Question AMD Phoenix/Zen 4 APU Speculation and Discussion

[uzzi38]

I can finally make this thread.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1519669375283957760

Phoenix is indeed RDNA3. My advice to everyone: treat the old APU rumours as being out of date.

 

[jpiniero]

Call me again when there finally are any Phoenix U laptops. Framework is still the only one, though backordered.

Acer launches Swift Edge 16 featuring AMD Ryzen 7040 APUs, high-res 16:10 120 Hz OLED, Wi-Fi 7, and 1440p webcam

Acer is upgrading its Swift Edge 16 premium business laptop ahead of Computex 2023. The Acer Swift Edge 16 features AMD Ryzen 7040 APUs with up to Radeon 780M graphics and a 16:10 120 Hz WQXGA+ OLED panel among other features. Acer has also equipped the Swift Edge 16 with a QHD 1440p webcam and...

www.notebookcheck.net

Acer just announced a Phoenix U laptop. Says July though and starts at $1299.

 

[gdansk]

Acer launches Swift Edge 16 featuring AMD Ryzen 7040 APUs, high-res 16:10 120 Hz OLED, Wi-Fi 7, and 1440p webcam

Acer is upgrading its Swift Edge 16 premium business laptop ahead of Computex 2023. The Acer Swift Edge 16 features AMD Ryzen 7040 APUs with up to Radeon 780M graphics and a 16:10 120 Hz WQXGA+ OLED panel among other features. Acer has also equipped the Swift Edge 16 with a QHD 1440p webcam and...

www.notebookcheck.net

Acer just announced a Phoenix U laptop. Says July though and starts at $1299.

That actually doesn't sound bad. 120hz OLED screen, Phoenix, Wifi7.
Keyboard looks awful however

 

[Brunnis]

Here are some benchmarks I've run myself on my new Asus Zephyrus G14 with Ryzen 9 7940HS, 32GB DDR5-4800 and RTX 4070. Several of these are older benchmarks that I've used for benchmarking my laptops over many years. The Thinkpad T14s G3 was returned after a few days due to hardware instability, while I still have the Dell in possession. Please note that the Dell benchmarks were run on an old but well kept Windows 11 installation, while the others are completely fresh. No instability or weirdness so far with the Asus.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Those Crysis results, wow. Surprised it wouldn't start/run in so many circumstances.

 

[Brunnis]

Those Crysis results, wow. Surprised it wouldn't start/run in so many circumstances.

I think I need to clarify, since the wording in the table is a bit ambiguous: "Not run" means I haven't attempted to run it. "Did not start" means what it says, of course. Crysis seems to have problems launching on recent systems. I think I just got a black screen shortly and then back to Steam. I got the same issue on the Asus, but managed to solve it my using the 3rd party c1-launcher (https://github.com/ccomrade/c1-launcher). Hopefully the use of c1-launcher doesn't skew the results.

As a comment on the Crysis results, I'd say that the old Dell is severely GPU limited even at 1024x768, while the Asus is probably decently CPU limited at the same settings. If both would have been GPU limited, the difference would have been much larger (i.e. similar to the 3DMark results).

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

ASUS ROG Ally gets up to 20% boost in 15/25W gaming with new firmware

Performance at lower TDPs looks a lot better now.

 

[moinmoin]

Certainly looking better now. But considering that Ally is using the supposed dedicated to handheld use Z1 whereas 2S is using standard 7840U there should still be room for actual firmware optimization to this particular use case, akin to Steam Deck.

 

[Tigerick]

Here comes the cheapest Phoenix notebook that selling below US$600, but only available in China . HP China also just launched business laptop with Phoenix at aggressive price in China, worldwide they might be available as ZBook Firefly 14 with slightly better specs at more than double prices.

Both notebooks are having similar specs: Ryzen 7 7840HS, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD with differences below:

	Mechrevo	Mechrevo	HP
	无界14+​	曙光16 Air	战X 14​
SRP	RMB3799 (~US$532)	RMB4999 (~US$700)	RMB5699 (~US$800)
LCD	14" 2880 X 1800 120Hz	16" 2560 X 1600 120Hz	14"' 2560 X 1600 120Hz
Battery	60 Whr	75 WHr	51 Whr

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

GDP will release a new revision of Win4 with Phoenix APU. Videocardz

Very nice specs, up to 64GB LPPDR5x 7500MT/s and 4TB SSD. The only problem I have is low graphic performance.

 

[soresu]

The only problem I have is low graphic performance.

At that silly hi 7500 MT/s rate it at least has a lot of bandwidth.

Hopefully future APUs start including some infinity cache as a stacked option - the relatively small increase in price for the 7xxxX3D SKUs over the regular ones gives some hope that it is commercially viable for APUs too.

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

At that silly hi 7500 MT/s rate it at least has a lot of bandwidth.

Hopefully future APUs start including some infinity cache as a stacked option - the relatively small increase in price for the 7xxxX3D SKUs over the regular ones gives some hope that it is commercially viable for APUs too.

In my country, the difference looks like this.
7950X3D (€722.9) costs 19.5% more than 7950X (€604.9).
7900X3D (€575.9) costs 28% more than 7900X (€449.9).
7800X3D (€482.9) costs 34% more than 7700X (€360.9).
That's a relatively small increase in price to you? We are talking about a small 36mm2 extra chip using 7nm process, yet they ask so much for It.

Now back to APUs with extra cache. We can't expect that AMD or Intel will choose a wider memory bus, so we are left with only some form of extra cache. Strix Point supposedly won't use any, even though IGP should be bigger than 12CU, most likely 16CU.

I made a chart comparing Asus ROG Ally vs Asus TUF Gaming A16 from notebookcheck.

	Low	Medium	High	Ultra
Far Cry 6 (2021)	80 vs 151 (+89%)	48 vs 133 (+177%)	41 vs 119 (+190%)	30 vs 104.7 (+249%)
F1 22 (2022)	86.6 vs 263 (+200%)	77.9 vs 244 (+213%)	57.9 vs 190 (+228%)	15.1 vs 50.5 (+234%)
Hogwarts Legacy (2023)	37.8 vs 118.4 (+213%)	24.8 vs 88.7 9 (+258%)	19.5 vs 72 (+269%)	14.8 vs 55.4 (+274%)

The difference in specs is clearly a lot smaller than the difference in performance.
BW is one problem, but I think this APU is not working at anything close to turboboost(2700MHz), maybe not even 200MHz. Couldn't find the exact clock, found only that 7600S worked at 2398MHz during Witcher3.

There are basically 3 problems with current APUs. Low amount of execution units, BW, lower clockspeed due to power limit.

Honestly, AMD doesn't really need to make an APU with 24-32CU in my opinion. Even with 18-20CUs they could manage 35-40 FPS in Hogwarts at Ultra settings, If the clock stays at the level of 7600S. Give this APU 64MB LLC for a 72% hitrate at 1080p and I don't think low BW would be a problem.
Power limit of course will need to be a lot higher than 30W.
Now you have a good APU in my opinion, but it would cost a lot.

I don't want to know how much would AMD ask for 8Zen5+8Zen4c+64MB LLC+20CU IGP.

 

[soresu]

We are talking about a small 36mm2 extra chip using 7nm process, yet they ask so much for It.

You are missing the extra packaging process steps for stacking that chip with TSVs which is non trivial + the silicon blanks to level out the rest of the chip for the heatspreader, and then the yields of that process too.

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

You are missing the extra packaging process steps for stacking that chip with TSVs which is non trivial + the silicon blanks to level out the rest of the chip for the heatspreader, and then the yields of that process too.

That cache Die costs ~$5, for the rest let's say another $15-20, in total $20-25. It clearly doesn't cost anywhere near what they ask for on top of already pretty costly CPUs.

 

[soresu]

That cache Die costs ~$5, for the rest let's say another $15-20, in total $20-25. It clearly doesn't cost anywhere near what they ask for on top of already pretty costly CPUs.

It seems costly to you, but I still remember what Intel was charging less than 7 years ago for their quad core CPUs, which they would likely still be hawking to consumers if AMD had gone under.

We're getting a bargain by comparison - especially considering node/mask costs have increased and the 7950X3D costs close to what the 5950X did at launch.

 

[dr1337]

That cache Die costs ~$5, for the rest let's say another $15-20, in total $20-25. It clearly doesn't cost anywhere near what they ask for on top of already pretty costly CPUs.

But thats true for every company that works in semi-conductors. They build up economies of scale so high and tall spending billions on developing these processes, buying machines, and paying workers that they can actually produce what might as well be considered alien technology for mere dollars per chip. Its only "cheap" for AMD to add v-cache to a CPU because of the fact they invested in building millions of chips at a time when literally the process is 2x more involved compared to any normal IC.

Fact of the matter with pricing around v-cache is that there is no competition. In 2019 I thought it was pretty silly people would pay $499 for a 9900k, only 8 cores and you still have to do most of the overclocking yourself. But had intel done something like include eDRAM on package for enhanced memory performance then that price tag would have been looked really good; I might have even bought one instead of ryzen. If the product has a feature that I find useful in the workload I'm using, I want to buy it even if it has a higher price. So I'd really assume if anything consumers are more than willing to reward a company with paying a slightly higher margin for 1:1 better performance.

Like really just look at how expensive GPUs are and their price scaling, consumers love paying way more there. Paying an extra 100 for extra cache on the CPU is more than fair. I mean, last time I bought ram it cost me over $100. So a dedicated cache die on package costing as much doesn't seem like a bad deal.

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

It seems costly to you, but I still remember what Intel was charging less than 7 years ago for their quad core CPUs, which they would likely still be hawking to consumers if AMD had gone under.

We're getting a bargain by comparison - especially considering node/mask costs have increased and the 7950X3D costs close to what the 5950X did at launch.

I still remember Zen 1's or Zen 2's prices in comparison.

Year: 2017 vs 2023
$499 8C16T Ryzen 7 1800X vs $699 16C32T Ryzen 9 7950X3D
$249 6C12T Ryzen 7 1600X vs $599 12C24T Ryzen 9 7900X3D
$189 4C8T Ryzen 5 1500X vs $449 8C16T Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Year: 2018 vs 2023
$329 8C16T Ryzen 7 2700X vs $699 16C32T Ryzen 9 7950X3D
$229 6C12T Ryzen 7 2600X vs $599 12C24T Ryzen 9 7900X3D
This is no bargain.

 

[LightningZ71]

That's way too aggressive for something like this application. Just going from 6 WGPs to 8-10 WGPs (12CUs to 16-20CUs) and including just 32MB of IfC, when coupled with 7500MT/s LPDDR5, would give performance in excess of the 6500XT, probably nearing 6600 territory, which is more than enough for most anything at FHD. Just speculating, but the increase in cost of the processor package would only be about $30 at most if what we've heard over the years is true. If they really wanted to get fancy, they could do a separated IfC cache die with 32MB dedicated to the CPU core CCX and another 32MB for the IfC. This would allow the CPU cores to run at lower speeds for similar performance levels and better manage power usage under load as we've seen that the X3D processors seem to consume less power per arbitrary performance measure than the non X3D parts. That wouldn't really cost a noticeable amount more in mass production.

 

[moinmoin]

I still remember Zen 1's or Zen 2's prices in comparison.

Year: 2017 vs 2023
$499 8C16T Ryzen 7 1800X vs $699 16C32T Ryzen 9 7950X3D
$249 6C12T Ryzen 7 1600X vs $599 12C24T Ryzen 9 7900X3D
$189 4C8T Ryzen 5 1500X vs $449 8C16T Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Year: 2018 vs 2023
$329 8C16T Ryzen 7 2700X vs $699 16C32T Ryzen 9 7950X3D
$229 6C12T Ryzen 7 2600X vs $599 12C24T Ryzen 9 7900X3D
This is no bargain.

You call that a comparison?

 

[soresu]

And you call It a bargain.

I still notice you neglected to include Intel prices there 😏

$499 8C16T Ryzen 7 1800X vs $699 16C32T Ryzen 9 7950X3D
$249 6C12T Ryzen 7 1600X vs $599 12C24T Ryzen 9 7900X3D
$189 4C8T Ryzen 5 1500X vs $449 8C16T Ryzen 7 7800X3D

You are comparing 1x quantity of cores at 16nm to 2x quantity of cores at 5nm - hardly apples to apples.

You missed my point about fab node costs and die mask costs increasing with each new generation which is not at all an inconsequential point.

So ye, all things considered to what the market condition was in mid 2010s + current inflation rates we are indeed getting a bargain.

GPUs on the other hand I'm less sanguine about.

If 16C continues to be the top end for consumer markets at the same general price range past Zen5 generation I'd definitely be inclined to side with you, inflation and costs be damned.

I was hoping for <$1,500 32C AM5 in the Zen5 generation, but it seems pretty unlikely now, unless they are just pulling another jebait to throw Intel off the scent.

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

Like really just look at how expensive GPUs are and their price scaling, consumers love paying way more there. Paying an extra 100 for extra cache on the CPU is more than fair. I mean, last time I bought ram it cost me over $100. So a dedicated cache die on package costing as much doesn't seem like a bad deal.

You pay in the case of 7800X3D 34% more than for 7700X, in return you gain 11% higher FPS. For that you also need a $1599 GPU and 1080p, because at higher resolutions the difference gets smaller. At least with 7950X3D you pay only 19.5% more for comparable increase in FPS.

For this performance increase, I don't consider It a good deal or fair price when It cost only a fraction of that extra price.

You call that a comparison?

Yep. You think I should have compared them at the same core count when they are 5-6 years apart?

 

[moinmoin]

Yep. You think I should have compared them at the same core count when they are 5-6 years apart?

The most earnest comparison would be comparing the cost at the same performance. Of course there are then endless possible workloads one could pick as the performance point. Likewise more expensive CPUs are not necessarily better in specific workloads.

Your "comparison" is little more than picking a manufacturer's most expensive consumer CPUs at a given time and complaining that that manufacturer added more expensive options now. You could add HEDT/workstation and server CPUs to complain even more. The MI300 series is totally the cherry on the cake in that comparison, totally not worth the hefty price tag in your chosen workload!

Btw. here general price inflation has been over 20% since 2017.

 

[Thibsie]

I still remember Zen 1's or Zen 2's prices in comparison.

Year: 2017 vs 2023
$499 8C16T Ryzen 7 1800X vs $699 16C32T Ryzen 9 7950X3D
$249 6C12T Ryzen 7 1600X vs $599 12C24T Ryzen 9 7900X3D
$189 4C8T Ryzen 5 1500X vs $449 8C16T Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Year: 2018 vs 2023
$329 8C16T Ryzen 7 2700X vs $699 16C32T Ryzen 9 7950X3D
$229 6C12T Ryzen 7 2600X vs $599 12C24T Ryzen 9 7900X3D
This is no bargain.

That's no apple to orange comparison. More like strawberries to bananas.

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

I still notice you neglected to include Intel prices there 😏

The same way, you neglected to include Zen prices, because then Zen4 wouldn't look like a "bargain".
i7 7700K - $350 4C8T
i7 7800X - $389 6C12T
i7 7820X - $599 8C16T

You are comparing 1x quantity of cores at 16nm to 2x quantity of cores at 5nm - hardly apples to apples.

You missed my point about fab node costs and die mask costs increasing with each new generation which is not at all an inconsequential point.

So ye, all things considered to what the market condition was in mid 2010s + current inflation rates we are indeed getting a bargain.

GPUs on the other hand I'm less sanguine about.

If 16C continues to be the top end for consumer markets at the same general price range past Zen5 generation I'd definitely be inclined to side with you, inflation and costs be damned.

I was hoping for <$1,500 32C AM5 in the Zen5 generation, but it seems pretty unlikely now, unless they are just pulling another jebait to throw Intel off the scent.

Yes, you are right that Zen 4 costs more to produce than either Zen1 for example, but you also can't say that the difference in price is only due to higher cost or inflation.

AMD has great margins on these CPUs.
With how much they ask for this extra 64MB cache chip, I have to wonder when we will see extra cache for APUs.

 

[TESKATLIPOKA]

That's no apple to orange comparison. More like strawberries to bananas.

Then please provide your apples to apples comparison. I am eagerly waiting for It.

 

[Joe NYC]

I still remember Zen 1's or Zen 2's prices in comparison.

Year: 2017 vs 2023
$499 8C16T Ryzen 7 1800X vs $699 16C32T Ryzen 9 7950X3D
$249 6C12T Ryzen 7 1600X vs $599 12C24T Ryzen 9 7900X3D
$189 4C8T Ryzen 5 1500X vs $449 8C16T Ryzen 7 7800X3D

Year: 2018 vs 2023
$329 8C16T Ryzen 7 2700X vs $699 16C32T Ryzen 9 7950X3D
$229 6C12T Ryzen 7 2600X vs $599 12C24T Ryzen 9 7900X3D
This is no bargain.

$279 for 5800x3d is a bargain. At my local MicroCenter in the US.

And if it is true that AMD will be releasing 5600x3d, it will probably be in $199-$239 range MSRP.