable the entire core.
- Zandikar 5y ago>the AMD 4700S only supplies one PCIe x16 expansion slot, which is restrained to a x4 signal. This means that the list of supported graphics cards is very limited as well. Worth noting (without further information) that "supported" does not necessarily mean "Only works with, and nothing else." There's nothing I see about this APU (be it the onboard GDDR6 or UMA of the APU) being inherently incompatible about a PCIe3 x4 (electrical) slot that only limits it to working with cited cards. Assuming you can still get drivers supported on contemporary OS', that hardware is compatible with cards as old as the 2005 ATi X800 and Nvidia 7000 series GPU's, or as new as the 6900 XT and 3090's, to any (PCIe) cards in between. Granted, the newer high end cards will saturate the 4GBps link on this APU in heavier loads, and see restricted performance, but they'll still be perfectly functional. This is something that was often discussed in the eGPU community only having x4 PCIe lanes to work with, but you could still plug in 980's, 1080TI's, Vega 56's etc if you were so inclined, and they'd work fine, and would still outperform lesser cards, they just wouldn't quite perform to their fullest potential. TL;DR: "Supported" and "Compatible" are not the same thing, and is likely just AMD heading off potential complaints from people trying to put high end cards into this for a SFF build.
- aspaceman 5y agoI got a bit excited until I read about the lack of Linux driver support - which makes sense. Could probably cobble together what you need since the parts seem pretty standard here, but that's a little more work than I was hoping. This basically is a cheap NUC alternative.
- floatboth 5y agoWhat driver support would you even need? Thermal sensors? There's no iGPU even so basically everything should just work.