AMD Renoir APUs Bringing "DCN 2.1" Display Engine

[ThoreauHD]

I thought the point of navi was lower tdp and smaller die with better than vega performance. What am I missing with AMD's laptop approach? Are they intentionally losing to Intel with this half dick in the hole horsesht?

They really need to not get too comfy on their 7nm dies. Intel is still whipping their ass on 12 nm and nvidia can drop down to 7 on generations old crap and dominate just on the shrink. Man, their gpu division.. nevermind. From the rumors, Mama Su put them on their knees to service Sony and MS. Fuck it. I'll just stick with intel and dell laptops.

[ThoreauHD]

Well Google Stadia will render on Vega too, so Vega is good enough since it is everywhere beside current traditional gaming consoles and very new high end PCs

AMD obviosly have these collisions, lets wait just for Samsung to release these tablets and phones... but they wanted Radeon everywhere, so

This is for laptop's dude, not a server cloud datacenter the size of a Walmart. The only collision is AMD making a gimped product when they have the means to do better.

[brent]

LPDDR4 is mentioned in this patch. https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...st/039227.html

That's a BIG thing, actually. A weakness of current APUs is relatively high idle power consumption, in part due to DDR4 RAM idle power. That is also why so many power efficiency optimized Intel notebooks still use slower LPDDR3 RAM. Unfortunately AMD doesn't support that either. So if we see any Renoir based notebooks with LPDDR4 RAM, they might be vastly more efficient in idle and low load scenarios.

[Nille_kungen]

I use an 2500U in my laptop with vega graphics and the graphics is really good.
It takes a lot of time and money to develop a navi based iGPU for APU's, i understand why AMD keeps vega for another round.
Vega is still good enough for laptop APU's but once we get RDNA in laptop APU's i will upgrade my laptop.
The biggest problem with ryzen apu in laptops is memory support of max 2400MHz DDR4 (1.2V) support for faster LPDDR4 would be very needed for faster graphics, it also opens up for thinner laptops with soldered ram.
stebler thanks for the heads up on LPDDR4 it's the biggest news i seen on Renoir APU.

[chithanh]

So does that mean Renoir will have DisplayPort DSC support? That could also help with power consumption, as the internal laptop panel would require fewer eDP lanes.

[sykobee]

Why did they pick Vega instead of Navi for 7 nm APUs?

It could be a denser design, which would be useful on a monolithic GPU to keep die size and cost down.
OR: It could be a chiplet CPU with the GPU on the I/O die on 12nm, so Vega might be a better match.
OR: It's Navi and it's just not been configured yet, but the Vega codepaths work.

Ultimately, in the APU memory bandwidth is going to limit performance, so you don't need all of Navi's features or clock speed. That also applies to a lesser extend for LPDDR4, which is a great thing to see is present.

[msroadkill612]

Why did they pick Vega instead of Navi for 7 nm APUs?

Re this debate here, it seems a bit off that the prevailing attitude is negative, as in, the armchair theorists know better than AMD.

There IS the matter of the Vega & Zen already teamed on Fabric. No small achievement, & perhaps one more suited to Vega.

Mobile is not all about gaming. A wiser design focus is an efficient combination of the two processors. Perhaps the more industrial design of Vega has wider advantages?