News Biostar Reveals Specifications For AMD Ryzen 4000 Renoir APUs

[Admin]

Biostar's list of supported AMD Ryzen processors reveals juicy details on the upcoming Ryzen 4000-series Renoir desktop APUs.

Biostar Reveals Specifications For AMD Ryzen 4000 Renoir APUs : Read more

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Thing is though, you will only be able to use them with certian motherboards, as a video output will be required. Also, it will still be weak, quite likely unable to exceed entry level discrete cards, yet carry a higher price tag than their non APU counterparts.

The only reason to be "excited" about them that I can see is that AMD and nVidia have essentially colluded to keep GPU prices in excess of $200 (RX 580/90 doesn't count as they're still backstock from Cryptoboom meltdown), even though at that price you can't (yet) ensure a 1080p60 experience.

I have a distinct feeling TomsHardware, as well as the other reputable sites, will echo the same sentiment that while Renoir takes APUs to a new level, the lack of PCIe 4, B series motherboard requirement, and lack of graphical performance makes them a hard pass for a marriage of Matisse and Navi/Ampere, especially if certain rumors are true and Renoir is simply a higher clocked Ryzen Mobile 4000 series chip in a Socket AM4 form factor.

 

[e36_Jeff]

There are at least 37 x570 boards with some kind of video out port, and virtually all the lower chipsets have some kind of video out. By my count, you are 'limited' to around 120 mobos, which isn't really a limit at all.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

Not necessarily. Being under the 4000 series brand it's entirely likely AMD will limit them to 500 series boards, which again eliminates the cheap upgrade path for users of an existing APU which means they will achieve higher performance by just buying a dedicated card.

 

[cryoburner]

Not necessarily. Being under the 4000 series brand it's entirely likely AMD will limit them to 500 series boards, which again eliminates the cheap upgrade path for users of an existing APU which means they will achieve higher performance by just buying a dedicated card.

AMD announced several days ago that they would in fact enable Ryzen 4000-series processors to run on 400-chipset motherboards. You posted in the comments of an article discussing that, so I would assume you are aware. >_>

As for those with an existing APU, the improvements to graphics performance alone might not be enough to justify buying a new processor, but the main draw here is having access to processors with higher core counts that don't require a dedicated GPU. Not necessarily for gaming, but for desktop productivity use, where graphics performance often isn't much of a concern. And for that use, adding significantly more graphics cores would just increase the cost of the processor and possibly make cooling more of an issue. It might be a nice extra that the integrated graphics of these chips can run many recent games at low graphics settings, but if someone cares about gaming performance much, they probably should drop at least an extra $130 on an RX 570, or maybe $160 or so for something like a 1650 SUPER, 5500 XT or RX 580.

 

[Alvar "Miles" Udell]

AMD said:

"The select beta BIOSes will enable a one-way upgrade path for AMD Ryzen Processors with “Zen 3,” coming later this year. Flashing back to an older BIOS version will not be supported. "

And as these are Zen 2 processors, that says to me support is still questionable, given how AMD is crying about no more space available, and there are still yet another set of Zen 2 Matisse+ processors to potentially add as well.

As for productivity, yes you can make the argument that 4 additional CPU cores would be beneficial, but I'm struggling to come up with a setting where 8 CPU cores would be highly beneficial over 4 cores, yet the GPU would be irrelevant given how many tasks are GPU accelerated.