Why? The low-end Matisse 6c chip launched at $199 and is dropping in price already. There's plenty of room for a downclocked 6c APU that isn't as fast as a 3600 in the traditional APU price points. 8c maybe so, but by the time Vermeer is out, there will be plenty of room in AMD's lineup for a $150-ish 8c Renoir on the desktop.
With Ryzen 3000 the APUs replaced the sub 6 cores offerings. I can see the same happening with sub 8 cores (sub 12 seems like too big a stretch) offerings as part of Ryzen 4000. Pricing will depend on how AMD intends to set up the range in the next round. But I suspect they'll do more of what they did with Ryzen 3000/Threadripper 3 where they essentially kept the Zen 1 prices at launch but extended the performance (thanks to Zen 2) and expanded the top end offerings with more cores. So we may see little changes which would mean Renoir costing the same as iGPU-less counterparts currently.
Do we have any indication that the cache reduction will hurt a lot? I ask this as there is no chiplet penalty in APUs.Phasing out 3600 and 3600x would be a very bad move, as the strong gaming performance of these chips really relies on the 2x16MB of L3 cache. The APU cuts it doen to 2x4MB.
That's actually a good point, didn't consider the fact that Renoir on desktop can improve memory latency noticably.Do we have any indication that the cache reduction will hurt a lot? I ask this as there is no chiplet penalty in APUs.
Do we have any indication that the cache reduction will hurt a lot? I ask this as there is no chiplet penalty in APUs.
Older gens are not really phased out, they just don't get a non-APU successor in the new gen (like 4600, if that is still 6c/12t).Phasing out 3600 and 3600x would be a very bad move, as the strong gaming performance of these chips really relies on the 2x16MB of L3 cache. The APU cuts it doen to 2x4MB.
Phasing out 3600 and 3600x would be a very bad move, as the strong gaming performance of these chips really relies on the 2x16MB of L3 cache. The APU cuts it doen to 2x4MB.