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Rebranded GCN 1.0 AMD Radeon 520 DGP in my HP laptop supported in "amdgpu"?

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  • Rebranded GCN 1.0 AMD Radeon 520 DGP in my HP laptop supported in "amdgpu"?

    This AMD Radeon 520 is a dedicated GPU is used in many newer laptops especially HP. It was launched during April 2017. As per someone who knew the thing about GPU's, this card is basically a rebranded radeon 7750. Quoting him:
    I feel kind of bad for you, as your "500 series" AMD GPU is actually basically a cut down radeon 7750 that's been rebranded four times. 7750 -> 8670 -> M330 -> M430 -> M520
    So, I own an HP 15-BS576TX laptop which has dynamic switchable graphics with IGP Intel HD 620 and DGP AMD Mobile Radeon 520. This is GCN 1.0 architecture . So, Ubuntu 17.10 + xwayland defaults into radeon driver, rather than using amdgpu. I understand that amdgpu drivers are still experimental for GCN 1.0 GPU's.

    My queries are:
    1. Is AMD R 520 will get longterm support by including in amdgpu driver? Will I have to stick with older radeon driver for ever?
    2. The proprietary driver from AMD, AMDGPU-PRO supports Radeon 520 or not?
    3. If this GPU is not supported by amdgpu, will I have better luck using older fglrx proprietary driver?

    Please find the hardware information below:

    lspci -knnn shows that AMD Radeon 520 card is detected:

    01:00.0 Display controller [0380]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Sun XT [Radeon HD 8670A/8670M/8690M / R5 M330 / M430 / R7 M520] [1002:6660] (rev 83) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Sun XT [Radeon HD 8670A/8670M/8690M / R5 M330 / M430] [103c:832b] Kernel driver in use: radeon Kernel modules: radeon, amdgpu
    and Integrated Intel HD 620 graphics in the laptop:

    00:02.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 620 [8086:5916] (rev 02) Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company HD Graphics 620 [103c:832b] Kernel driver in use: i915 Kernel modules: i915
    lshw -C video

    *-display
    description: VGA compatible controller product: HD Graphics 620 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0 version: 02 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pciexpress msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=i915 latency=0 resources: irq:128 memory:b0000000-b0ffffff memory:a0000000-afffffff ioport:6000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff

    *-display description: Display controller product: Sun XT [Radeon HD 8670A/8670M/8690M / R5 M330 / M430 / R7 M520] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 83 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=radeon latency=0 resources: irq:129 memory:90000000-9fffffff memory:b1200000-b123ffff ioport:5000(size=256) memory:b1240000-b125ffff
    Now, if I run any app with DRI_PRIME=1 it works and shows below info:

    :~$ DRI_PRIME=1 glxinfo |grep -i Opengl* OpenGL vendor string: X.Org OpenGL renderer string: AMD HAINAN (DRM 2.50.0 / 4.13.0-16-generic, LLVM 5.0.0) OpenGL core profile version string: 4.5 (Core Profile) Mesa 17.2.2 OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 4.50
    So, I assumed Radeon 520 is working fine. I see that there is amdgpu driver module also loaded. From the list, R520 card seems to be supported by both the drivers.

    lsmod |grep radeon
    radeon 1470464 0 ttm 94208 2 amdgpu,radeon i2c_algo_bit 16384 3 amdgpu,radeon,i915 drm_kms_helper 167936 3 amdgpu,radeon,i915 drm 356352 28 amdgpu,radeon,i915,ttm,drm_kms_helper

  • #2
    If the driver recognizes it as Sun then I doubt it is a rebranded 7750.

    IIRC the Sun/Hainan parts were half-generation designs midway between SI and CI with 6 CUs (384 SPs) rather than the 7750's 10 CUs.
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    • #3
      Originally posted by bridgman View Post
      If the driver recognizes it as Sun then I doubt it is a rebranded 7750.

      IIRC the Sun/Hainan parts were half-generation designs midway between SI and CI with 6 CUs (384 SPs) rather than the 7750's 10 CUs.
      So, if recognized as SUN/HAINAN, is the card falling in R7 series? Is it really GCN 1.0 or something better? There is no clue about this card even in the review pages as regarding it's origin. It is said to have older architecture from 2014 than Polaris.

      AMD Radeon 520

      The Radeon 520 is a dedicated entry-level graphics card for laptops that was released in 2017. AMD reveals that the chip features five compute units based on the GCN architecture and 2 GB GDDR5 64-bit graphics memory. The new chip is not based on the Polaris architecture from 2016, but the old one that was introduced with the Radeon R5 M230 in 2014 and later used in the M330 and M430 / M440 / M445.

      Due to the higher clock speed of up to 1030 MHz, the Radeon 520 should be slightly faster than the old Radeon R7 M445 (920 MHz, 320 shader units, GDDR5). However, the performance should be comparable, which means that demanding games like Dishonored 2, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare or XCOM 2 should not run smoothly. Less demanding games like Overwatch, Fifa 17 (with a fast CPU) or Farming Simulator 17, would run well, but using low to medium detail settings. If only DDR3 is used, the performance should be on par with the Radeon R7 M440 (1021 MHz, 320 shader units, DDR3).
      Specifications and benchmarks of the entry-level dedicated AMD Radeon 520 graphics card for laptops.

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      • #4
        Looks like the 520 is a 5-CU configuration while 530 is 6-CU:



        The shader core would be GCN 1.0 while some of the other blocks would be newer and inline with the larger CI parts IIRC.

        I'm not sure where marketing draws the line between R3/R5/R7 categories - although it appears they may be moving away from that naming convention. I believe the R3/R5/R7 rating was a performance measurement rather than an indicator of technology generation, so based on CU count and memory complement I would expect R5 rather than R7.
        Last edited by bridgman; 15 November 2017, 07:19 AM.
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        • #5
          Originally posted by bridgman View Post
          Looks like the 520 is a 5-CU configuration while 530 is 6-CU:



          The shader core would be GCN 1.0 while some of the other blocks would be newer and inline with the larger CI parts IIRC.

          I'm not sure where marketing draws the line between R3/R5/R7 categories - although it appears they may be moving away from that naming convention. I believe the R3/R5/R7 rating was a performance measurement rather than an indicator of technology generation, so based on CU count and memory complement I would expect R5 rather than R7.
          Definitely, the gaming performance as seen by the reviews is below R7 445. The doubt was whether this card gets into the list of supported GPU's in the newer "amdgpu" opensource driver. Otherwise, I would've to satiate with the old radeon. Now that it is clear that the card is supported, although the performance benchmarks are not available.Thanks for the replies. debianxfce Definitely, I think I should try the PPA's and also give bug reports to the amdgpu BTS hopefully, to get some attention for this model.

          BTW, it is pathetic to see major laptop brands like HP, Dell pushing old, outdated and obsolete mobile GPU's even in their newest laptops. I checked and both Dell 5567 or HP models usually carry 4GB R7 445 or 2GB AMD Radeon 520. This is how it is. May be these laptops are not for gaming; But, they are pushing really old tech.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by bridgman View Post
            Looks like the 520 is a 5-CU configuration while 530 is 6-CU:



            The shader core would be GCN 1.0 while some of the other blocks would be newer and inline with the larger CI parts IIRC.

            I'm not sure where marketing draws the line between R3/R5/R7 categories - although it appears they may be moving away from that naming convention. I believe the R3/R5/R7 rating was a performance measurement rather than an indicator of technology generation, so based on CU count and memory complement I would expect R5 rather than R7.
            You are correct. I don't know if this info is absolute, but when I installed AMD 520 drivers to autodetect GPU and install on Windows 10, the GPU is shown as R5 M330. (I uninstalled the driver from AMD). When I installed the AMD/Intel Switchable driver from HP, the GPU is correctly shown as AMD R520. What this means, perhaps is R5 M330 may be very similar to this AMD R520..may be?

            Regarding Vulkan support in Linux, is there something to be installed? I saw there is something called "radv" https://github.com/airlied/mesa/tree...src/amd/vulkan

            OR is there official vulkan provided for Linux by AMD. Thanks again.
            Last edited by deepclutch; 15 November 2017, 09:30 PM. Reason: updated.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by deepclutch View Post
              BTW, it is pathetic to see major laptop brands like HP, Dell pushing old, outdated and obsolete mobile GPU's even in their newest laptops. I checked and both Dell 5567 or HP models usually carry 4GB R7 445 or 2GB AMD Radeon 520. This is how it is. May be these laptops are not for gaming; But, they are pushing really old tech.
              In fairness, if we made a newer chip in that size range I'm sure the OEMs would use it instead. The problem is that we all have to make best estimates of what the market will be like in a few years and design chips for that forecast... and we thought the very low end dGPU market would have gone away by now since we have been offering APUs with more performance for a while.

              In practice, the OEMs who did pick up our APUs frequently configured them in what I would call a worst-case configuration - single channel memory and sharing the power budget with a low end dGPU - so the market didn't shift as we expected and low-end dGPUs remained in demand. The smallest dGPU we make today is Lexa, which is ~2x the size AND >>2X the performance.

              A smart OEM would have configured one of our APUs running at full power (rather than reserving ~20W for a low end dGPU and forcing the APU to lower clocks) with fast dual channel memory and picked up a big chunk of the market even with APUs from a couple of years ago. I don't really know why that hasn't happened yet.
              Last edited by bridgman; 15 November 2017, 09:45 PM.
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              • #8
                For dynamic switchable graphics, do we still need vga-switcheroo, especially if used in with wayland (X on wayland in Ubuntu 17.10)?
                https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.1...witcheroo.html .

                I read the below and it seems AMD dynamic switchable graphics also supports manual mode? possible in Linux?
                The details of AMD’s Dynamic Switchable Graphics are similar in practice to Optimus, but with a few differences. First, AMD always has both the IGP and GPU driver loaded, with a proxy driver funneling commands to the appropriate GPU. Where NVIDIA is able to completely power off the GPU under Optimus, AMD has modified their GPUs so that the PCI-E bus is isolated from the rest of the chip. Now when the GPU isn’t needed, everything powers down except for that PCI-E connection, so Windows doesn’t try to load/unload the GPU driver. The PCI-E link state gets retained, and a small amount (around 50mW) is needed to keep the PCI-E state active, but as far as Windows knows the GPU is still ready and waiting for input. AMD also informed us that their new GPUs use link adapter mode instead of multi adapter mode, and that this plays a role in their dynamic switchable graphics, but we didn’t receive any additional details on this subject.

                As far as getting content from the dGPU to the display, the IGP always maintains a connection to the display ports, and it appears AMD’s drivers copy data over the PCI-E bus to the IGP framebuffer, similar to Optimus. Where things get interesting is that there are no muxes in AMD’s dynamic switchable graphics implementations, but there is still an option to fall back to manual switching. For this mode, AMD is able to use the display output ports of the Intel IGP, so their GPU doesn’t need separate output ports. With the VAIO C, both dynamic and manual switching are supported, and you can set the mode as appropriate.


                Last edited by deepclutch; 16 November 2017, 10:31 AM.

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                • #9
                  Sun/Hainan are SI (GCN 1.0) asics with no display or multi-media engines, the rest is the same as other SI parts. As for hybrid graphics, the dGPU is completely powered down (i.e., disappears from the bus) when not in use. The driver stays loaded however because it controls when it gets powered up/down.

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                  • #10
                    Any idea if features like freesync is supported in this AMD 520 card? Also, is this card supported in AMDGPU-PRO drivers? I read that many features are added and most of these are not available with early cards like these with GCN1.0/1.1.

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