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Maybe it's me but AMD could really do with simplifying now....
Apart from the obvious reason of charging more for the pro, why couldn't the non pro's have these features and just have one chip do everything. It's not like those extra layers of security (main selling point) couldn't help a home user.
Would a gamer pay for those pro features though? I'm guessing not....Originally Posted by LSG501
And to be fair whilst many don't admit it price is still king for a lot of folks otherwise Intel would still be on 4c tops
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
If there was only one version of each cpu, economies of scale etc come in and the price difference likely wouldn't be as big... there would only be one price to consider too and that would be dictated by competition etc like it is now.
There are elements where product stack separation is necessary, if they didn't have an "enterprise" SKU then it will actually be harmful when they want to get into OEMs to get into Enterprise sales.
They do only have one chip, in silicon term - those features will be baked in. But providing them properly means a whole heap of extra support, which is what the Pro pricing actually buys you - longer terms, more responsivity, better channels for contacts (via your OEM, usually), different driver update cycles - all the stuff that's needed for business-critical hardware. Strip out the support guarantees and you can charge less for the chip, which is what the OEMs selling to normal consumers want.
I see it differently.... or would look at it differently at least if it was me. There isn't enough difference in the hardware to support another naming convention in my opinion, it's already bad enough with '4000 series' with gpu's literally being 3000 series with a gpu stuck on....
If it's all about the 'support' which goes with it (although from what I've seen on reddit, that's not exactly great), sell the 'pro' services as an add on, you can likely get more doing it via a 'subscription model', it's basically what MS does with windows so it's not like it's unusual approach in big enterprise.
That's because you're not a large technology manufacturer who get the majority of their business from huge OEMs (at least, I assume you're not).
A big chunk of processor naming and marketing is dictated by what OEMs want. It's the biggest driver behind mobile GPU branding, which is why my 2 year old laptop claims to have a "Radeon 530" GPU rather than admitting it basically has an R7 250, which was already 4 years old at the time. Dell do not want to let on they're putting 4 year old hardware in their laptops.
Similarly, when an OEM is selling 10,000 desktops to a major enterprise customer, they want them to think they're getting something better than an off-the-shelf consumer desktop. So they require Intel and AMD to differentiate the products going in those enterprise desktops. Intel do it by distinguishing the platform (vPro), AMD do it by distinguishing the processors. Either way, it's driven by the OEMs.
From AMD's point of view there's one very good reason to diverge product naming and model numbers in the Pro range - they're trying to make up a big market-share gap to Intel in that space. Making a clear difference between their consumer and enterprise products is going to play well in those markets - if you've got a Ryzen 7 Pro 4750G, that's clearly different to a Ryzen 7 4700G. Intel's offering there is a Core i7-10700 vPro, versus a Core i7-10700 - not such a clear distinction.
I still don't see a reason why they can't just make one 'version' and then up sell it with 'services' rather than multiple versions with different branding and at best minimal variation. More choice of hardware for the enterprise clients and potentially long term income from 'subscription' versus one time profit on sale of cpu, seeing as a lot of the benefit from the pro is support such as 'better drivers' to fix compatibility issues etc.
I don't even want to go down the gpu lineup, that's even more daft imo (and not just on AMD's side).... but that does raise another thing in that what happens if they ever add a 'radeon pro' gpu instead of just a radeon, albeit unlikely...
I'm used to the nomenclature in laptops of having products labelled as a later generation, but having Ryzen 4000 in the name for a desktop CPU feels strange. But if an OEM started selling this as a Ryzen 3xxx then by the time the products came out, Zen 3 Ryzen 4xxx would of been released and punters will see this as old like scary Jim said.
Perhaps you are underestimating the engineering effort involved here. If bolting a CPU and GPU together to make an APU were trivial, then they would come out at the same time as the CPU that these APUs are based on. Sadly they can't release the product early and then tune the thermals and performance with software updates because people only remember the benchmarks at release.
I do think the Pro line could be done better. Part of it is the guarantee of availability for years to come for those big corporates that want to standardise on just a couple of PC builds to their IT support can respond to all IT problems by simple re-imaging Windows onto the user's PC which is made a whole lot harder if the hardware spec of PCs changes every time they buy one and IT have to maintain more than a couple of rolling Windows images. That seems fair enough, but the guarantee of these parts being around for 2 years seems laughably short for that.
My pet peeve here is that the ECC memory support is only in the Pro APU models. Most office PCs don't use ECC ram, I've only seen it used in the HP Microservers. Even that would be fine if I could buy a new Pro APU, but so far I have only seen pulls available on Ebay which isn't something I feel comfortable using in a machine where I care enough about data integrity to bother with ECC ram.
I notice the Pro APUs are already listed as compatible with my B550 motherboard, but interestingly not the normal ones. I guess that shows that Asus think these parts are worth extra effort, so they must see some OEMs lining up to use them already.
I'm not underestimating the engineering side of things, I know it's not easy to get thermals low even though ryzen is modular in it's design.... this is purely from a marketing stand point that it's confusing for the non techy consumer imo, at least on the desktop where they even use the same socket, because they could think they're getting a 'better' cpu than the current 3000 desktop, when it's basically the same. I'm sure there will be some 'first time builders' out there who will buy a desktop 4000G cpu over a 3000 model and then stick a pcie gpu in the motherboard too.
Also pretty sure non pro ryzens do support ecc, it's just not listed anywhere or 'officially' supported, I know it used to be the case and a quick google seems to say it's still the same deal with ryzen 3000 series.
Yes someone could choose a 4300G based on the big number, but at that point it all comes down to pricing as to whether we can cry foul given that these aren't bad chips. When the 4000 series CPUs come out then we should be back to something like the "do you choose 3400G or 3600" style easy choice where more money gets you a faster part.
The problem here is that we just can't get the CPU and APU parts released at the same time unless you want AMD to artificially hold one of them back. Either they design the APU and then retro fit the core to a CPU, or do it this way around.
That comment was aimed at the APU chips. I have a 3600 downstairs happily reporting ECC enabled and no flipped bits, but the APUs have this ability disabled unless you get the Pro version:
You do need an Asus or Asrock motherboard for it to work.Code:[root@gate ~]# edac-util -v mc0: 0 Uncorrected Errors with no DIMM info mc0: 0 Corrected Errors with no DIMM info mc0: csrow2: 0 Uncorrected Errors mc0: csrow2: mc#0csrow#2channel#0: 0 Corrected Errors mc0: csrow2: mc#0csrow#2channel#1: 0 Corrected Errors mc0: csrow3: 0 Uncorrected Errors mc0: csrow3: mc#0csrow#3channel#0: 0 Corrected Errors mc0: csrow3: mc#0csrow#3channel#1: 0 Corrected Errors edac-util: No errors to report.
Last edited by DanceswithUnix; 23-07-2020 at 01:11 PM.
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