AM4 Boards are out

[moab]

BIOSTAR drew first blood.



So excited AMD finally got something that brings back real competition.
AM3+ and FM2's are both garbage. The last AMD processor I owned was Phenom II.

[flearider]

out of where ???
do you have a sales site .. if not then asus and gigabyte ,asrock have them also https://videocardz.com/

[stevie lee]

hmm.. following a few links. fleariders, then clicking on the biostar article https://videocardz.com/66089/biostar...yzen-announced , and at the bottom we get a list of links to the biostar site with loads of product details.

including http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/...#specification

it has the memory and CPU support. not seen that posted on hexus yet (?)

CPU SUPPORT AMD A-series APU / Ryzen CPU / NPU for Socket AM4
Maximum CPU TDP (Thermal Design Power) : 95Watt

MEMORY Support Dual Channel DDR4 2667/ 2400/ 2133/ 1866 MHz
4 x DDR4 DIMM Memory Slot
Max. Supports up to 64GB Memory
* DDR4 2667 for AMD Ryzen CPU

whats an NPU?

and I would've thought they'd at least do 2800mhz ram support.

the drivers download page http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/en/mb/...D=874#download also works. if anyone fancies poking around in the files for chipset feature readme.txts to try and figure out what XFR is or what the X chips actually do

[Jonj1611]

whats an NPU?

Network Processor?

[DanceswithUnix]

Network Processor?

Neural Processing Unit? Skynet starts here

[Jonj1611]

Lol, AMD did say they were working on something new hmmmmmm

[moab]

out of where ???
do you have a sales site .. if not then asus and gigabyte ,asrock have them also https://videocardz.com/

no i don't, thanks for the link

[scaryjim]

Network Processor?

This is the most recent usage if you google AMD NPU - in conection with their SeaMicro purchase a few years ago. That said, AMD canned the SeaMicro business a couple of years ago, so it would be a backwards step if they went that way.

Neural Processing Unit? Skynet starts here

That'd fit with the current direction of AMD, but would raise lots of questions about what it'd consist of. ARM cores plus Vega SPs? Or just an ordinary APU with the video outs turned off?

The other common use of NPU was back in the 386 days, for "Numeric Processing Unit" - a GPU-core only AM4 socket chip for multu-socket systems perhaps? Although it seems unlikely that AM4 will be multi-way, and I don't think it's currently possible to run an OS just on GPUs (although no doubt it could be made to happen)...

[Bagnaj97]

Neural Processing Unit? Skynet starts here

An APU with more focus on IGP for neural net training? Minimal/downclocked Zen/ARM to boot an OS, and more shaders etc than a regular APU.
I could see something along those lines being of use, but more in embedded environments (Self driving cars etc). Stick one in a regular motherboard for development purposes though...

[EndlessWaves]

Possibly something like Intel's silvermont-based Rangeley 'communication processors'?

[scaryjim]

Thining about how many shaders you might be able to get into an AM4 chip, it just occurred to me that we have die area figures from the horses mouth for Ryzen cores and their associated caches: http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/10227...ompact-intels/

According to that, the 4-core complex is 44mm², the L2 caches will total 6mm², and the associated 8MB of L3 cache is 16mm². That's a grand total of 66mm². Polaris 11 is 123mm² - almost twice as big.

Now, obviously an APU won't need the GDDR5 memory controller, and I suspect there's other resources that will end up shared between CPU cores and GPU cores, but I wonder if that puts doubt on a 1024-shader APU? Will it exist but be devoid of L3 cache? From what I've read Zen is kind of tuned for efficient cache usage that the L3 is a big part of, so that might not be great. Or will they have a bigger die for the APUs?

What an interesting diversion from "NPU"...

[shaithis]

Hoping the NPU isn't "neural".......it seems the term IPU (Intelligent Processing Unit) has already been is use for a while....and NPU was used for network as far back as a decade ago....so, AMDs answer to the killer nic (lol) or AMD muddying the already murky waters of computing acronyms....

[stevie lee]

had a 'thing you only think about when just nodding off' thought about NPU

look at the slide AMD showed, where it has the next few years of releases on it.

on that, theres NAVI and Nextgen/Nexgen listed.

got a feeling its just that. which will also mean that they're using AM4 aswell.

except that was the GPU releases.


but.....



the CPU one, shows that they have 12 Next Gen GFX cores.

so I stand by, it just means Nextgen Processing Unit.

[Beattie97]

are you sure they are out i was having a look on amazon and i don't see nothing. can't wait for people to bench it tho

[moab]

are you sure they are out i was having a look on amazon and i don't see nothing. can't wait for people to bench it tho

not actually out as out, it will be available in the market by march 3rd

[flearider]

all on preorder in uk
worked out my system last night £900 .. ouch lol