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My pet gripe with AMD and Intel is that their APUs / gaming chips always over-index on CPU performance, and under-index on GPU performance. I get it, it’s a CP
by dannyw 3y ago
My pet gripe with AMD and Intel is that their APUs / gaming chips always over-index on CPU performance, and under-index on GPU performance.
I get it, it’s a CPU/SoC. But the end users care about FPS. Dedicate more of your die area to GPUs, and you’d crown the competition.
Steam Deck, and the PS5/Xbox chips are the sole exceptions; I wish those chips were available to consumers to buy.
Give me a quad core, or hexa core at most, with top of the line integrated graphics. The extra 4 cores are wasted die space for gamers.
- blackoil 3y agoHow big is the market? Anyone even little serious about gaming will get a dedicated GPU and they can't beat it no matter how much space they use. It will have weaker cpu that will hurt in many tasks. x86 isn't big in mobile form factor.
- 3abiton 3y agoIf you look right now at the homeserver market, it's getting larger and larger. With APUs, it could be a great bargain for a self-hosted PC console with decent steam deck like performance. Linux is getting spoiled with steam compatibility. I have one of those iGPUs, with around 15W idle, and their performance is surprisingly good for an old APU, on low settings for AAA games. You can check YouTube for some comparison.
- c0pium 3y ago> …homeserver market, it's getting larger and larger. Is that true? How are you measuring it?
- 3abiton 3y agoProxy kpis, like how many tech YouTubers are pivoting to the "check my home server you guys", and the popularity of home server desktop hardware (on the shopping sites I follow)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- diffeomorphism 3y agoThere are somewhat opposing goals between home servers (e.g. movies, many drives, low power consumption, stowed away) and gaming console-like pcs. A mini pc can be a good compromise but not the best at either.
- blackoil 3y agoHome Servers need not be very small. If gaming is primary objective, you can add a 3060/70 or similar, or old gaming laptop, otherwise like you said current iGPU also serve purpose. OPs idea is to sacrifice CPU cores for iGPU, i.e. a home server with weak CPU but powerful iGPU, that is a small niche.
- danbolt 3y agoI usually buy game consoles instead of fussing around with components, but I’d be incredibly tempted with something as convenient as that.
- c0pium 3y agoDo you own a Steamdeck?
- jorvi 3y agoYou can put together an ITX / SFF system with: - AM4 motherboard - 5800X3D - Aftermarket low profile CPU cooler - 3600MHz 16GB RAM - RTX 4060 Low Profile - 2TB NVMe SSD And it’d be smaller and much more powerful than a PS5. If you get the parts secondhand, it wouldn’t be that much more expensive either, especially once you factor in PS+ and how cheap Steam games are. The only hairs in the soup are SteamOS and Nvidia drivers. SteamOS doesn’t yet have a standalone install. You can work around that by installing ChimeraOS and having it launch Steam Big Picture on passwordless boot. Nvidia currently has relatively poor open source drivers, but nvVLK is rapidly improving, with probably good performance in a year or so. Your other option is hoping AMD or a board partner release a low profile card, but I don’t see that happening. Or the dark GPU horse that is Intel. You could also go for a larger case, which would allow you to fit a bigger GPU. Something like an AMD 6800 XT would deliver a 120FPS experience at 1440P and high/ultra settings, and do so quietly with an undervolt.
- nfriedly 3y agoFWIW, I have a desktop with an RTX 2070 and a handheld (GPD Win Mini) with a 7840U, which is essentially the same chip as the Z1 Extreme. I do nearly all of my gaming on the handheld these days. The desktop is way more powerful, but the handheld is powerful enough, and way more convenient.
- ngcc_hk 3y agoHave gdp4 and older winmax2-2022 and both run fine with fs2020. Hence unless I need to do Ai which need nvidia, it is all good for low resolution games.
- The_Colonel 3y agoI think the handhelds prove there's a market for mobile gaming. Thin and light 13" laptops would be a step up from those handhelds. I would be interested also because AMD has better support in Linux and their mobile GPUs are hard to find in laptops.
- izacus 3y agoThere is a market for mobile gaming, but machines like Razer Blade 14 and ASUS G14 are successfully cornering that market with powerful discrete GPUs. There's no big reason to manufacture iGPUs when a separate chip is much more performant and easier to cool. There's not that much demand for a mediocre-to-poor GPU that's more powerful than iGPUs of current era.
- The_Colonel 3y agoMost gamers game on mediocre to poor GPUs, which are still more powerful than the current iGPUs. My assumption is that such APU would be cheaper than the equivalent CPU + discrete GPU and there's a large demand for budget gaming (e.g. students). Ultimately we will see if/when the Strix Halo gets released, how priced it will be and how successful. I would likely buy a laptop with it.
- JonChesterfield 3y agoIt's not clear to me that discrete GPU's are inherently faster. Historically yes. You got 16gb or whatever on the card near the compute core. So what if you put 16gb of the same memory on the package with the APU instead? Shout out to PCIe for unhelpful latency characteristics and barely adequate atomics support as my primary objection to discrete GPUs. It's also plausible that games will become less demanding of the state of the art in GPU. If a playstation APU can play them beautifully, maybe a higher spec PC one will manage the same despite the OS and libraries overhead. I think dedicated GPUs are probably on their way out.
- DinaCoder99 3y ago> Anyone even little serious about gaming will get a dedicated GPU This is just not true—I do the vast majority of my gaming on my laptop and only switch to the dedicated GPU for super graphics-intensive games like city skylines. As usual, this attitude conflates "FPS-obsessed entitled divas" with "gamers"
- Tuna-Fish 3y agoThe lead APU of each generation usually wouldn't get meaningfully faster if you just spent more silicon on the GPU instead of the CPU. The fundamental problem here is that GPUs require more memory bandwidth than CPUs, the platforms are created for CPUs, resulting in a pretty hard cap on APU GPU performance using the same platform. Generational GPU performance gains on APUs happen when the platforms update to faster memory. The big break in this will be Strix Halo, coming from AMD either next year or late this year, as it will support 256-bit LPDDR5. Even using the fastest LPDDR5 available on the market, this will still just barely match the memory performance of Radeon 7600, the weakest current-gen discrete GPU AMD has on the market.
- rowanG077 3y agoAnd even then memory channels is not really a marketable term for OEMs so not much is done to get that in. Only enthusiast (and thus really expensive) laptops go with a large number of memory channels.
- wtallis 3y agoThere aren't any enthusiast laptops with more than a 128bit memory bus for the CPU, and memory channels and bus width are the wrong metrics to compare discrete GPUs where both width and clock speed vary widely across the entire product line.
- rowanG077 3y agoThis isn't at all about discrete GPUs, where did you get that from? This is about APU/iGPUs. In general memory channel are expensive so you won't see a new product with 8 channels running 3000Mhz memory speed or something like that. Also Apple laptops do have large memory busses. The Apple M1 Max chip for example has a 512bit memory bus.
- wtallis 3y agoI assumed when you said "Only enthusiast laptops go with a large number of memory channels" you intended to refer to something beyond just the MacBook Pro, because "enthusiast laptop" is usually used to describe a category that definitely includes a lot of laptops that aren't MacBook Pros, and only arguably includes some MacBook Pros. And if you did mean to refer specifically and only to MacBook Pros, there were plenty of more straightforward ways for you to do so.
- me551ah 3y agoIt already exists and it’s the “ Ryzen Z1 Extreme” The Ryzen Z1 Extreme uses AMD’s high-end Zen 4 APU configuration, with eight Zen 4 cores and six RDNA 3 WGPs. The ROG Ally uses it and you can dedicate 50% of the memory to the GPU and it performs quite well.
- nfriedly 3y agoTo be fair, I think the complaint of wanting more GPU and less CPU is reasonable, even in the context of the Z1 Extreme. 2 less CPU cores in exchange for more GPU cores, cache, and/or memory bandwidth would make it a more gaming oriented chip. The RX 7600, AMD's lowest-end current-gen graphics card, has several times more CUs and memory bandwidth, so I think there's some room for improvement without undercutting their dGPU business. The Z1 Extreme is essentially the same chip as the 7840U, AMD's highest tier U-series (15~30W) chip. In other words, it's a general-purpose design, not specifically gaming oriented.
- klausa 3y agoAs a potential counterpoint — this is exactly how (baseline) PS4/Xbox One APUs were; and in turned out to be an extremely wrong bet!
- fulafel 3y agoAMD got burned when they did it the other way around in the Kaveri (2014) era, when they bet on unified memory, transparently passing pointers between gpu/cpu with unified virtual memory etc, and hoped that software would start to utilize GPUs more with OpenCL and other vendor neutral APIs providing portability.
- rldjbpin 3y agomodern consoles do not only run games, but by design have to support background tasks. iirc both xbox and playstation now uses some form of virtualization to run games, while the "hypervisor" is also doing other tasks such as capturing highlights, etc. while there are gpu-accelerated workloads for some of it, as per my understanding cpu is still used for these scenarios. so it is better to think that only a part of the cpu is dedicated for running the game, so you'd need more cores than otherwise.
- stodor89 3y agoThis is done on purpose. They've put so much effort into bullying casual gamers to splurge $300+ on a GPU. Why release a $150 SoC that's good enough for 95% of people? Free market, my ***!