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posted by martyb on Thursday June 25 2020, @11:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the more-vs-Moore dept.

AMD claims to have improved performance by about 5x while cutting power use to about 1/6th, when comparing 2014 "Kaveri" mobile APUs to 2020 "Renoir" mobile APUs. This exceeds a goal of improving efficiency by 25x by 2020:

The base value for AMD's goal is on its Kaveri mobile processors, which by the standards of today set a very low bar. As AMD moved to Carrizo, it implemented new power monitoring features on chip that allowed the system to offer a better distribution of power and ran closer to the true voltage needed, not wasting power. After Carrizo came Bristol Ridge, still based on the older cores, but used a new DDR4 controller as well as lower powered processors that were better optimized for efficiency.

A big leap came with Raven Ridge, with AMD combining its new highly efficient Zen x86 cores and Vega integrated graphics. This heralded a vast improvement in performance due to doubling the cores and improving the graphics, all within a similar power window as Bristol Ridge. This boosted up the important 25x20 metric and keeping it well above the 'linear' gain.

[...] The jump from Picasso to Renoir has been well documented. Our first use of the CPUs, reviewed in the ASUS Zephyrus G14, left us with our mouths open, almost literally. We called it a 'Mobile Revival', showcasing AMD's transition over from Zen+ to Zen2, from GF 12nm to TSMC 7nm, along with a lot of strong design and optimization on the graphics side. The changes from the 2019 to the 2020 chip include doubling the core count, from four to eight, improving the clock-for-clock performance by 15-20%, but also improving the graphics performance and frequencies despite moving down from an silicon design that had 11 compute units down to 8. This comes in line with a number of power updates, adhering to AHCI specifications, and as we discussed with Sam Naffziger, AMD Fellow, supporting the new S0ix low power states has helped tremendously. The reduction in the fabric power, along with additional memory bandwidth, offered large gains.

AMD accomplished this while using refined "7nm" Vega GPU cores in its APUs, instead of moving to a newer architecture such as RDNA2.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Laptop Vendors Will Pair AMD's Cezanne (Zen 3) with High-End GPUs 16 comments

Vendors Finally Pair Ryzen CPUs and High-End GPUs In Laptops

AMD's Ryzen 4000 (Renoir) processors may be mobile powerhouses, but for reasons unknown, laptop vendors were reluctant to pair the Zen 2 chips with high-end graphics cards. Ryzen 5000 (Cezanne), on the other hand, appears to have won over manufacturers as there are already retailer postings of upcoming laptops (via Tum_Apisak) with options that span up to a GeForce RTX 3080.

[...] The Ryzen 9 5900HX broke its cover recently, but the Zen 3 chip's secret remains to be unraveled. It's plausible that the Ryzen 9 5900HX is just a faster variant of its H-series counterpart or that AMD may have finally unlocked the multiplier for enthusiasts to overclock the processor, like what Intel allows with its HK-series SKUs.

[...] No one has any idea of when AMD will release Ryzen 5000, but the sudden appearance of benchmark submissions and retailer listings point to an imminent launch. CES 2020 is coming up, and AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech. It would be the ideal venue to announce the mobile Zen 3 chips since the desktop counterparts are already out.

"Cezanne" is the Zen 3 version of AMD's Zen 2 "Renoir" 4000-series APUs. "Lucienne" will consist of Zen 2 APUs (a Renoir refresh) confusingly given the same 5000-series naming as Cezanne.

One of the common theories behind a lack of high-end GPU options has been that AMD's Renoir limits a discrete mobile GPU to a PCIe 3.0 x8 connection (instead of x16), which can be a slight bottleneck for higher end mobile GPUs. Others believe it's just due to OEMs cheaping out on AMD systems.

Upcoming mobile GPUs (like the mobile RTX 3080 mentioned) could bring up to 16 GB of VRAM to laptops.

See also: AMD Radeon RX 6000M RDNA 2 Mobility GPUs Based on Navi 22, Navi 23, Navi 24 SKUs Further Detailed – Die Sizes, TGPs, Clock Limits

Related: AMD Ryzen 4000 'Renoir' APU Runs Crysis Without Any Cooling Solution
AMD Succeeds in its 25x20 Goal: 2020 "Renoir" Over 31 Times More Efficient than 2014 "Kaveri" Chips
AMD Launches Ryzen 4000G Desktop APUs: OEM-Only at First


Original Submission

AMD Aims to Increase Energy Efficiency of Epyc CPUs and Instinct AI Accelerators 30x by 2025 17 comments

AMD wants to make its chips 30 times more energy-efficient by 2025

Today, [AMD] announced its most ambitious goal yet—to increase the energy efficiency of its Epyc CPUs and Instinct AI accelerators 30 times by 2025. This would help data centers and supercomputers achieve high performance with significant power savings over current solutions.

If it achieves this goal, the savings would add up to billions of kilowatt-hours of electricity saved in 2025 alone, meaning the power required to perform a single calculation in high-performance computing tasks will have decreased by 97 percent.

Increasing energy efficiency this much will involve a lot of engineering wizardry, including AMD's stacked 3D V-Cache chiplet technology. The company acknowledges the difficult task ahead of it, now that "energy-efficiency gains from process node advances are smaller and less frequent."

What does it mean?

In addition to compute node performance/Watt measurements, to make the goal particularly relevant to worldwide energy use, AMD uses segment-specific datacenter power utilization effectiveness (PUE) with equipment utilization taken into account. The energy consumption baseline uses the same industry energy per operation improvement rates as from 2015-2020, extrapolated to 2025. The measure of energy per operation improvement in each segment from 2020-2025 is weighted by the projected worldwide volumes multiplied by the Typical Energy Consumption (TEC) of each computing segment to arrive at a meaningful metric of actual energy usage improvement worldwide.

See the 25x20 Initiative from a few years ago.

See also: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to unveil new AI technologies and products at GTC Keynote in November


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @11:25PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @11:25PM (#1012691)

    That's because "kaveri" was garbage. That generation of AMD chips gave "APU" the bad name.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday June 26 2020, @09:35AM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday June 26 2020, @09:35AM (#1012805) Journal

      Wasn't it faster than what came before it?

      Actually, I have an older Llano (2011) APU, which was the last generation before Bulldozer/Piledriver based APUs came out. TDP for TDP, it's worse than Kaveri, and the 15 Watt Kaveri can *sort of* match the 35 Watt Llano.

      In between Llano and Kaveri was Trinity and Richland, which were both Bulldozer/Piledriver.

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      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @04:10PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @04:10PM (#1012901)

      I think that's a given - if Kaveri didn't suck, a 25x increase would have been a ludicrous goal. AMD wasn't nutty enough to set their target Renoir as 25x more efficient than 2014 Haswell.

  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @11:29PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @11:29PM (#1012692)

    So he sent his only daughter, Dr Lisa Su, to smite Intel. And it was good.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @11:48PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2020, @11:48PM (#1012695)

      You are a bad jew. How can you screw up genesis so bad?

      Anyways, Taiwan Numbah Won.

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by boltronics on Friday June 26 2020, @03:34AM (6 children)

    by boltronics (580) on Friday June 26 2020, @03:34AM (#1012774) Homepage Journal

    I was seriously considering a GPD WIN Max gaming "laptop" handheld, mainly for JPRGs and other text-heavy games I have on Steam (until my wife shut that idea down...). But from the Indiegogo page [indiegogo.com]:

    Initially we considered using AMD's mobile processor Ryzen 5 2500U. However, after the release of Intel's 10th generation Ice Lake-U, we found that with the 10nm process, 15W TDP, 4 cores and 8 threads, twice the number of transistors (compared to the previous generation) and 6MB L3 cache, this product is superior to AMD Ryzen 5 2500U in terms of overall performance. In particular, Intel's 11th-generation Iris Plus Graphics 940, as an integrated graphics chip featuring lower power consumption and heat dissipation, actually performs in 3DMark 11 nearly as good as NVIDIA GeForce MX250, a discrete graphics chip. Considering the above (especially Intel AMD integrated graphics for the first time), we finally decided to go with the Intel solution. Considering the above (especially Intel having better integrated graphics than AMD for the first time), we finally decided to use the Intel solution.

    The laptop is not out yet, but it looks like the Ryzen 5 2500U they were comparing against is just a Raven Ridge APU that's close to 3 years old. I'm assuming they didn't really take that long to make this hardware... but did Intel really beat AMD APUs in graphics at any point? It's kinda hard to believe.

    In any case, I wish a portable gaming machine such as this existed with an AMD APU (and a more sensible keyboard layout).

    --
    It's GNU/Linux dammit!
    • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @06:08AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @06:08AM (#1012798)

      You can get laptops with the Ryzen 4000 series APUs which are far superior to anything Intel has to offer. 8 core/8 thread CPU with Vega graphics in a 15W package. It beats desktop chips in multi thread applications. Though no such handheld devices exist yet.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Friday June 26 2020, @09:53AM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday June 26 2020, @09:53AM (#1012808) Journal

      Ice Lake was better than Picasso [anandtech.com], and it did come out before Renoir, although I'm not sure if availability was any good in September 2019. Renoir in turn, is better than Ice Lake. By far in the case of CPU performance.

      Intel's successor to Ice Lake, "10nm" Tiger Lake, should beat AMD's Renoir graphics performance by about 20-30% this year. That's in part due to AMD not increasing graphics performance so much this year with Renoir, instead focusing on CPU performance (up to 8 cores). AMD going forward may have two separate lines of mobile APUs: ones meant for high performance laptops with discrete GPUs (Renoir w/ Zen 2 and Vega, Cezanne w/ Zen 3 and Vega), and ones better suited for small, low power devices (Rembrandt and Van Gogh?). You can check out some of the reasoning in this 25 minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMJZOjbsMeE [youtube.com]

      I don't know how sensible a keyboard can get on an 8-inch device. Doesn't seem too bad from the Indiegogo page. You probably shouldn't buy a "laptop" through crowdfunding since your payment predates reviews and potential price drops.

      --
      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
      • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @04:47PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @04:47PM (#1012914)

        You probably shouldn't buy a "laptop" through crowdfunding since your payment predates reviews and potential price drops.

        There is also a high risk of production delays with crowdfunding, so maybe the hardware that will be a reasonable value for its cost in June 2021 won't actually be in your hands until 2022 or 2023.

    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday June 26 2020, @03:13PM (1 child)

      by Freeman (732) on Friday June 26 2020, @03:13PM (#1012880) Journal

      I'm thinking you'd be better off buying a small monitor and a minipc, then use your choice of input, keyboard/mouse,gamepad, etc. That indiegogo looks pretty gimicky. While it may deliver a product, I just got to wonder about the ergonomics of said device. I prefer keyboard/mouse or a comfortable gamepad. The first thing I did for my PSPs and DS Lite was to purchase something that gave them grips. In the case of the PSPs, it was battery packs that had nice controller grips. In the case of the DS Lite it was a case with fold out wing grips that made it fit more comfortably in the hand. I don't need arthritis 'cause I was too dumb to think about basic ergonomics on a device I plan to use a lot.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
      • (Score: 2) by boltronics on Sunday June 28 2020, @06:45AM

        by boltronics (580) on Sunday June 28 2020, @06:45AM (#1013592) Homepage Journal

        Reviews so far say it's comfortable, with one reviewer claiming to have put ~150 hours into it IIRC. Probably because you hold it in your lap, hands wider apart and resting on each leg, instead of in the air and close together like a typical game controller.

        Having said that, the paint on the sides of my 3DS XL has almost completely peeled off after many hundreds of hours playing the various Fire Emblem and Persona Q games, and I've never had the slightest hint of a problem.

        OTOH, my wife complains about wrist pain after briefly using a Switch Pro controller, which is supposed to be one of the most comfortable modern controllers. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

        --
        It's GNU/Linux dammit!
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @10:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 26 2020, @10:21PM (#1013013)

      Same. I would have preordered immediately if they were still using AMD. I think I'll stick with my Win 2 until their next iteration.

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