Quote from: william blake on January 05, 2020, 08:04:04
Quote from: Valantar on January 04, 2020, 15:18:12
Why is 8 cores a deal breaker? I would think that was a massive plus. Sure, it's a bit overkill, but Zen2 cores are highly efficient, and a handful of them active for a game won't eat the entire power budget of an H-class chip. At 45W this ought to be an amazing IGPU gaming chip. I would also guess this has LPDDR4X rather than DDR4, which should account for a lot of the performance increase, and would largely equalize the memory bandwidth deficiency when compared to a dGPU.
nothing amazing, sorry.
what if the exact igpu performance is not for you, you need faster or slower but cheaper?
still shared resources. memory would be 6, not 8, 45w tdp for 8 cores AND fastest igpu? how about the fact that rx540, the smallest 14nm mobile has 50w tdp? physics not magic. even with efficient cpu cores amd gpus are hot and power hungry, compared to the competition.
why 8 cores is a deal breaker? as i said, same thing happened in desktop.
remenber what happened between zen+ and zen 2?
before-cheaper alternative. intel is the king of hedt and gaming.
after-amd everywhere. intel 2x pricecuts, nobody cares now about adding a bit of money to buy the "better" lntel cpu .
in laptops, now, amd is a cheaper alternative. renoir=amd everywhere. triple the number of models. for everyone.
This is a bit weird, and I can't tell if this is a language thing or just a writing clarity thing, but you seem to be contradicting yourself. On the one hand, you're arguing that 8 cores is too much and that these chips will be power hogs and perform poorly (bad), on the second hand you're saying that there will be plenty of new models (good, and presumably due to good performance?), and on the third hand (yes, I should have started this count out with a different phrasing, but now I'm going with it) you seem to be saying that these will be expensive (bad) despite extolling the virtues of AMD's current desktop pricing. I don't follow this line of reasoning.
Let's address power and performance first. Any 15W CPU/APU/SoC will be power limited, no matter its configuration - unless it's based on an architecture made for much lower wattages. So the question then becomes how it balances performance. Current AMD offerings have competitive multithreaded CPU performance, lag a bit in single-threaded, trounce (pre-Ice Lake) Intel in iGPU performance, and win hands-down in mixed performance, aka. gaming.
Moving from 4 12nm Zen+ cores to 8 7nm Zen2 cores will be a reshuffling of this, but AMD's desktop boost schemes show that they are fully capable of having a chip that can both boost high in low-threaded workloads and perform efficiently in high-threaded workloads. 15W for 8 cores is of course a challenge, but Zen2 is very efficient, so it will no doubt work. A chip like this would outshine any competition in heavily threaded workloads, though lower core count chips might of course be faster in lower threaded workloads. There are however ways of mitigating this, such as power gating unused cores. Nonetheless, there's nothing inherently wrong with an 8-core chip. And of course there will be cheaper 6-core chips using the same silicon.
As for iGPU power, given that current AMD 12/14nm offerings handily beat anything from the competition pre-Ice Lake, I see no reason to worry. The transition from 12nm to 7nm can easily balance out some added CUs and higher clocks, though of course they still won't be able to go crazy within a 15W power limit. The biggest boost will likely still come from the (rumored) faster LPDDR4X memory subsystem, as this will likely provide ~2x the bandwidth of a DDR4 system for the same or less power (which of course isn't part of the CPU's TDP either way). And all iGPUs are ultimately limited by memory bandwidth.
Which brings us to your dGPU comparison. First off, by nature of being dedicated solutions it's both natural for these to push for a bit of extra power to maximize performance and there are some inherent power draws you can't escape that count for the GPU. A 4GB GDDR5 setup alone can draw up to 10W dependent on bus width and clock speeds. There are also additional VRM losses, and likely a lack of power saving features in silicon that you would find in a mobile-only part. After all even the 25W version of Nvidia's MX250 (based on a more efficient architecture on a comparable node) barely beats AMD's 15W iGPUs, and that's despite having dedicated memory with far more bandwidth and a higher TDP that exludes the CPU.
Your iGPU logic is trying to scale down from a dGPU rather than scale up from current iGPUs, which is problematic. Current iGPUs perform well, so it's only logical for upcoming solutions to perform better within the same power limit, particularly given the dramatic increase in memory bandwidth.
When it comes to combined performance, again, there will of course be a power limit, but there always is, and there's still no reason to expect worse performance unless your mixed load (presumably a game) is loading all 8 cores at 100% - which is extremely unlikely. Even well threaded games run 2-4 threads with high loads with a couple of ancillary threads for other functions. Both the CPU and iGPU will of course throttle if pushed hard enough, but that is to be expected. And of course a 6-core chip might throttle less, but that depends on binning and the workload in question. There's no issue whatsoever with having 8 cores in the silicon.
As for pricing, we have no idea, but it's reasonable to expect that top-end SKUs won't be any cheaper than Intel, which is entirely reasonable given that performance matches the price. Low-end AMD chips are likely to still be cheaper with better iGPUs but not necessarily better CPUs, as that seems to be their preference.
So, to address your first sentence, "what if the exact igpu performance is not for you, you need faster or slower but cheaper?"
-If you need a faster iGPU, then sorry, technology is not there for 15W yet. Get a 45W model instead, or at least a 25W cTDP-up version. There should be plenty of options there too.
-If what you mean is you want a faster CPU and don't care about the iGPU - an idle iGPU doesn't consume noticeable power, so the CPU will still be plenty fast unless you somehow manage to load the GPU too. In which case it's likely that it's doing something useful and, you know, actually providing value.
-If you want slower but cheaper ... why wouldn't there be slower and cheaper options? There always are. AMD's most recent CPU launch is after all the $50 Athlon 3000G. There's no reason to expect 4000-series APUs to be high-end only.
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