AMD Ryzen 9 APUs could present a new challenge for Intel

[Shawn Knight]

Forward-looking: AMD has been doing everything right and is looking to parlay its recent victories into sustained success for the long haul. According to hardware leaker @Komachi, the chipmaker could do just that through the use of integrated graphics.

As TechRadar highlights, a list of processors recently published by the hardware leaker highlights four Ryzen 9 parts – two 45W units and two 15W “Pro” models – sporting a B12 designation. This, according to the leaker, indicates the presence of 12 graphical compute units.

B12 = 12CU.
つまり、Renoir "Mobile" APUのiGPUは12CUですか。 pic.twitter.com/0bS993JUZY

— 比屋定さんの戯れ言@Komachi (@KOMACHI_ENSAKA) November 2, 2019

Ryzen 9 APUs, as the publication points out, could benefit from heightened clock speeds and increased efficiency afforded by their 7-nanometer design. This, in turn, would presumably benefit graphics compute units as well. It’d be an interesting alternative to discrete graphics solutions and would of course further press Intel in the portable laptop space.

AMD has had a phenomenal 2019, recently reporting its highest quarterly revenue since 2015. The company still has a lot of ground to make up but has been steering the ship in the right direction with increased market share ever since Q2 2017.

As always, it’s worth reiterating that the post from @Komachi neither confirms nor denies anything as nothing is truly official until official word comes from the horse’s mouth. With CES 2020 less than two months away, however, the timing is certainly right for a hardware announcement.

Permalink to story.

https://www.techspot.com/news/82733-amd-ryzen-9-apus-could-present-new-challenge.html

 

[amstech]

AMD is learning from the past.
They haven't been able to maintain a top spot, everytime they've had a certain victory with a GPU or CPU, its short lived, then boom back to second fiddle.
The reason that Intel and Nvidia STILL have a stranglehold on the discrete CPU/GPU market is the fact they've been consistent for decades, with software and hardware buyers can trust. People will even buy something that doesn't perform as well if they have more faith in it.
Ryzen has shown us it can perform, but can it do it without any setbacks, issues, catches or hiccups. And this is just for mainstream buyers, which is a small part of market. The real meat and potatoes lies in the business, backbone, infrastructure and server mainframes and services. Even with consistent success, it's hard to change the direction of hardware on that scale, its not all about silicone. There are people shaking hands at these meetings who have worked together for a long time, and those bonds are tough to break/replace.
This all being said, AMD is doing the right thing and congrats to their success this year.

 

[Danny101]

We'll see.

 

[Irata]

AMD is learning from the past.
They haven't been able to maintain a top spot, everytime they've had a certain victory with a GPU or CPU, its short lived, then boom back to second fiddle.
The reason that Intel STILL has a stranglehold on the discrete CPU market

is because they paid OEM, distributors and retailers who also feared retribution to not make or sell AMD based system. This deprived AMD of earning enough to invest sufficiently in R&D.

People will even buy something that doesn't perform as well if they

Cannot buy (decently configured) AMD based systems.


Here, fixed it for you.

 

[yeeeeman]

is because they paid OEM, distributors and retailers who also feared retribution to not make or sell AMD based system. This deprived AMD of earning enough to invest sufficiently in R&D.



Cannot buy (decently configured) AMD based systems.


Here, fixed it for you.

That is only in part true. AMD never really had a performance/watt champion part until maybe this next generation when they enjoy better ipc, have more cores and are on 7nm.
We can look back in time and see that there were some very few premium/gaming notebooks with AMD hardware inside but they didn't sell because they had worse performance then the competition, and that could be proven by benchmarks, and battery life/cooling was worse than what Intel had.
Last gen from AMD had much more options, the most prominent one being the surface pro, testament to the fact that AMD is now good enough to be used in premium laptops. Well, it is still overtaken by Comet Lake 6 core and Ice Lake, in some regards but it is good enough.
So yeah, I don't think AMD situation was only because OEMs were paid. They just didn't have a good enough product, so they ended up in cheap laptops. With Zen 2 they have, from my opinion, all the ingredients to create some monster laptops. An 8 core 16 thread at 45w is not so hard to do, as undervolting has shown on 3700x. They can even do a 12/16 core in that power budget if they really wanna smash Intel, but I am guessing it will be too much of a spending to worth the effort.
So an 8core 16 thread in 45w tdp with Vega 15 gpu can beat imo the 9980hk from Intel, if things are done right.

 

[Irata]

That is only in part true. AMD never really had a performance/watt champion part until maybe this next generation when they enjoy better ipc, have more cores and are on 7nm.
We can look back in time and see that there were some very few premium/gaming notebooks with AMD hardware inside but they didn't sell because they had worse performance then the competition, and that could be proven by benchmarks, and battery life/cooling was worse than what Intel had.
Last gen from AMD had much more options, the most prominent one being the surface pro, testament to the fact that AMD is now good enough to be used in premium laptops. Well, it is still overtaken by Comet Lake 6 core and Ice Lake, in some regards but it is good enough.
So yeah, I don't think AMD situation was only because OEMs were paid. They just didn't have a good enough product, so they ended up in cheap laptops. With Zen 2 they have, from my opinion, all the ingredients to create some monster laptops. An 8 core 16 thread at 45w is not so hard to do, as undervolting has shown on 3700x. They can even do a 12/16 core in that power budget if they really wanna smash Intel, but I am guessing it will be too much of a spending to worth the effort.
So an 8core 16 thread in 45w tdp with Vega 15 gpu can beat imo the 9980hk from Intel, if things are done right.

Think back to the original Athlon times. This was a highly superior platform wrt performance and power.
And I do remember a friend trying to find an Athlon based gaming laptop but he wasn't able to. A salesperson talked him into a Pentium 4 based model (this was at Germany's largest electronics retailer which was paid off by Intel to not sell AMD based systems).

The laptop was so slow yet hot that he ended up returning it and building a desktop system instead.

So yes, it was because Intel gave incentives and pressured OEM and this is very well documented.

BTW: Do you remember Intel's "Secret Shopper" program?

 

[Puiu]

AMD is learning from the past.
They haven't been able to maintain a top spot, everytime they've had a certain victory with a GPU or CPU, its short lived, then boom back to second fiddle.
The reason that Intel and Nvidia STILL have a stranglehold on the discrete CPU/GPU market is the fact they've been consistent for decades, with software and hardware buyers can trust. People will even buy something that doesn't perform as well if they have more faith in it.
Ryzen has shown us it can perform, but can it do it without any setbacks, issues, catches or hiccups. And this is just for mainstream buyers, which is a small part of market. The real meat and potatoes lies in the business, backbone, infrastructure and server mainframes and services. Even with consistent success, it's hard to change the direction of hardware on that scale, its not all about silicone. There are people shaking hands at these meetings who have worked together for a long time, and those bonds are tough to break/replace.
This all being said, AMD is doing the right thing and congrats to their success this year.

A budget just for R&D bigger than the entire AMD does help with consistency (and a few anti-competitive practices thrown in the mix)

 

[yeeeeman]

Think back to the original Athlon times. This was a highly superior platform wrt performance and power.
And I do remember a friend trying to find an Athlon based gaming laptop but he wasn't able to. A salesperson talked him into a Pentium 4 based model (this was at Germany's largest electronics retailer which was paid off by Intel to not sell AMD based systems).

The laptop was so slow yet hot that he ended up returning it and building a desktop system instead.

So yes, it was because Intel gave incentives and pressured OEM and this is very well documented.

BTW: Do you remember Intel's "Secret Shopper" program?

Between then and now there were many years with very bad products from AMD. So it is not all incentives and bribery. Also, it takes time to convince oems to invest in your platform. Sure, AMD CPUs might have been great at that time but it depends how the whole platform fared, how cheap it was, how easy it was to implement. It depends on a lot of factors that we as consumers don't know, but I can assure you that Intel is very streamlined with their platforms and much better support for oems in bringing up new notebooks.
So it is not enough to have the best performing product, it is a combination of many factors especially economic ones.
This is one thing that AMD seems to have changed lately. They invest a lot more in supporting their partners.

 

[Irata]

Between then and now there were many years with very bad products from AMD. So it is not all incentives and bribery. Also, it takes time to convince oems to invest in your platform. Sure, AMD CPUs might have been great at that time but it depends how the whole platform fared, how cheap it was, how easy it was to implement. It depends on a lot of factors that we as consumers don't know, but I can assure you that Intel is very streamlined with their platforms and much better support for oems in bringing up new notebooks.
So it is not enough to have the best performing product, it is a combination of many factors especially economic ones.
This is one thing that AMD seems to have changed lately. They invest a lot more in supporting their partners.

That does not contradict my point. Yes, there were many underwhelming CPU but the reason for this was that Intel‘s tactics starved AMD of cash. Imho that was the point of them doing their best to prevent AMD from selling their CPU - no sales = no cash = AMD cannot keep up the momentum and falls behind.