APU future

[MasterOC]

Are we likely to get APUs from AMD or intel in the near future that actually rival console specifications , they can obviously do it on mass for semi-custom designs , so why do we not see something that revolutionary in the PC space ?

 

[Martini1991]

Are we likely to get APUs from AMD or intel in the near future that actually rival console specifications , they can obviously do it on mass for semi-custom designs , so why do we not see something that revolutionary in the PC space ?

At the moment you've got the whole memory bandwidth bottleneck for starters.
And then it's the cost aspect of it as well.

You'd basically just have to see AMD release a full set up, but then that's what the consoles are.

 

[Donnie Fisher]

Its cause it is semi custom. Its likely a proprietary socket in a console Which will likely have a larger footprint.

At the moment a CPU socket has to handle both cpu and apu. if you make a socket that is larger for a bigger portion of GPU , then for the CPU only its wasted space.... Which impacts on motherboard space etc etc.


Plus I just don't think the market is there for it. Apus fill a gap for most business and simple needs.... Anyone who wants more is far more likely to go discrete or console.

 

[jigger]

We've had APU's with RX570 performance for some time.

 

[Martini1991]

We've had APU's with RX570 performance for some time.

Not on desktop we haven't .

 

[Freddie1980]

Are we likely to get APUs from AMD or intel in the near future that actually rival console specifications , they can obviously do it on mass for semi-custom designs , so why do we not see something that revolutionary in the PC space ?

There's a custom PC/type console that some Chinese company has made that has specs somewhere between an Xbox one and Xbox One X https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/274805-amd-announces-new-custom-apu-for-chinese-game-consoles, with a Zen CPU instead of a crappy Jaguar that the consoles have been lumbered with.

It would be nice if AMD launched this custom made chip as a standalone product, the problem is you need really fast ram or GDDR to avoid bottlenecks (even with high speed DDR 4 modules I'm not sure just how viable that would be but would be interesting to find out) and there really expensive and the point of an APU is to be able to provide just the one chip at a low cost. One solution in the future and provided it ever becomes cheap enough is to make an APU with onboard HBM to act as a cache between the APU and the main memory.

 

[DragonQ]

I'd be surprised if Renoir wasn't 8c/16t + Navi in a nice little APU package that provided essentially PS5-like performance. Won't be out for nearly a year though.

 

[4K8KW10]

Intel is well ahead with the notebooks chips, offering for quite some time a 6C/12T chip for the OEMs.
I don't know why AMD is so weak with their offerings in that segment.

This particular launch turns out to be so uninteresting for Intel, that it might very well be possible they won't answer it.

 

[davida76]

There's a custom PC/type console that some Chinese company has made that has specs somewhere between an Xbox one and Xbox One X https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/274805-amd-announces-new-custom-apu-for-chinese-game-consoles, with a Zen CPU instead of a crappy Jaguar that the consoles have been lumbered with.

Unfortunately it's completely crippled by the genius idea of only allocating 2gb of vram. I'd love to make an apu gaming machine too but the performance just isn't there yet, well for me personally at least. 1080p medium / high is the sweet spot or you may as well go ps4.

 

[LePhuronn]

Let's go old school and bring back Sideport RAM! 4GB HBM2 stacked nicely next to the CPU socket should do the trick.

Or hell, just stack some HBM2 on top of the I/O die for the GPU chiplet, job done.

 

[alexakasloth]

Unfortunately it's completely crippled by the genius idea of only allocating 2gb of vram. I'd love to make an apu gaming machine too but the performance just isn't there yet, well for me personally at least. 1080p medium / high is the sweet spot or you may as well go ps4.

If that is the Subor Z+ then it appears to have binned.

 

[Freddie1980]

Let's go old school and bring back Sideport RAM! 4GB HBM2 stacked nicely next to the CPU socket should do the trick.

Or hell, just stack some HBM2 on top of the I/O die for the GPU chiplet, job done.

But that would add £100+ of cost to the chip at which point it commercially unviable against a CPU and standalone video card with GDDR.

 

[LePhuronn]

But that would add £100+ of cost to the chip at which point it commercially unviable against a CPU and standalone video card with GDDR.

Well no. 8GB HBM2 was reportedly around $160 back in 2017, so we could easily see $60 for 4GB today. So $60 for 4GB HBM2 vs a graphics card with 4GB RAM and comparable to the APU's performance and you're on equal money (assuming you can even get such a graphics card for $60).

But then try fitting a graphics card into a Thin ITX case or HTPC case like the Streacom F1C or Antec ISK 110 or 300. Plus, office PCs don't need full size cases and the footprint can shrink even more with VESA mounted units and there's no space for a graphics card in them (although admittedly such machines don't need a lot of graphics grunt so the existing RAM bottleneck on APUs isn't much of a deal anyway).

There are plenty of applications which require or benefit from decent graphics performance which don't have the space to fit a graphics card, and such use cases would carry a bit of a premium anyway so it's trivial to transfer the money usually spent on a graphics card into stacking HBM2 onto an APU, or SidePort-style RAM.

 

[Panos]

Are we likely to get APUs from AMD or intel in the near future that actually rival console specifications , they can obviously do it on mass for semi-custom designs , so why do we not see something that revolutionary in the PC space ?

Around Xmas there are the Zen 2 + Navi based APUs coming out.