News AMD Brings Zen 2 to 6nm Process With New Ryzen, Athlon Chromebook Chips

[Admin]

AMD is bringing Zen 2 to 6nm Chromebooks in its 7020C series Athlon and Ryzen processors.

AMD Brings Zen 2 to 6nm Process With New Ryzen, Athlon Chromebook Chips : Read more

 

[abufrejoval]

I hate to see AMD play Intel's game again.

I can't believe for a second that the dual and quad core chips will be different dies. And likewise that the duals will be harvested dies with honest defects: TMSC at 6nm just isn't very likely to produce defects of sufficient magnitude on chips as small as this.

So good dies will be fused off and culled just like the Alder Lake N chips are all very likely fully functioning 8-core chips destroyed to yield 2 and 4 core variants to fit a niche that has no technical reason for its existence.

Zen was all about using the die real-estate that Intel gave away for free as iGPUs on their quad core chips (originally to kill off ATI and Nvidia chipsets with their iGPUs) to create an additional 4 cores at no extra cost and kick Intel where they had hurt them as ATI.

That was both genius and a fair return for Intel's anti-competitive behavior.

But of course it left them vulnerable to market segments, that didn't really need or appreciate core counts not multiples of 8... and without an entry level equivalent.

Perhaps a quad core APU is of sufficient interest for a stand-alone die. I certainly wouldn't mind "AMD Atoms". But I'd want them without Zen features fused off, e.g. ECC RAM and not culled to the point where their target will be e-waste after a single short generation of use.

Designing on a Zen 2 base probably only makes sense, because it's a quad core at its heart. I've never quite understood why Zen wasn't octa from the start unless quads were orignally planned and only eliminated later.

If it wasn't for that, using an older generation core for a die shrink would seem intentionally crippling a design for market segmentation, because the die area savings may not be enough to gain extra dies from a wafer: CPU cores cost so little area vs the I/O blocks an smaller geometries that I'd have to see the math to believe it.

 

[rluker5]

Cherry picking again.

Trying to make older, slower stuff look groundbreaking in efficiency.

There's older, slower stuff out there that make these chips look terrible at power consumption.
I'm going on vacation again soon and have connecting fights and am going with some old, cheap ebay tablets again. One runs the m-5y71 2c4t, up to 2.9 ghz at 6w tdp (from 2014) and the other runs an atom z3775 4c at 2w tdp (also from 2014) The atom is barely useable. It runs the web slowly but completely, Netflix and Youtube smoothly, music fine and maxes out playing Bioshock 1 and Oblivion at 720p low/~30. The m-5y71 seems like a normal pc. Plays Skyrim, FONV, ME2, etc at 720p low~30 for example and has a normal modern response time for light use.

Both are much slower than these much newer Ryzens, but user experience per watt for light use make the new chips look less than impressive. They're in old Dell Venue 11 pros btw. And there might be a bit of conflict on who is going to be using the newer one. I'll probably just make sure the atom gets plenty of books and music.

They should sell these on experience per $. They will be in new systems. Set the power limit for the slow things high enough to not throttle and give them good connectivity. Maybe sodimms and a decent amount of ports.

Price, not efficiency should be the selling point for repurposed old designs.