News AMD Phoenix Desktop APUs Are Almost Here, According To AGESA Update

[Admin]

Motherboard manufacturers have begun dropping BIOS updates sporting AMD's new AGESA AM5 microcode update, version 1.0.8.0, featuring mysterious support for future AM5 CPUs.

AMD Phoenix Desktop APUs Are Almost Here, According To AGESA Update : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Until AMD integrates HBM into APUs to allow them to not be handicapped by system RAM, I'm not getting excited about them.

 

[hotaru.hino]

Until AMD integrates HBM into APUs to allow them to not be handicapped by system RAM, I'm not getting excited about them.

That would likely make the APU more expensive than what the intended market is for these things.

I feel like APUs are one of those things where PC gamers are all "I'll buy one when it actually has decent gaming performance" and when push comes to shove, they don't actually buy it. Like the i7-8809G. Then again I guess PC gamers wanted that thing as a standalone product.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

That would likely make the APU more expensive than what the intended market is for these things.

I feel like APUs are one of those things where PC gamers are all "I'll buy one when it actually has decent gaming performance" and when push comes to shove, they don't actually buy it. Like the i7-8809G. Then again I guess PC gamers wanted that thing as a standalone product.

While that may have been true in 2018, given that dGPUs are around the $250 mark (for the 3050) these days, an APU with on board HBM fills a price gap.

 

[hotaru.hino]

While that may have been true in 2018, given that dGPUs are around the $250 mark (for the 3050) these days, an APU with on board HBM fills a price gap.

The cost of a Ryzen 5700G launched at $360. Though to be fair, it dropped to around $250 after a year, then down to $180 another year after that.

But we don't know what the market will be like. So let's assume AMD ships out a Phoenix desktop Ryzen 7 APU at the same price and it remains for a good bit. Adding HBM would dramatically add to the cost of the processor since HBM, as far as I can tell, is still really expensive. On top of this, you'd need to add another memory controller to the CPU and there's added complexity on the packaging to interface between the two.

So my WAG if you were to add say 4GB of HBM based VRAM would probably add another $100-$150 to the APU. Given this delta, you may as well save another $100-$150 and get a decent video card. You'd get close to the RX 7600 and it would put the smack down on the Phoenix iGPU.

EDIT: I wanted to see if I could make any educated guesses as to how well a 12CU RDNA3 GPU would perform if given better RAM. But unfortunately, the only card I could think of in recent memory that has vastly different memory but the same GPU core is the GT 1030. And while TechSpot benchmarked the DDR4 version and found it to perform half as good as the GDDR5 version, it got me thinking: what if the GT 1030 was designed with the higher bandwidth from the start? Plus if the DDR4 version was using the same DDR4 DRAM that you plug into a RAM slot, that's a problem since system RAM isn't designed in the same way as GDDR RAM is.

But I did notice that NVIDIA released an even lower version of the GeForce 10: the GT 1010. It had a GDDR5 version. The only semblance of a review or benchmark I could find was at https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-geforce-gt-1010-has-been-tested-in-geekbench-spoiler-its-slow. Even with GDDR5, the thing is hella slow. An Iris Xe of a i7-1165G7 outperforms it.

So yeah, memory speed may not be the cure-all to a really low specc'd GPU.

 

[Amdlova]

What really bother me is the pci system...
The last gen of apu is a nightmare for upgrades.

 

[renz496]

While that may have been true in 2018, given that dGPUs are around the $250 mark (for the 3050) these days, an APU with on board HBM fills a price gap.

RX6600 can be had for $200 or less.

 

[evdjj3j]

Until AMD integrates HBM into APUs to allow them to not be handicapped by system RAM, I'm not getting excited about them.

You should by a console then. While they don't use HBM, they are quite close to the hardware you're wanting.