AMD Launches Ryzen 7020 C-Series - Continues Pushing Zen 2 For Chromebooks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Launches Ryzen 7020 C-Series - Continues Pushing Zen 2 For Chromebooks

AMD today announced the Ryzen 7020 C-series processors. These processors are interesting for at least having integrated RDNA2 graphics but are based on the aging Zen 2 architecture...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Ryzen-7020-C-Series

[Ironmask]

What is the goal of making new chips with old architectures? Getting a better investment from the tooling and R&D it took to make the architecture?

[agd5f]

What is the goal of making new chips with old architectures? Getting a better investment from the tooling and R&D it took to make the architecture?

Each part is tailored to the market it is serving. Not every market requires the latest CPU or GPU cores or the expense of a newer node.

[Adarion]

Well, that might help getting Coreboot on more Zens, which is a good thing. And,indeed, Chromebooks hardly ever used the most recent stuff. These boxes are rather affordable and low energy devices.

[Mitch]

What is the goal of making new chips with old architectures? Getting a better investment from the tooling and R&D it took to make the architecture?

From what I know about chip manufacturing, they have varying capacities and costs at varying fabrication standards. You may find 7nm is cheaper and more available than 5nm. So instead of relying solely on binning your 5nm, you can produce 7nm chips and sell those at a much lower price to people who don't need the top shelf chips. And rather than put your engineers through the arduous task of making 7nm versions of your latest processors, you modify or reuse existing blueprints of previous hardware already designed at that fabrication.

You might do the above in combination of rebranding and price dropping old stock. You might also be mixing your integrated GPUs between new and old CPUs (as with the Steam Deck mixing RDNA2 with Zen2, which are at least 1 generation apart).

Top-shelf and best fabrication is limited in capacity and very expensive for every company that's not vertically integrated. I think AMD is doing one or both of the two things above in light of the manufacturing bottlenecks.

[bridgman]

What is the goal of making new chips with old architectures? Getting a better investment from the tooling and R&D it took to make the architecture?

Between Zen2 and Zen3 we moved from 4-core CCDs to 8-core... and this market does not need a lot of cores.

Going with Zen3 or higher would have either meant shipping a lot of inactive silicon or a major design/layout effort to create a 4-core CCD, and neither of those are desirable for a cost-sensitive market.

[kylew77]

Cries in wants a high end Chromebook market. I got a nice 17inch Chromebook for less than $400 dollars awhile back, only problem is it has 8GB of RAM and a 4 core Jasper Lake processor. It sucks all around, which is a shame because Chromebooks are some of the finest, least buggy, Linux laptops out there. Plus they have a security record that rivals OpenBSD because of how locked down they are. I would gladly pay $600 or $700 for a full featured Chromebook with 32GB of RAM and an 8 or 16 core processor!

[torsionbar28]

What is the goal of making new chips with old architectures? Getting a better investment from the tooling and R&D it took to make the architecture?

Chromebook is a highly cost optimized market. Regardless of who supplies the CPU, intel or AMD, the parts are going to be principally focused on hitting a tight price target above all else.

[gukin]

Those processors sound intriguing, I just got a Thinkpad Chromebook 13" for $150, it had one of those two core Athlons with a 3CU Vega GPU, I'd sulk but that chromebook is the best $150 new computer I've ever bought.

That said, I also bought a beelink N100 (Alder Lake) mini-pc to play with and found that the GPU was about on par with an older AMD Kaveri 7850k but the CPU was considerably faster; also the N100 could do 4K 60Hz while the Kaveri could only do 30Hz. The GPU was good enough for Half-life 2 but a little too slow for HL2 Episode 2. Still the Beelink N100 was one of the best $190 general purpose computers with 16GB of RAM and 500 GB of storage I've bought.

I'll bet that one of those AMD 7320s could spank the N100 CPU, GPU and power-wise.

[Jabberwocky]

Correction thanks to nrganger: 7020 series in fact does use LPDRR5 and 6nm fab. The 7030 series is the one that uses DDR4 and 7nm fab.

Cries in wants a high end Chromebook market. I got a nice 17inch Chromebook for less than $400 dollars awhile back, only problem is it has 8GB of RAM and a 4 core Jasper Lake processor. It sucks all around, which is a shame because Chromebooks are some of the finest, least buggy, Linux laptops out there. Plus they have a security record that rivals OpenBSD because of how locked down they are. I would gladly pay $600 or $700 for a full featured Chromebook with 32GB of RAM and an 8 or 16 core processor!

The 7020 series looks way too old for me. I don't mind the less cores, less PCIe bandwidth or lower clocks. I do mind lower IPC a̵n̵d̵ ̵w̵o̵r̵s̵e̵ ̵p̵o̵w̵e̵r̵ ̵e̵f̵f̵i̵c̵i̵e̵n̵c̵y̵.̵ ̵D̵D̵R̵5̵ ̵w̵i̵l̵l̵ ̵b̵e̵ ̵s̵o̵r̵e̵l̵y̵ ̵m̵i̵s̵s̵e̵d̵ ̵t̵o̵o̵.̵ I'm looking for something like 7040 (Zen4 + RDNA3 - Phoenix) or 7045 (Zen 4 + RDNA2 - Dragon Range) but with good I/O and Linux support...

Productivity is EXTREMELY important for me on my work daily driver. I am a fan of Apple laptops hardware but I can't stand the OS and besides the efforts Linux still isn't very stable on it in my experience. The next best thing I found was Dell with official Linux support. I payed about $700 USD for my Dell 5495, everything works and the laptop is still spotless after being used every day for more than 5 years. I've got a Ryzen 2500U 4C/8T CPU, 16GB DDR4, 256GB NVMe, 14" 1080p IPS screen. The processor scaling can be set to ~15W and remains 100% stable that with the 65Wh battery works really well*. Build quality is really good. The keyboard decent once you get used to it. I ended up buying another one for my colleague and he's still using it too till today.

* After 5 years of daily use the 68Wh battery is now a 40Wh one. My guess is I've done over 2600 charge cycles which isn't that bad considering total system cost.

I'm looking to upgrade my system, but I can't find a good laptop with excellent Linux support. I refuse to buy a laptop with a monster GPU that just ends up sucking power while idling or causing driver problems. So far it looks like Asus is my best bet (based on availability in South Africa). I have heard some good things about asusctl, but I still need to do more research before making up my mind. I suspect AI cores will be a requirement in the next 5 years, so that pretty much just leaves me with the 7040 series.

A Chromebook with a Zen4+RDNA3 chip, 16 cores and at least 32gb DDR5 would have been legendary! I would pay $2000 USD for that. Since we are talking about utopian product why not through in a solid state fan for dust-proof, low-power, low-to-no noise cooling.