AMD Zen APU Featuring HBM Spotted

[Orangey]

The NX hardware will have been chosen & qualified long ago. It's not Zen.

 

[pmc25]

With samsung also manufacturing for them, we could also see Zen APU's coming out in the Nintendo NX first.

Highly unlikely. Apple will get priority.

The NX hardware will have been chosen & qualified long ago. It's not Zen.

If it's not Zen, it's K12 / cluster of A72 cores. It definitely will not be based on any of the old x86 earth moving or cat architectures.

 

[pmc25]

Seems like the schedule may have been shunted forward again.

Zen APU now marked as '16 in a recent slide.

https://twitter.com/blueisviolet/status/682619647372296193

Would be killer for AMD if they could ship a Zen HBM APU in '16 in volume ... any response from Intel would be 2+ years away.

 

[Emlyn_Dewar]

Would be an instant buy for me, assuming ITX motherboards were released at the same time.
Until its listed online, and in stock, then all the news is just rumour!

 

[drunkenmaster]

The NX hardware will have been chosen & qualified long ago. It's not Zen.

THat doesn't really mean anything, qualification in no way means it can only happen on an only already released product. From what I recall the current gen consoles were the first to use Jaguar, launched what, late 2013 with Kabini only making it to market something like 6 months later? Absolutely no reason at all a product coming out sometime late this year or next year can't feature Zen. I don't think it will but your reasoning is very much wrong.

I honestly can't remember what the GPU's in the consoles were but IIRC one of both of them had tweaked GCN feature set that was a bit ahead of what was on desktop, though obviously less powerful.

 

[drunkenmaster]

That is the thing though, the cooling is not adequate for the capabilities of the chips being used. The gpu parts could easily run at 1ghz and the cpu cores running higher than the 1.8ghz i think they run at.

There was a lot of issues on launch with PS4's and xbox ones overheating, they also tun very warm. Just like previous consoles, it's also a matter of them doing a **** job on the thermal paste.

Considering the Cooler on my sapphire 7870 is not that big, they could have used far better coolers and run the chips at higher clocks.

That isn't really how it works, it's a case of yield, costs and performance. Say they wanted $90 a chip and AMD can only achieve that cost at 1.8Ghz cpu/800Mhz gpu, if they wanted to spend $120 then they can bin a little better meaning throwing away a few more chips or go even slower and get a little cheaper.

Once that is determined then as always manufacturers will get away with as cheap as possible cooling to a point they think failures will be low. The clock speeds aren't set by the cooling, the cooling is matched as closely(cheaply) as possible to the clock targets.

Manufacturers are money saving, cheap little ***** and would save 7p on a cooler if they could get away with it. There is nothing stopping both consoles from being near silent except it's not high on the list of priorities and to hit a lets say $400 price point they'd make $10 less if they spent $10 more on a chip because charging $410 and telling everyone it's quieter is apparently too complex, these people are morons.

That is basically what caused the RROD, MS overshot the money saving and cost themselves well over a billion in replacements hence they are no where near that limit this time. Sony found the limit well last time and felt confident doing it again. I'd happily have paid $10 more for the PS4 with a $10 better cooler in there.

 

[Orangey]

When Nintendo were shopping, Zen was still on the drawing board. Jim Keller hadn't even finished with it. They only just got test silicon back.

 

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The PS4 had the first implementation of an 8 ACE GCN1.1 chip before the R9 290 was officially launched. Even the HD7790 is a two ACE chip like the HD7970. So,I don't see why it it won't be possible for the NX to have Zen cores.

However,being a console,it wouldn't surprise me for cost reasons Nintendo would probably go with something closer to PS4 hardware,which also has the advantage of being able to get the cross platform ports much more easily than if they went with a new generation CPU and GPU.

The last time they ever went cutting edge was with the N64.

 

[kitch9]

That is the thing though, the cooling is not adequate for the capabilities of the chips being used. The gpu parts could easily run at 1ghz and the cpu cores running higher than the 1.8ghz i think they run at.

There was a lot of issues on launch with PS4's and xbox ones overheating, they also tun very warm. Just like previous consoles, it's also a matter of them doing a **** job on the thermal paste.

Considering the Cooler on my sapphire 7870 is not that big, they could have used far better coolers and run the chips at higher clocks.

Why don't you ask Sony for a job, you appear to have all the answers?

 

[drunkenmaster]

When Nintendo were shopping, Zen was still on the drawing board. Jim Keller hadn't even finished with it. They only just got test silicon back.

Test silicon means it wasn't on the drawing board. It costs millions to tape out a chip and get test silicon back, it is worthless doing it till the chip is done. The only changes past the first silicon is fixes, nothing architectural unless there are massive massive problems.

Also again, both of the current consoles were pretty much locked in 18-24 months before release when Jaguar was at the same stage Zen is, maybe even further behind considering when it looks like NX will launch. Jaguar hit desktops 5-6 months after the consoles launched, NX will probably launch after the Zen FX chips are out, maybe before Zen APU are out.

 

[Orangey]

I think you'll agree Zen is a different beast than Jaguar, seems to me they would have much higher confidence selling Jag on spec.

 

[drunkenmaster]

I think you'll agree Zen is a different beast than Jaguar, seems to me they would have much higher confidence selling Jag on spec.

Absolutely wouldn't agree. You're talking about validation and ability to ship a product, nothing more or less. It's actually very likely they'd have significantly more confidence in Zen.

Zen will be an HSA architecture from the get go, it will have been made with HBM/on die memory in mind, so it's made with a shared memory concept and coherency to start with and even the 'standard' level APU is going to be console level this gen.

Jaguar is no less complex than any other architecture, it doesn't need less taping out or less validation than any other chip. However both the PS4 and even more so the Xbox 1 chip were things that Jaguar weren't built for. One, Jaguar and the standard desktop chip weren't remotely design with that amount of GPU power in mind, that means the chip needed heavy internal bandwidth improvements to cope with the data moving. Both chips had various extra blocks added and because they needed shared memory they had to add coherency layers and extra architecture. The Xbox chip had a whole bunch of other crap added on top, super low latency connection for Kinect, the on die cache and extra coherency layers due to that.

A Zen based APU in a console today would be dramatically closer to the normal shipping desktop product than the normal Jaguar and the chips that shipped in the previous consoles.

EDIT:- Oh, and missed the even most cripplingly obvious one, the consoles released as 8 core Jaguars along with all the other changes, a quad core would have been wholly insufficient and they use a fair amount of power. A Zen will launch in both at least 8 core non APUs and at least 4 core APUs. It's very likely a basically bog standard desktop Zen quad core APU will match the consoles in CPU and power, that is effectively off the shelf. HSA has also been finalised, Zen will certainly be HSA compatible, that means there is an infrastructure already there and waiting for adding extra IP blocks into Zen as a semi custom part with a dramatically smaller amount of work than the PS4/Xbox 1 chips too. While PS4 is supposedly HSA compatible, other companies making other blocks that were required wouldn't necessarily have the capability or want to produce an HSA compatible block. Arm now support HSA properly as well so combining a bog standard say 80W Zen APU with a simple cheap $10 custom Arm core when both can communicate and work together easily is just a massively simplified prospect.

The idea of a standard quad core Zen APU is going to end up monumentally easier to implement than a very customized Jaguar from two years ago. If they wanted silly power even adding a 8 core Zen FX and then sticking a normal Zen APU to it is pretty much just a die size increase, but the reality is they likely just want to match the current consoles for both cheapness, time to market and making it easy for third party devs to support them(because games will port across with ease to something with similar power). So A quad core 4Ghz Zen will easily surpass a 1.8Ghz 8 core Jaguar and the gpu within a 14nm Zen APU will be pretty much console level power but with newer next gen features and more DX12 support.