From what I've seen so far, none of the Ryzen APUs pack as much graphics power as the Vega-powered Kaby Lake Gs, which is disappointing.
I was hoping for a Ryzen NUC that would be powerful enough to use as an HTPC and ultra-portable gaming machine, but it appears that won't be happening.
It's immediately visible AMD have no serious plans in the 65-100W package TDP territory if it gave the Vega to Intel instead of launching such a chip itself.
Who wants to guess this monster hybrid will only be available in Hades Canyon and some Apple machine and nowhere else?
A Ryzen "7" series APU with the same 4 core / 8 thread setup as the 2400G but with double the CUs (so 22 CU) and a big beefy L4 buffer like Intel uses in their high end GPUs to be able to use the extra gpu horsepower would be game changing.
Maybe in the Navi generation? It would make for a very pretty lineup to have, say, Navi 10 / 14 / 24 be APUs, Navi 36 / 44 be a budget discrete GPU pair, have Navi 56 / 64 be shrunk Vega cards, and then some high end 2080 Ti competitor series of new cards called Navi 80 / 88[1]. If they can get power under control and have the TDPs like up like 45 / 65 / 95 / 120 / 150 / 170 / 200 / 210 / 250 watts they could have a really viable lineup no matter what Nvidia pulls...
[1] Having a GPU called the 88 would just be marketing bliss. "When we get this thing up to 88 compute units you are going to see some serious shit".
2400G's 65W is waaaay to much for NUC. Even current dual-core 15W i5 can be quite noisy. And 2400G allows you to play games only on lowest details with >25fps anyway.
For home HTPC even an old BayTrail-based NUC is sufficient (Kodi/Plex) at 1080p though. I run one for ~3 years and haven't had any need to upgrade so far.
For gaming get one of those ZOTAC Magnus machines with 1070, as large as Mac Mini, quiet and powerful. I use one as a SteamBox and couldn't be happier.
Besides the consumer Raven Ridge CPUs there are also 2 OEM 35w versions that are downclocked slightly while shaving off a huge chunk of TDP. They are named like 2400G but with an E on the end, ie 2400GE. I imagine if AMD really wanted to put the effort into a 15W chip they could manage a ~2.5ghz quad core with Ryzen modules.
Honestly curious: why get a ~$1300 Linux console over say a Nintendo Switch or regular PC? Seems to me SteamOS was a great idea but is dying? Anything I am missing, any killer apps/games?
It's a very fast, general-purpose computer; 1070 also can be used for crypto-mining, so when you aren't playing, it can run ETH/XMR/etc. mining and as it's pretty low power, you might even be profitable. Deep Learning model training can be done too if you have such a need as well. I bought it as I wanted to help SteamOS not to die and bought all AAA titles that were available on SteamOS.
I was under the impression the 2400G is already heavily memory-bandwidth limited, so unless memory gets a whole lot faster I don't see them packing all that much more into an APU.
Depends on how many people know about it and might interprete it as some kind of association. I would be sceptical to use 88 as a designation, at least in Germany. See 4 or 13 for numbers avoided in other cultures (for non-political reasons).
Well, we're talking motherboards here, I live right next door and had absolutely no idea and it definitely would not affect my purchase of any product numbered 88, living in house number 88 or setting the price of a product (though 89 would obviously be better).
I have no idea why 4 would be special and 13 avoidance is for superstitious people which I'm not one of.
So forgive me if I don't see the problem with the 'Navi 88', in spite of being pretty sensitive to such issues because of what my grandparents went through.
When some kids wanted to do a dance festival under the label 'Tanzen macht frei' I thought it was in pretty bad taste because it clearly intended to be a reference. But just a number is not enough to trigger my sense of indignation.
"Nazi numerology"? How's that a thing? We have already started banning words, so now start banning numbers just because some braindeads use them instead of banned words? Please, stop.
So what? The killer must have wear shoes, so should we ban shoes now as well? I understand what these numbers might mean in some circles, but I just don't follow logic why the rest of us would care. After all, Streisand effect kicks in if we try to limit usage of certain numbers.
And if he was, would you propose Nike stop marketing their shoes? It's probably another US-centric thing I will never understand, like skipping 13th floor or plane seat number.
P.S. we have already derailed this discussion deep off-topic, so I will not continue any longer.
Meanwhile, the 300-unit housing complex next to where I live doesn't have 4 in any of the addresses. The street blocks even go 100, 200, 300, 500, 600...
Seems like their marketing team cared enough about a number.
> I think 88 would be a very unfortunate designation, Neo-Nazis use it as a code / abbreviation for “Heil Hitler” (8th letter twice).
IIRC 8 is a lucky number in chinese and asian cultures. Between catering to the billion-strong asia market and hurting the feelings of a hand-full of conspiracy nuts, I would prefer to go where the money goes.
I wonder if part of the agreement with Intel, AMD agreed to not bring out Ryzen 7 APU with better graphics to keep that segment competition-free? Currently there are no plans for anything higher than Ryzen 5 in the APU space.
Would that be anti-competitive behavior or just part of business?
Would it be illegal for AMD to agree not to enter a competing part in that segment though? It's not as though they're colluding on price or squashing other competitors.
I went for a microatx b350 chipset motherboard, ryzen 1500x (overclocked by 300 MHz), and a $85 geforce1030 2GB for my home media system. The geforce1030 has far superior H265/HEVC and similar GPU-assisted video decoding than anything possible with currently shipping intel or AMD CPUs. Same architecture as the 1060/1070/1080 in a low power fanless version. You wouldn't want to use it for 3D gaming but for high bitrate 4K video, it's perfect.
The highest bitrate movie I have plays with about 22% CPU usage spread across all four cores.
If I were doing the same build two months from now, probably not. But I don't think the new APUs are shipping in any commercially available real quantity yet, and many ryzen socket motherboards do not yet support 4K at 60Hz for their onboard HDMI outputs.
For 3D gaming (not video decode GPU-assist performance), to me, neither the gt1030 or the ryzen 2400G look like they have acceptably smooth framerates (45-60 fps) at 1080p high settings:
According to heise/c't magazine[1] (highly respected German tech publication), the Vega-based APUs support HDMI 2.0 even if the motherboards only advertise HDMI 1.4 support, as the pins are directly routed from the APU package. DisplayPort 1.2 works for 4K@60Hz as well of course. I suppose there's a risk the motherboard traces might be too low quality to carry HDMI2 signal speeds on some boards; hopefully board makers will revalidate and update specs for their boards. On the other hand, it may be worth waiting the 5-8 weeks until 400 series chipset boards come out which will presumably be designed with Ryzen G in mind.
