'AMD Cardinal' PC system relies on Xbox reject APUs

[HEXUS]

Cardinal motherboard features an 8C/16T 4700S processor, plus 16GB GDDR6 memory.

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[Rob_B]

I like it, not for £500, but I like it! Smaller prebuilts with discrete graphics are something I'm really interested in, just not for the current prices though, hopefully that'll come down when chip shortages are a distant memory.

[bae85]

£500 for all that is a great deal. I want one!

[LSG501]

Yeah I quite like it too, would prefer non soldered ram so I could at least have 32GB though....would make a great little render node if it came with an nvidia gpu and maybe a heavier duty cpu cooler.

[Rob_B]

So system memory is GDDR6, hence the soldering, only just clicked.

[Corky34]

Nice to see companies making use of what would've just been e-waste.

[Ozaron]

Seems like a great deal. What interests me though is whether you could swap the APU for something bigger, or tinker with bringing the onboard Navi to life..

[KultiVator]

Seems like a great deal. What interests me though is whether you could swap the APU for something bigger, or tinker with bringing the onboard Navi to life..

I would suspect the APU is soldered rather than in a ZIF socket (or similar)... so could be a lot of work and a bit risky unless you're a ninja with a soldering iron.

Fingers crossed for some Ryzen 5000G-series APUs making it into NUC-like enclosures in the near future though.

[DanceswithUnix]

Begs the question of whether it is AMD selling these chips, or if they were owned by Microsoft. Sold by Microsoft might explain the lack of built in graphics. Why would they want to enable a competitor, even if slightly slower?

That GPU could also be on an electrical x4 PCIe slot, I can't see it really needing 8 lanes let alone 16. That could make wiring up somewhat easier if it uses a x4 NVMe port to drive graphics.

[Kato-2]

An interesting curiosity the same thing was done recently with xbox one APU's though the GPU part was largely useless due to lack of driver support, a driver from 2017 is all that was provided.

[Millennium]

I hope this leads to more innovation around faster memory technology for PC, even as DDR5 is rolled out I'm sure there will be room for improvement. There will likely be some edge case uses for this that benefit greatly from the DDR5.

A little overpriced though, surely?

[lumireleon]

GDDR6 causes a LATENCY issue the size of Spectre.

[rave_alan]

Better use like this than to waste!! But I guess it will never be sold in Europe, and they have little chance - unknown brand.

[gagaga]

Interesting (similar boards are floating around with the Xbox One S chips too), but you're far better off with one of the Lenovo Tiny M75q-2 boxes instead. Price is about the same, 4750G, DIMM slots, NVMe slot and a sata bay and port. Also has the GPU functioning too.

[markzero]

I wonder what the power consumption is?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Interesting results for the Ryze 7 4700S against the Ryzen 7 4900HS:
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/am...s-mystery-chip

A Geekbench 5 submission (via Leakbench), which dates back to March 29, shows the AMD 4700S with an eight-core, 16-thread configuration and 8MB of L3 cache. The obscure processor's specifications coincide with mobile Renoir for sure. The AMD 4700S seemingly sports a 3.6 GHz base clock and 4 GHz boost clock. The desktop kit reportedly comes equipped with 16GB of memory as well.

The AMD 4700S scored 998 points and 8,589 points in the single-and multi-core benchmarks, respectively. For comparison, the Ryzen 9 4900HS, which is the Ryzen 4000 flagship, averaged 1,083 points in the single-core test and 6,994 points in the multi-core test. While the Ryzen 9 4900HS delivered up to 8.5% higher single-core performance, the AMD 4700S offered up to 22.8% higher multi-core performance.