IO Die
The IO Die was probably one of the first chips developed for the platform surrounding the AM4 socket / Zen in general.. AMD was linked up with Global Foundries back then and did not have a large R&D budget, as they had very uncompetitive CPU offerings.
It can be used as a PCH (x570 chipset) and or as the IO Die to link the chiplets / offer all the integrated USB/Ethernet,SATA PCIe connectivity.
This chips is developed for GF 12nm and still produced there. And probably the design did not change much during Zen -> Zen 3, as there is no reason for that / R&D is expensive for little gains.
Furthermore this chip has do do multiple PCIe4 Lanes, which require high clockrates and that requires a lot of power.
Speculation: Maybe they did skip on some fine grain clock gating oportunities as this chip is probably high risk / complex already anyway. Just think of how many protocols / functions it has to implement.
Compare that to Renoir, which does not use that chip, it uses much less power, but only does PCIe3 and is probably a newer design and only some blocks are copied over on the logic level from the IO Die design..
Furthermore, get into AMD shoes: They have much larger demand than they can deliver products, they are limited by the 7nm capacity they booked with TSMC some years ago.. Why would the move the existing chip to a 7nm process or another TSMC process, if that means cutting down output, this would make no sense from a business standpoint.
I guess the Chip is replaced with the new Platform (New Socket + DDR5 / PCIe5) as a large part of that chip has to be redesigned then... Maybe they even move to a monolithic die on the desktop then for up to 8 or 12 core designs with included graphics.. But this is just wishfull thinking.. But on 5nm the chip could be pretty small even with 8 cores and integrated I/O die... Depends on the complexity and space requirements of then Zen 4 Cores, which we don´t know and probably wont see for another 6-12 Months.
If you wan´t good energy efficiency on the desktop today, get a renoir based APU for AM4 or wait for cezanne.
New Platform might be different, but no one knows..
RDNA Support in ROCm
It´s a pitty that they don´t support it.. But i do get that they focus on existing customers / HPC market with CDNA.. Still believe it´s a mistake that will materialize in the long run to not allocate more resources to it, to get a minimal RDNA Support such that academia / students can board the platform early on.
The IO Die was probably one of the first chips developed for the platform surrounding the AM4 socket / Zen in general.. AMD was linked up with Global Foundries back then and did not have a large R&D budget, as they had very uncompetitive CPU offerings.
It can be used as a PCH (x570 chipset) and or as the IO Die to link the chiplets / offer all the integrated USB/Ethernet,SATA PCIe connectivity.
This chips is developed for GF 12nm and still produced there. And probably the design did not change much during Zen -> Zen 3, as there is no reason for that / R&D is expensive for little gains.
Furthermore this chip has do do multiple PCIe4 Lanes, which require high clockrates and that requires a lot of power.
Speculation: Maybe they did skip on some fine grain clock gating oportunities as this chip is probably high risk / complex already anyway. Just think of how many protocols / functions it has to implement.
Compare that to Renoir, which does not use that chip, it uses much less power, but only does PCIe3 and is probably a newer design and only some blocks are copied over on the logic level from the IO Die design..
Furthermore, get into AMD shoes: They have much larger demand than they can deliver products, they are limited by the 7nm capacity they booked with TSMC some years ago.. Why would the move the existing chip to a 7nm process or another TSMC process, if that means cutting down output, this would make no sense from a business standpoint.
I guess the Chip is replaced with the new Platform (New Socket + DDR5 / PCIe5) as a large part of that chip has to be redesigned then... Maybe they even move to a monolithic die on the desktop then for up to 8 or 12 core designs with included graphics.. But this is just wishfull thinking.. But on 5nm the chip could be pretty small even with 8 cores and integrated I/O die... Depends on the complexity and space requirements of then Zen 4 Cores, which we don´t know and probably wont see for another 6-12 Months.
If you wan´t good energy efficiency on the desktop today, get a renoir based APU for AM4 or wait for cezanne.
New Platform might be different, but no one knows..
RDNA Support in ROCm
It´s a pitty that they don´t support it.. But i do get that they focus on existing customers / HPC market with CDNA.. Still believe it´s a mistake that will materialize in the long run to not allocate more resources to it, to get a minimal RDNA Support such that academia / students can board the platform early on.
Comment