AMD Raven Ridge
Cliff_Forster
Icrontian
Obviously named Raven Ridge after the Baltimore Ravens because of their biggest fanboy. If not, may I suggest AMD's next architecture be named O's Hon! That will sell big time.
Seriously though, I have not been so excited for a hardware launch in a long time, some rumors are just coming out and it looks like the Ryzen 5 2400G is going to be able to play just about any modern title in 1080P without a dedicated GPU, and when I say play, I mean 60 FPS, not 30..... Now I'm not saying every bell and whistle turned all the way up, and obviously you will need to feed it adequate DDR4, but if you want to game on a small form factor desktop without smashing in a ridiculous giant three fan hotbox GPU in a tiny little space, you will finally be able to do it for real. AMD has been close on a few occasions, they had some really compelling ideas on how to link up an APU with a lower powered GPU in crossfire and that sort of kind of worked okay but this is really exciting. I can't wait to build something on this platform. $169 for this chip looks like a steal.
Comments
I really wish there was an 8-core version with graphics. I wanted two GPUs in my latest build so I could give VFIO a shot, and had to get a micro-ATX board to get a second slot. If there was a beefier CPU APU, I could have done it with mini-ITX and had room in the case for better cooling.
Still, I'm excited to see Zen + Vega in laptops. Been holding out on upgrading until I see a one with good build quality and solid Linux support.
I think their engineering is capable of more but there is some pause on how far to take the APU concept because there is probably some fear of cannibalizing their own GPU market. I think Raven Ridge is a big opportunity for AMD to differentiate from Nvidia. I truly believe the future performance system isn't going to scale with PCIE slots, it's going to go to a second socket on performance boards to allow the user to scale all the CPU / GPU horsepower they need. In five years performance computing is going to be dramatically different. Smaller, more efficient, more portable, more flexible across various form factors, easier to scale. GPU's stream performance computing is still going to have it's space in mining and in certain environments that need that parallel compute power, but client systems may not see them as desirable in a few years and I don't think that's a bad thing. Especially not for AMD.
I don't think we'll ever see a second socket. Routing 200W+ through a motherboard is expensive and needless complexity when PCIe Gen4 is on the horizon and discrete GPUs are only getting more and more efficient with the performance they offer.
I'm sure there will be a replacement of low-end GPUs with APU-like devices. Broadly that has already happened. But markets like China are holdouts that will take a while to come around to the idea that discrete isn't always necessary.
The future of a performance PC, though, looks very much like the system today. Just with more go under the hood.
That may be so. I do find the idea exciting though. At a 65 Watt TDP you know the engineers have some wiggle room to expand on the design a bit (not that fitting all of those GPU and Compute cores in that space is easy). I think it is exciting and I know as an insider you would not say this, but we kind of know they are sandbagging on the desktop end a little to see how things go. AMD has to wonder how this will impact GPU sales in that segment, and ultimately how it will impact relationships with board partners. I think this is a premium architecture, an exciting variant that neither Intel or Nvidia have an answer for. I have no real reason to build anything right now, but I think I'm going to build a 2400G system just because. I want to see what I can squeeze out of it.