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

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 23 November 2017 at 06:44 AM EST. 64 Comments
AMD
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.

Instead of the Vega graphics on Raven Ridge using HBM2 memory, it appears at least for some models they are just using onboard DDR4 memory. FUDZilla is reporting today that there is just 256MB of onboard DDR4 memory being used by the new APU, at least for the Ryzen 5 APU found on the HP Envy x360 that was the first Raven APU system to market.

The Radeon Vega mobile graphics performance is a huge letdown in their initial tests shared. In fact, this APU was "barely beating NVIDIA's 840m GPU."

This is a big letdown if all Raven Ridge APUs indeed are just using DDR4 memory onboard rather than HBM2. The Envy x360 is also a bit of an odd-ball in just using a single memory channel, odd for being the launch laptop of Raven Ridge.

Also making it a bit more of a sticky situation for Linux users is the Raven Ridge APU with its new "DCN" display engine is still seeing a lot of code churn for AMDGPU DC and not all of the DCN 1.0 code merged for Linux 4.15. Thus the Raven display support might not even be in good shape until Linux 4.16.

Hopefully we'll learn more soon.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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