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You'd think after AMD shipped Xbox One, XboxX, PS4, and PS5 with decent iGPUs and a decent memory bandwidth they might bless one of their APUs with > 128 bit wi
by sliken 3y ago
You'd think after AMD shipped Xbox One, XboxX, PS4, and PS5 with decent iGPUs and a decent memory bandwidth they might bless one of their APUs with > 128 bit wide memory. Seems an obvious bottleneck that would improve GPU performance.
It's coming with the Halo Strix with it's 256 bit wide memory, but should it really have taken over a decade?
- KennyBlanken 3y agoWhat market would they be targeting? People who want casual gaming buy consoles. People who want gaming-level performance buy discreet GPUs. AMD makes more money selling a CPU and GPU.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoYeah same. Especially that those consoles were launched all the way back in 2020, nearly 4 years ago. I guess it's difficult to replicate the console performance when those run on GDDR as system memory and PCs on DDR so the bandwidth difference is huge. But it's not like a system integrator like Asus or Gigabyte couldn't have built a small form factor PC based on a PC variant of the consoles APU and use GDDR instead. AMD really missed out on this, especially during the pandemic when everyone was stuck indoor trying to game and looking for inexistent GPUs.
- sliken 3y agoXbox One came out in 2013, 11 years ago, with an AMD CPU. PS4 came out in 2013, 11 years ago, with an AMD CPU.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoYes, but what's your point with those facts? Those were Bulldozer based APUs, not very good compared to what you could buy for PC back then, in an era where AMD wasn't very competitive and GPUs weren't overpriced unobtanium.
- sliken 3y agoJust pointing out that AMD has been shipping cheap APUs with nice memory systems that increase iGPU performance for over 10 years. Just mystifies me that AMD hasn't shipped similar in a laptop, SFF, or desktop yet. Especially during the GPU shortage. The AMD 780m iGPU does pretty well, clearly AMD could add more cores and ship a faster memory bus, like the ones on their Threadripper (4 channel), Siena (6 channel), threadripper pro (8 channel), or Epyc (12 channel). Apple's doing similar with M1/m2/m3 (128 bit), M1/M2/M3 Pro (256 bit), and M1/M2/M3 Max (512 bit wide) available in laptops, tiny PCs (up to 256 bit wide) with the mini, and small desktops (studio).
- Narishma 3y agoThey were not Bulldozer but Jaguar APUs.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoJaguar was the APU console name but it was based on Buldozer CPU architecture.
- wtallis 3y agoJaguar was the codename for the CPU core microarchitecture. AMD had two separate families of microarchitectures, much like Intel's Core and Atom families (since united in one chip in Alder Lake and later).
- p_l 3y agoGDDR isn't necessarily all that better on use for general purpose CPU. Most importantly, buyers didn't want machines with soldered memory, and that was main method of going with wider bus without prohibitively expensive boards etc.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- cma 3y agoThis was a different era with southbridge and stuff, but what about the Nvidia Nforce2: https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/NForce2 https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/NForce2 Based somewhat on Xbox 1 design.
- wtallis 3y agoJumping to a wider memory bus is most feasible in product segments that already use soldered CPUs and RAM. PCs have been reluctant to drop the sockets/slots until recently, and only then in thin and light laptops. In systems that don't have discrete GPUs, Intel hasn't been applying competitive pressure against AMD's integrated GPUs. So it's really been a question of whether AMD could spare the cash to tape out a larger laptop chip with the goal of cutting off the low end of NVIDIA's dGPU sales for laptops.
- bombcar 3y agoThis is exactly the reason - and perhaps they finally can do it because "Apple showed the way" with the M-series. They obviously could have done it from a technical standpoint, as they had done it for consoles, but those are not general purpose from the viewpoint of who is laying out the motherboard design.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoBefore Apple does it: Bad idea. After Apple does it: Next big thing.
- ip26 3y agoThey seem to have this unusual ability to get consumers to suddenly demand what used to be too expensive.
- bombcar 3y agoMore importantly you can get the Board of (insert company here) to finally do X if you can show that Apple did X.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoThey don't refer to it as a cult for nothing.
- 3y ago
- MetaWhirledPeas 3y agoWhat's to stop someone from taking a mid-high end dedicated graphics card and soldering on a CPU, RAM, and IO? (Do they do this already?) I know it sounds like sacrilege, but I suspect most people upgrade their mobo/CPU/RAM/graphics all at once.
- wtallis 3y agoSoldering doesn't do anything about pin count. An off the shelf GPU chip is still going to support at most a PCIe x16 interface to other chips, which isn't enough to share DRAM with a separate CPU. Taping out a new chip that combines existing GPU and CPU IP blocks is relatively straightforward, but taping out a large chip is extremely expensive.
- Osiris 3y agoWhy do they not use HBM and unified memory like Apple? I assume it's for cost reasons.
- sliken 3y agoApple does not use HBM, just LPDDR5 with wider interfaces. Xbox X/One, PS4/5, AMD server/workstation chips (threadripper (and pro), siena, and epyc), and apples above the base model m1/m2/m3 all use wider memory interfaces. AMD agpu (and Intel with iGPUs) do use unified memory. As well as the high end AMD (MI300A) and Nvidia (Grace+hopper) server+iGPU chips. This REALLY helps GPUs performance which is very bandwidth intensive, but even normal workloads have cache misses. Part of the benefit isn't just more bandwidth, but that you can have 4,8, or 16 cache misses running in parallel which can help keep more of your cores doing useful work instead of waiting on memory. This doesn't decrease memory latency, but can help improve throughput when using multiple cores. Sad that even a M3 pro (the midrange, 3rd fastest in the apple M series lineup) available in Apple laptops or mac minis has more bandwidth than every AMD Ryzen and every Intel i3/i4/i7/i9. Even Intel's fastest i9-14900KF using a maximum of 250 watts has 1/8th the memory bandwidth of the M2 Ultra, 1/4th the bandwidth of the M3 max, and 1/2th the bandwidth of the M2 Pro. Same (or less actually) then the MBA or base Mac mini.
- brnt 3y agoDoesn't the Deck have quad channel memory?
- sliken 3y agoYes, as does any most DDR5 systems, but they are still 128 bits wide or 4 x 32 bit channels.
- brnt 3y agoAh! I thought 64bit buswidths had been standard in DDR memory for, well, a very long time now? Why did that change? Sounds like nothing much changed actually, in terms of total (bus) bandwidth.
- sliken 3y agoYeah, up to DDR4 it's standard, or at least common to have 64 bit channels. But with DDR5 it's standard to have 2 32 bit channels per dimm. Unfortunately many confuse number of dimms with number of channels, which is wrong for DDR5.