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PC Engine complained about a lack of design support. Personally I just am not that sympathetic. There are a variety of new Ryzen embedded cores which have reall

PC Engine complained about a lack of design support. Personally I just am not that sympathetic. There are a variety of new Ryzen embedded cores which have really great capabilities that could fit this model. We're just not in the same world where AMD is going to sit down & lead you through design, like a much much smaller world was. And board design is harder, faster systems. It's just harder to make boards. What really sucks is that this frell over a huge market segment. Industrial embedded stuff is all crazy expensive. New embedded systems are often $700 plus. I'm also curious to know what availability on embedded parts is. I get the impression old parts aren't necessarily easy to get, much less get with reasonable discount prices. The low-end R1505G from 2019 was $80 when announced, & my vague impression is this is still about as low as one's gonna go for getting a embedded Ryzen chip. The GX-412 chips from 2014 were probably half the price. It's so awful that the gap between rpi & x86 grows. Sure there are excellent second hand markets, but the x86 market running upmarket is a terrible general situation. Decent embedded chips should be a very cost effective available baseline, should make lots of affordable baseline low frills systems available.

transpute 4y ago
> PC Engine complained about a lack of design support. Personally I just am not that sympathetic. PC Engines designed one of the best-regarded boards of the last decade. It's unlikely that they needed babysitting by AMD. What they sought from AMD was a low-power embedded SoC without a GPU, in ~price and perf/watt of sub-10W TDP SoC used in the fanless APU2. An SoC with different TDP and price tier would have meant no upgrade path for APU2 customers, and market development for new customers. Ryzen Embedded V2000 (2020) customers included casinos. All models included iGPU, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-launches-v2000-ryzen-embedded-socs-with-up-to-eight-7nm-cores-and-radeon-graphics https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-launches-v2000-ryzen-e... Ryzen Embedded V3000 (2022) finally dropped the iGPU, https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-embedded-v3000-launched-with-zen-3-and-ddr5/ https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-embedded-v3000-launch... While we're having a moment of silence for PC Engines, they deserve credit for small biz survival through 2020-2022, with supply chain disruptions and grey markets for Intel NICs and other components. Now AMD is ending sales of embedded GX-412TC, with 6 month backlog and >30% drop in laptop sales. Why can't AMD extend sales of this old SoC until they have a replacement Ryzen Embedded V3000 SKU with comparable power profile? GX-412 is an older node. Customers want to buy it. AMD has struggled to get adoption and design wins for Ryzen Embedded. Why abandon existing embedded customers?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mkopec 4y ago
  I wonder if in pursuit of outright performance, AMD stopped optimizing for low power consumption. Desktop Zen3 Vermeer (which the newly announced 5000E series also are) with chiplets idles at around 20 watts, presumably due to having to maintain signal integrity between the chiplets. Similar story with the chiplet-based RDNA3 cards idling at 100W. Anecdotally, my Renoir laptop is also lacking in battery life.
- rektide 4y ago
  With a decent implementation the integrated Gpu should be able to d3 cold sleep at incredibly low power usage. If this isn't the case it seems like a defect. AMD has definitely scaled up but a configurable 10W TDP hardly seems like a showstopper. It's a little hard to know what TDP really means these days, which complicates, but it feels like some give/take in design to handle a 10W chip should be managable. Overall good post & a great different view. I'm not convinced of either your view nor what I've said. It just doesn't feel like it should be a huge blocker as is. And it feels like there should be better than 10 year old offerings that would work.
  - transpute 4y ago
    I think we all agree that it should theoretically exist, but I've not seen any existence proof in either a paper spec announcement (many embedded boards are not sold directly to consumers) or a shipping device review. Solidrun/Compulab in Israel announced a DIN-mountable fanless router based on Ryzen Embedded V3000, https://www.solid-run.com/fanless-computers/industrial-embedded-computers/bedrock-v3000-basic https://www.solid-run.com/fanless-computers/industrial-embed.... Premium components and proprietary cooling to support 30W+ TDP. Impressive, but probably $1K price tier.
- skywal_l 4y ago
  I don't know anything about this market so I may be completely off-topic here but would RISC-V help in this case? RISC-V has a modular design where the size and complexity of you CPU can be adapted pretty dramatically (RV32I is not that much more complex than a 6502) and being "open" and free can be manufactured by anyone. Indeed today it remains a niche but we see some reasonable momentum and it's getting traction. Again I don't know anything about PCEngine (reading the title I though they were still making that game console from the 90s...) but I am interested to see where RISC-V could take over some x86 business and that's looks like it.

transpute 4y ago

> PC Engine complained about a lack of design support. Personally I just am not that sympathetic. PC Engines designed one of the best-regarded boards of the last decade. It's unlikely that they needed babysitting by AMD. What they sought from AMD was a low-power embedded SoC without a GPU, in ~price and perf/watt of sub-10W TDP SoC used in the fanless APU2. An SoC with different TDP and price tier would have meant no upgrade path for APU2 customers, and market development for new customers. Ryzen Embedded V2000 (2020) customers included casinos. All models included iGPU, https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-launches-v2000-ryzen-embedded-socs-with-up-to-eight-7nm-cores-and-radeon-graphics https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-launches-v2000-ryzen-e... Ryzen Embedded V3000 (2022) finally dropped the iGPU, https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-embedded-v3000-launched-with-zen-3-and-ddr5/ https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-embedded-v3000-launch... While we're having a moment of silence for PC Engines, they deserve credit for small biz survival through 2020-2022, with supply chain disruptions and grey markets for Intel NICs and other components. Now AMD is ending sales of embedded GX-412TC, with 6 month backlog and >30% drop in laptop sales. Why can't AMD extend sales of this old SoC until they have a replacement Ryzen Embedded V3000 SKU with comparable power profile? GX-412 is an older node. Customers want to buy it. AMD has struggled to get adoption and design wins for Ryzen Embedded. Why abandon existing embedded customers?

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mkopec 4y ago
I wonder if in pursuit of outright performance, AMD stopped optimizing for low power consumption. Desktop Zen3 Vermeer (which the newly announced 5000E series also are) with chiplets idles at around 20 watts, presumably due to having to maintain signal integrity between the chiplets. Similar story with the chiplet-based RDNA3 cards idling at 100W. Anecdotally, my Renoir laptop is also lacking in battery life.
rektide 4y ago
With a decent implementation the integrated Gpu should be able to d3 cold sleep at incredibly low power usage. If this isn't the case it seems like a defect. AMD has definitely scaled up but a configurable 10W TDP hardly seems like a showstopper. It's a little hard to know what TDP really means these days, which complicates, but it feels like some give/take in design to handle a 10W chip should be managable. Overall good post & a great different view. I'm not convinced of either your view nor what I've said. It just doesn't feel like it should be a huge blocker as is. And it feels like there should be better than 10 year old offerings that would work.
- transpute 4y ago
  I think we all agree that it should theoretically exist, but I've not seen any existence proof in either a paper spec announcement (many embedded boards are not sold directly to consumers) or a shipping device review. Solidrun/Compulab in Israel announced a DIN-mountable fanless router based on Ryzen Embedded V3000, https://www.solid-run.com/fanless-computers/industrial-embedded-computers/bedrock-v3000-basic https://www.solid-run.com/fanless-computers/industrial-embed.... Premium components and proprietary cooling to support 30W+ TDP. Impressive, but probably $1K price tier.
skywal_l 4y ago
I don't know anything about this market so I may be completely off-topic here but would RISC-V help in this case? RISC-V has a modular design where the size and complexity of you CPU can be adapted pretty dramatically (RV32I is not that much more complex than a 6502) and being "open" and free can be manufactured by anyone. Indeed today it remains a niche but we see some reasonable momentum and it's getting traction. Again I don't know anything about PCEngine (reading the title I though they were still making that game console from the 90s...) but I am interested to see where RISC-V could take over some x86 business and that's looks like it.