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> 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 la

> 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
  Probably in the medium term (a few years?), but not there today.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    A good 10b cores shipped just last year does seem to disagree with this. Many have already chosen RISC-V.
    - transpute 4y ago
      How many of those cores were in network appliances?
- charcircuit 4y ago
  >but would RISC-V help in this case No. All the instructions get turned into uops regardless of what instruction set is exposed. Supporting x86 is an advantage. >and being "open" and free can be manufactured by anyone. That makes no sense. You can't manufacture an instruction set.
  - snvzz 4y ago
    >Supporting x86 is an advantage. Compatibility-wise, there's no doubt. The software ecosystem is most broad on x86. But x86 is really bad at reliability / high assurance due to its complexity and due to obtrusive (SMM mode), non-auditable firmware.
zokier 4y ago
R1102G has nominal 6W tdp, so its very comparable to GX-412 in that sense. It also has 2x2.5Gbe networking builtin so that should be a major win for something like pcengines
- transpute 4y ago
  R1102G power budget is spent on dual-core + iGPU vs. GX-412 with 4 cores. Should a networking device BOM budget be spent on unused graphics silicon?
  - rektide 4y ago
    Honestly the embarrassing thing is that we don't have GPUs on our networking devices. This seems like near ideal hardware for network processing. PacketShader was from 2010. We have made so little visible progress since then. https://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/ https://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/ There has been some progress since then. There's probably other fronts, but my first question to myself here was, "I wonder what P4 (network programming language) has been up to with acceleration." (https://opennetworking.org/p4/ https://opennetworking.org/p4/). And sure enough there are a couple hits, P4GPU (2016), APUNet (2017), P4GPU (2022). Alas none seem to be open source atm. FPGA's are the more common target, with so called "smart nics". They're present in lots of fancy cloud hardware & could be excellent at helping us push packets at a good power point. I think if the software market were more evolved people would be clamboring for these things & they would have become more mainstream popular & in demand, & would be available at lot more price points. AMD should be releasing cpu+fpgas (from their Xilinx acquisition) pretty soon, and if they're smart there'll be some affordable low end options - small ryzen embedded cpus and a modest chunk of network processing fpga - so folks can mess around & get good. We are seeing them start to upstream some software stuff. The actual kernel drivers for the XDMA CPU<->FPGA DMA made it into the upcoming 6.3 (https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-XDMA-Linux-6.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-XDMA-Linux-6.3), there's a whole new FPGA bus "CDX" that is slated for 6.4 (https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-CDX-For-Linux-6.4 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-CDX-For-Linux-6.4), and there's a LLVM-based eBPF XDP C code to FPGA compiler Nanotube (https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-Nanotube-Compiler https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-Nanotube-Compiler) that... well... looks like it might categorically enable these use cases with almost no effort. (After years of being thrashed by awful OpenWRT router's quirky vendor packages for network accelerating, I say: heck yes, yes pleaseeeee!) GPUs do indeed seem >50% likely to be bypassed, that FPGA just fits better & wins faster. But they both had & have a ton of potential. Especially if there are APU style GPUs that have shared memory (where there's not the latency of sending stuff back and forth over PCIe). Think of all the years ago AMD tried to sell us "Fusion" and Heterogenous Systems Architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_System_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_System_Architect...). Well, here we are 12 years latter & it's happening. It could already have happened, we just didn't have software to actualize it, especially in the networking domain. To your point, I do think 2 cores can be a potential issue. Ideally the iGPU should be able to power down quite effectively, ideally d3 cold sleep. Wasting the silicon isn't ideal, but generally I think a vanishingly small iGPU has such a small penalty to include, adds so much value to a chip for so little real cost. It feels overzealous to me to exclude iGPU-having chips & I think it's based in older prejudices from times when iGPUs used to entail more real trade-offs, with more impactful power budget & chip-size hits. What's important now is whether there's enough processing (which the networking world for now continues to ask for in the form of CPU), memory bandwidth, and network bandwidth, at solid price and power points. We have so few examples to learn from, so few embedded machines available these days at reasonable price points (<$400), that I think we just don't know how suitable what we have would be or not.

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
Probably in the medium term (a few years?), but not there today.
- snvzz 4y ago
  A good 10b cores shipped just last year does seem to disagree with this. Many have already chosen RISC-V.
  - transpute 4y ago
    How many of those cores were in network appliances?
charcircuit 4y ago
>but would RISC-V help in this case No. All the instructions get turned into uops regardless of what instruction set is exposed. Supporting x86 is an advantage. >and being "open" and free can be manufactured by anyone. That makes no sense. You can't manufacture an instruction set.
- snvzz 4y ago
  >Supporting x86 is an advantage. Compatibility-wise, there's no doubt. The software ecosystem is most broad on x86. But x86 is really bad at reliability / high assurance due to its complexity and due to obtrusive (SMM mode), non-auditable firmware.

zokier 4y ago

R1102G has nominal 6W tdp, so its very comparable to GX-412 in that sense. It also has 2x2.5Gbe networking builtin so that should be a major win for something like pcengines

transpute 4y ago
R1102G power budget is spent on dual-core + iGPU vs. GX-412 with 4 cores. Should a networking device BOM budget be spent on unused graphics silicon?
- rektide 4y ago
  Honestly the embarrassing thing is that we don't have GPUs on our networking devices. This seems like near ideal hardware for network processing. PacketShader was from 2010. We have made so little visible progress since then. https://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/ https://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/ There has been some progress since then. There's probably other fronts, but my first question to myself here was, "I wonder what P4 (network programming language) has been up to with acceleration." (https://opennetworking.org/p4/ https://opennetworking.org/p4/). And sure enough there are a couple hits, P4GPU (2016), APUNet (2017), P4GPU (2022). Alas none seem to be open source atm. FPGA's are the more common target, with so called "smart nics". They're present in lots of fancy cloud hardware & could be excellent at helping us push packets at a good power point. I think if the software market were more evolved people would be clamboring for these things & they would have become more mainstream popular & in demand, & would be available at lot more price points. AMD should be releasing cpu+fpgas (from their Xilinx acquisition) pretty soon, and if they're smart there'll be some affordable low end options - small ryzen embedded cpus and a modest chunk of network processing fpga - so folks can mess around & get good. We are seeing them start to upstream some software stuff. The actual kernel drivers for the XDMA CPU<->FPGA DMA made it into the upcoming 6.3 (https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-XDMA-Linux-6.3 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-XDMA-Linux-6.3), there's a whole new FPGA bus "CDX" that is slated for 6.4 (https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-CDX-For-Linux-6.4 https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-CDX-For-Linux-6.4), and there's a LLVM-based eBPF XDP C code to FPGA compiler Nanotube (https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-Nanotube-Compiler https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-Nanotube-Compiler) that... well... looks like it might categorically enable these use cases with almost no effort. (After years of being thrashed by awful OpenWRT router's quirky vendor packages for network accelerating, I say: heck yes, yes pleaseeeee!) GPUs do indeed seem >50% likely to be bypassed, that FPGA just fits better & wins faster. But they both had & have a ton of potential. Especially if there are APU style GPUs that have shared memory (where there's not the latency of sending stuff back and forth over PCIe). Think of all the years ago AMD tried to sell us "Fusion" and Heterogenous Systems Architecture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_System_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterogeneous_System_Architect...). Well, here we are 12 years latter & it's happening. It could already have happened, we just didn't have software to actualize it, especially in the networking domain. To your point, I do think 2 cores can be a potential issue. Ideally the iGPU should be able to power down quite effectively, ideally d3 cold sleep. Wasting the silicon isn't ideal, but generally I think a vanishingly small iGPU has such a small penalty to include, adds so much value to a chip for so little real cost. It feels overzealous to me to exclude iGPU-having chips & I think it's based in older prejudices from times when iGPUs used to entail more real trade-offs, with more impactful power budget & chip-size hits. What's important now is whether there's enough processing (which the networking world for now continues to ask for in the form of CPU), memory bandwidth, and network bandwidth, at solid price and power points. We have so few examples to learn from, so few embedded machines available these days at reasonable price points (<$400), that I think we just don't know how suitable what we have would be or not.