Details about AMD's low-power low-cost Van Gogh APU emerge

[HEXUS]

YouTuber reckons the laptop APU will feature 4x Zen 2 cores and up to 10x RDNA 2 CUs.

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[kompukare]

These rumours look wrong to me.
So the are supposed to have done the work for RDNA2 but stuck to Zen 2 cores?
Surely Renoir and removing 4 Zen2 cores would have made far more sense.

[Corky34]

These rumours look wrong to me.
So the are supposed to have done the work for RDNA2 but stuck to Zen 2 cores?
Surely Renoir and removing 4 Zen2 cores would have made far more sense.

Some people suspect they're based on the PlayStation and Xbox Soc's, at least that's what was reported last month based on an AMD's engineers posting a Linux boot log.

[bae85]

These rumours look wrong to me.
So the are supposed to have done the work for RDNA2 but stuck to Zen 2 cores?
Surely Renoir and removing 4 Zen2 cores would have made far more sense.

What's wrong with Zen 2? It's plenty fast enough and if they can manufacture a cheap, low power variant and use it in a mainstream laptop, it'll still be better than whatever Intel can do with their current tech.

[DanceswithUnix]

I'm sure the dual core Athlon 3000 series die started off as an embedded part for controlling advertising displays etc. That might explain the oddball look of these.

[kompukare]

Some people suspect they're based on the PlayStation and Xbox Soc's, at least that's what was reported last month based on an AMD's engineers posting a Linux boot log.

Would be nice if all under-yielding console parts didn't go to landfill.
Sony are now boasting they sold 7.6 million up to end of Q1 (2021-03-31), and expecting to sell 14.8 million over the next full year.
As they were meant to have had really poor yields compared to Microsoft with the bigger die (Sony pushed the clocks at the last minute after they found out Microsoft had gone for CUs), there must be millions of chips already which could be binned rather than binned.
In the Sony mix there could be anything from fully working dies which couldn't hit Sony's clocks, to variants like 6 to 4 cores with various amounts of functional CUs.

What's wrong with Zen 2? It's plenty fast enough and if they can manufacture a cheap, low power variant and use it in a mainstream laptop, it'll still be better than whatever Intel can do with their current tech.

Maybe because of product segmentation or lead time, but a Zen2 CCD is around 72mm² while the Zen3 CDD is around 84mm². So half of that is a difference of 4mm². Which is not going to make any Zen2 based APU much cheaper to make.

[loftie]

Maybe because of product segmentation or lead time, but a Zen2 CCD is around 72mm² while the Zen3 CDD is around 84mm². So half of that is a difference of 4mm². Which is not going to make any Zen2 based APU much cheaper to make.

IIRC, the video suggests they will be using one CCX, not one CCD. That's the size difference.

[bae85]

Maybe because of product segmentation or lead time, but a Zen2 CCD is around 72mm² while the Zen3 CDD is around 84mm². So half of that is a difference of 4mm². Which is not going to make any Zen2 based APU much cheaper to make.

Might be a business decision mainly... who knows.

[kompukare]

IIRC, the video suggests they will be using one CCX, not one CCD. That's the size difference.

Of course, all their APUs have always been monolithic.
The comparison of Zen 2 versus Zen 3 was to guess how much space they're saving by going with the Zen 2 cores.
BTW, the Renoir versus Cezanne is 156mm² and 175mm², which would imply that Zen3 would be 10mm² extra for four cores, Cezanne doubles the L3 cache from 8MB to 16MB which makes it harder to calculate the CPU size changes.

[[GSV]Trig]

Why would they sue the FF3 socket?

[philehidiot]

binned rather than binned.

I rather enjoyed that.

As for Zen 2 and 10 CUs, I'd buy one in a laptop if the price was right. I think Zen 2 is plenty for most uses you'll see in a laptop. For high end stuff I'd want Zen 3 absolutely as you're paying a fair bit and you get the rewards towards the end of the useful life. The biggest issue I'd have here is 4 cores and whether it's enough but again - price is king. I currently have two cores on my laptop. Four is moar better.

[kompukare]

I rather enjoyed that.

Yes, was considering highlighting that somewhat with [sic] or something, but decided against it.

Yes, obviously if the price is right Zen 2 is still a great performer.

Just hope the reason wasn't segmentation as that is a very dangerous road to go down on (I would argue that Intel's obsession led to them turning down Apple for the iPhone manufacturing, caused Atom to be so neglected that even thrown billions away on contra revenue could revive it, and saw Intel overtaken by TSMC).

[DanceswithUnix]

It is as likely just the current semiconductor industry mess getting AMD to just ship what they can, and this is something they had.

Segmentation doesn't make that much sense atm. I did get the impression from somewhere that the Zen3 APUs went really well, if this didn't and was late then the rate new parts are coming out...

I'm struggling with the idea that this is come console cast off though. Laptops are a pain to design, and benefit from standard pinouts. I can't see a console part fitting a standard laptop motherboard, so who would use it?

[Corky34]

I'm struggling with the idea that this is come console cast off though. Laptops are a pain to design, and benefit from standard pinouts. I can't see a console part fitting a standard laptop motherboard, so who would use it?

I don't think it's a cast off as that TPU article says it's based on console chips so i assume they tweaked that design and spun it into a new chip.

[DanceswithUnix]

I don't think it's a cast off as that TPU article says it's based on console chips so i assume they tweaked that design and spun it into a new chip.

That doesn't really make any sense though.

AMD made the games console SoCs by taking GPU and CPU elements from their currently library of designs, and customising them.

Why on earth would you re-customise something? By the time you have undone some of the custom bits, you could have just started off back at the company library of IP blocks and started putting things together from there onto a clean sheet which is far less error prone.

[Corky34]

That doesn't really make any sense though.

AMD made the games console SoCs by taking GPU and CPU elements from their currently library of designs, and customising them.

Why on earth would you re-customise something? By the time you have undone some of the custom bits, you could have just started off back at the company library of IP blocks and started putting things together from there onto a clean sheet which is far less error prone.

I would imagine for the same reason Intel have been re-customising the Core design for the last decade or so. I'm not going to pretend to know their reasons but a Van Gogh chip using RDNA 2 is defiantly a thing.