LinkBack URL
About LinkBacksRead more.AMD Ryzen 3000 and AMD Athlon 300 series mobile processors are detailed.
Read more.AMD Ryzen 3000 and AMD Athlon 300 series mobile processors are detailed.
Heh, what's with the last generation APUs AMD? Those look like 28nm Stoney Ridge processors (Excavator) to me. Still, maybe AMD can sell them for $30 for these low end devices.
APUs have generally lagged a generation behind, it's 12nm. Not sure why they went 12nm instead of 7nm, maybe they are wanting to do an IF APU but it isn't ready yet.Originally Posted by sykobee
But these are great for budget based system builders and if they have a mobile version, they will be nice cheap general purpose boxes with some gaming capabilities.
It would appear that Excavator is now the Atom equivalent. Die size wise how would Zen and Excavator compare at the same process size, anyone know? A pity they are just re-rolling 28nm chips, it would have been interesting to see if they could improve the design.
....its 6 watts which is pretty amazing for 28nm tech also consider the graphics performance. Question: would you pick those or a celeron?
Definitely Excavator for a low-power laptop. The individual cores are much more capable than low-power celerons/atom cores and in this scenario I'm rarely doing heavy multitasking so more celeron/atom cores are useless to me.
Edit: For some background, I had the choice between a dual core AMD A6 something and a quad core atom for my laptop 6 months ago and went with the A6 for the above reasons + better graphics performance.
I suppose it all comes down to price.
AMD doesn't seem to have anything in the bottom end of the market netbook wise and the lack of AMD there has really sucked the life out of them. I cant believe how much money it takes to get to an okay basic machine nowadays.
IMNSHO these are the Q&A here
AMD must have loads of back-stock of Excavator lying around, because they simply weren't selling prior to the Ryzen launch. Don't forget they were shipping out A-series APUs free of charge so people could boot their new AM4 motherboards and update the BIOS.
It's pretty obvious that AMD never planned to fab a smaller Ryzen APU than Raven Ridge, and the dual core/SMT + Vega 3 version is already a massive cutdown of the full die (which let's remember is quad core with Vega 11). There always comes a point where it's no longer commercially viable to salvage for a cheaper part. So if they've got a lowest viable price for Raven Ridge that's too high for the extreme budget market, and a load of surplus Excavator dies kicking around, why not reissue them? Getting a few dollars each for that silicon is better than it going into landfill (or whatever happens to waste dies).
As to why not 7nm? Well, it looks like the APU range is designed to be running one process behind the desktop range - the Ryzen 2000 APUs were 14nm vs the 12nm desktop CPUs, and the Ryzen 3000 APUs will be 12nm while we expect the desktop 3000s to be 7nm. I guess that should mean we see 7nm APUs in a year or so for the 4000 series...
As someone who had to do this (and is currently in the process of having a new motherboard delivered, because the ASRock A320M Pro4 has driven me up the wall by this point in time) I should point out that they DID want those back. It seemed to me that AMD were quite unhappy with people who would just keep them and threatened not to offer such "kindnesses" in the future for said people. I was about 2-3 days over their time limit to send it back, but I did send it back, so their wrath was tempered...
In all honesty I also don't know what they do with so many used, uncared for APUs though, but your point about there being enough of them is taken.
Maybe - just maybe - they stripped them off the packaging and rebranded them as the A6 9220C and A4 9210C...
Rather than old stock laying around perhaps the 28nm chips help with the GlobalFoundries WSA? Without GF 7nm they've presumably still got to buy wafers of something?
Look, I was (am?) somewhat sleep deprived, but I was also under the impression that the USED chips aren't something AMD can repackage and sell without mentioning that someone already used them to transplant a BIOS out in the wild. (passing inhouse stability tests or otherwise)Maybe - just maybe - they stripped them off the packaging and rebranded them as the A6 9220C and A4 9210C...
Probably not, I was being somewhat sarcastic.
Hmmm, not sure. It's not like it's AMD's fault that GF aren't doing 7nm. I hadn't considered the WSA implications of that decision
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote