Report: Ryzen "Raven Ridge" APU Not Using HBM2 Memory

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Report: Ryzen "Raven Ridge" APU Not Using HBM2 Memory

While the Radeon RX Vega discrete graphics cards are making use of the ultra-fast HBM2 memory, it appears the newly-launched AMD "Raven Ridge" APU featuring Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics is not using HBM2 memory...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Raven-Ridge-APU-Not-HBM2

[Kendji]

HBM is scarce and expensive compared.to the gddr5

[stiiixy]

I've a bunch or people holding out for this range of architecture. If the HP Envy with the limited VGA RAM, no HBM2 and single channel at that, is indicative of the entire range, theres not much left to compel them to buy it over other offerings, current and inbound.

I really do hope there will be a broad range of options available, even if it takes a bit more time.

[eydee]

When they demoed it, and showed playing a video instead of 3D graphics, people already suspected that something is fishy. Same as introducing Vega in CF, in a game with low requirements, without a fps counter.

[IreMinMon]

HBM is scarce and expensive compared.to the gddr5

But they're using DDR4, which is even slower as far as I recall.
GT 840M is a meme card, that is Intel iGPU-tier performance. If by some magic Ryzen APUs are aiming to be more energy efficient than Intel U-series than that's great, but the more realistic situation is that the new APU is useless. They need step up their game and compete with real nvidia cards.

[oleyska]

But they're using DDR4, which is even slower as far as I recall.
GT 840M is a meme card, that is Intel iGPU-tier performance. If by some magic Ryzen APUs are aiming to be more energy efficient than Intel U-series than that's great, but the more realistic situation is that the new APU is useless. They need step up their game and compete with real nvidia cards.

Tests show that video playback power consumption in windows is an issue now.
However at 15Watts for power user usage on battery this should be quite sweet.
Find me an quadcore Intel cpu with dedicated nvidia graphics at even 25 watts

[GruenSein]

Why would anyone expect this mass market APU with low end graphics to come with dedicated video memory at all? No recent AMD APU has ever offered dedicated video memory (There was a config many years ago, where the GPU was in the chipset and it had some video memory. That must have been pre-bulldozer, though). On the Intel side of things, this is also very uncommom. Only few select models of their integrated graphics come with 128MB of memory apart from the main RAM. Those 128MB are much more comparable to a L4 cache than to actual video memory. I think, even a single stack of on-package HBM would make these chips so expensive that they would miss the targeted market price point.

IMHO, it is purely out of academic interest that one would compare an APU like ryzen + Vega 8 with a dedicated GPU. The best comparison is to the iGPU in a mobile Intel quad core at 15W. Let's hope that most OEMs go for dual channel configuarions at least since this is vital to the GPU's performance.

[monstercameron]

Michael please forgive the self promotion but I have this notebook and I put a bunch of tests on my blog http://apusilicon.com/
also, i'm not sure if it is a semantics issue but there isn't 256MB of "onboard" ddr4 ram, 256MB just gets partitioned from main memory and then 4GB are sharable between the cpu and gpu.

Also linux is pretty much a no go for now, atleast from the major distros. No wifi, no graphics.

[mimi.vx]

classic HP , good components , bad product.

monstercameron .. yes support will be in 4.15+ kernel and mesa 17.3

[ColinP]

What about HSA?