AMD Sends Out Initial Linux Driver Support For "Renoir" APUs

[dungeon]

So, Auguste Renoir as AMD Renoir in august... who would guess

[vegabook]

I can not believe Renoir will be Vega again, Navi (RDNA) needs less memory bandwidth, is more power efficient and from scratch designed for 7 nm, to me it makes no sense at all to go on with Vega for mobile graphics

Vega is a higher throughput architecture. Navi is lower throughput with lower latency. When we're talking on-chip, latency is dramatically reduced, vega or navi. It makes some sense that they'd go with the higher throughput design if the latency has already been compressed due to the better locality.

[Berniyh]

Please Michael, if you post a news like that also link to the patch series.

Edit:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/amd-gfx/2019-August/038383.html

[entropy]

When AMD APUs are configured with FHD displays max*, who needs top notch mobile graphics power anyway...

(*) show me a single AMD APU notebook with a higher res display

[Jumbotron]

This is from hardware leaker Komachi Ensaka on Twitter [KOMACHI] GFX ID of PICASSO/RENOIR. GFX902/903 = Picasso Graphics (12nm Vega Graphics). GFX909 = Renoir Graphics (7nm (?) Vega Graphics). *Renoir is Picasso's successor.

https://twitter.com/KOMACHI_ENSAKA/status/1083437519356612608

HOWEVER.....over at Wikichip they have Renoir as based on Zen 2 and Navi graphics and is Picasso's successor.

https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/cores/renoir

In the words of the Genesis song....."It's a Land of Confusion"

[Jumbotron]

Additionally from Komachi Ensaka's Twitter feed....

"Considering From the GFX ID, that is certainly Vega (GFX9/GCN5)."

https://twitter.com/KOMACHI_ENSAKA/status/1083437519356612608

I wonder if Renoir will be for next gen Thin & Lights laptops, Chromebooks and Embedded use?

[Venemo]

I would assume that Navi simply wasn't ready yet when they started designing this chip yet, or the product manager wanted to wait until all the kinks are ironed out from Navi before using that in an APU.

[pipin]

Maybe Renoir is much closer to release than we might think?

There were some rumours floating that Renoir could launch in december or january. The timeframe before was march or april.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

I think it's more of a time, effort, and money thing. I assume this would be Zen 2, Vega, and 7nm. Adding Navi to the new mix would likely push it out to mid to late 2020. With Vega, it's closer to a shrink of the existing APU, and it's possible to then have it ready to show at CES 2020, and a release in early 2020. Maybe in 2021 they add in Navi + DDR5 to the mix (though I have no idea how far out DDR5 is, let alone for mobile).

They've had 2 years to release with Navi. That long makes no sense. Tested samples of Navi APUs would have been ready 9-12 months ago.

[Shevchen]

Vega has a bad reputation, because the high tier CU chips don't scale very well and consume a lot of power when pushed to higher clock speeds. On lower CU counts and lower clock speeds however, Vega is pretty damn efficient and has more compute power than Navi. Depending on the workload, both GPUs on lower CU counts (~20) may be roughly en par considering FPS in games, while Vega has more throughput for all other things non-gaming.

While I would have wished for some sort of hybrid µArch of Vega/Navi for the mobile parts that both scales well, takes the IPC advantages of Navi while retaining the compute power of Vega, this would mean a whole new design that isn't easily thrown out (esp. for low margin mobile chips).

I'm gaming on my 2700U and the chip is extremely efficient. For only 12W TDP I get a lot of horse power and can get my fav games up and running. (Thanks to Proton)
Tomb Raider, Subnautica, Prey... it just runs.

If the next mobile chips also support DDR4-3200, we are in for a nice performance gain on both CPU and GPU side. Whats left is a full SOC with HBM in an all-out-chiplet approach for the future, where we can ditch the (add-in) RAM completely.