Question Zen 6 Speculation Thread

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reaperrr3

Member
May 31, 2024
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A bit sad to see the iGPU being kind of relegated to a 2nd class citizen. At least with the Zen5 and previous monolithic APUs the iGPU would get access to the same process node.
Well, as Raven Ridge/Picasso clearly proved, relatively powerful iGPUs don't do much for the ASPs you can ask, so they're mostly just a cost adder and it makes sense to prioritise cost over performance for them.

No one is making iGPU/GPU for client on 2nm soon except Phone Vendors
Out of curiosity, is it mostly a cost/yield issue (not mature/cheap enough for desktop GPUs by 2027) or a volume issue (booked out for NVL, Zen6, HPC GPUs and phone chips)?

But yeah, apart from AMD with Vega20 + RDNA1 on N7 and NV with Ada on "4N" (semi-custom N5 afaik), both GPU IHVs have been rather conservative with their process choices over the past 10 years, so this isn't a new phenomenon.
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
16,799
7,249
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Out of curiosity, is it mostly a cost/yield issue (not mature/cheap enough for desktop GPUs by 2027) or a volume issue (booked out for NVL, Zen6, HPC GPUs and phone chips)?

Cost definitely. Even the N3 Zen 6 products are going to be pricey, can't wait to see what any theoretical N2 ones will cost.
 

Josh128

Golden Member
Oct 14, 2022
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lol look at this silliness. The 'kek already picked up on our discussion this morning and has an article about it!! They must have a bot scraping "Kepler_L2" instances in these forums....

1756828582589.png

 

LightningZ71

Platinum Member
Mar 10, 2017
2,508
3,190
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Raven Ridge/Picasso had the mountain of poor previous products and their accompanying reputation to compete with. They were good products, but, look at what they were selling against. Follow on products dealt with limited availability due to factors including OEM recalcitrance, AMD not wanting to over produce, and improving competing products as Tiger Lake improved a lot over previous Intel iGPUs, making that not as much of a competitive selling point in the market.

The other issue AMD continues to face across much of the market is that those processors are continually placed either in bottom end laptops that don't do them any favors with power/thermals, or, if they are in anything better, they are paired with dGPUs that take the place of the iGPUs. While they did gut the bottom end of Nvidia's mobile stack of cheaper dGPUs, leaving almost nothing on the market below the xx50 series, Nvidia responded by making the xx50 series cheap enough for laptop vendors to sell in the "in between" market that exists above barely above junk level volume retail models and the lower end gaming and professional market devices.

The market never really got to speak because there was barely an opportunity for it TO speak. I can count on one hand the number of laptops that were marketed without a dGPU, but had other useful gaming oriented features, decent power profiles for the CPUs, decent cooling, and weren't priced higher than other laptops that came with xx50 series dGPUs.
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
16,799
7,249
136
It helps that even the garbage stuff is a lot faster than the IGPs. Even Strix Halo likely only made it to market because of AI Hype.
 

Thunder 57

Diamond Member
Aug 19, 2007
4,026
6,740
136
Raven Ridge/Picasso had the mountain of poor previous products and their accompanying reputation to compete with. They were good products, but, look at what they were selling against. Follow on products dealt with limited availability due to factors including OEM recalcitrance, AMD not wanting to over produce, and improving competing products as Tiger Lake improved a lot over previous Intel iGPUs, making that not as much of a competitive selling point in the market.

The other issue AMD continues to face across much of the market is that those processors are continually placed either in bottom end laptops that don't do them any favors with power/thermals, or, if they are in anything better, they are paired with dGPUs that take the place of the iGPUs. While they did gut the bottom end of Nvidia's mobile stack of cheaper dGPUs, leaving almost nothing on the market below the xx50 series, Nvidia responded by making the xx50 series cheap enough for laptop vendors to sell in the "in between" market that exists above barely above junk level volume retail models and the lower end gaming and professional market devices.

The market never really got to speak because there was barely an opportunity for it TO speak. I can count on one hand the number of laptops that were marketed without a dGPU, but had other useful gaming oriented features, decent power profiles for the CPUs, decent cooling, and weren't priced higher than other laptops that came with xx50 series dGPUs.

I always found that annoying. There would be the low power chips for thin and lights, fine. Then the high power chips that could've been good enough for light/older gaming but everyone just HAD to put a stupid dGPU in them.
 
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511

Diamond Member
Jul 12, 2024
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4,128
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35W RTX 3050 is a crime in laptop considering how fast 890M/140V are it basically destroys the battery life for not that improved performance.
 

LightningZ71

Platinum Member
Mar 10, 2017
2,508
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I've been using them for a while. I got a cast off Raven Ridge laptop that I bios hacked to give higher power to the CPU and transplanted the fans from another laptop from the same line that had a dGPU option to improve the cooling. It's still working great driving a TV in my garage by my workbench. I later got, for a brief time, an ASUS ROG Flow X13 GV301 (2022 edition) that had no dGPU, just the 8 core HS Rembrandt chip. It worked like a champ. The motherboard died within a year though, but I wasn't too upset as I got it used for about a third of what it was sold new for. That device showed that it was possible to build a device that would work well for the concept, but, it was also financed by the far higher end products that also used that platform that had dGPUs in them.

Two of my kids have Lenovo laptops that have Hawk point/Phoenix point chips with 4060 mobile dGPUs. When they are mobile, they both use them with the dGPU disabled with no issues and get plenty of battery life. Such a device is perfectly possible, but no one wants to suffer the tighter margins to make them. Then AMD goes and makes a chip that would have been almost perfect, Strix Point. The ONLY thing it lacked was 16MB of infinity cache to bring it's performance way up, and they put in an NPU instead. After that, they decided that, what, since a broken product didn't sell well, they weren't going to try again?
 

Saylick

Diamond Member
Sep 10, 2012
4,035
9,454
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lol look at this silliness. The 'kek already picked up on our discussion this morning and has an article about it!! They must have a bot scraping "Kepler_L2" instances in these forums....

View attachment 129555

SMDH. All wtftech will ever be is a glorified news aggregator...
 

Thunder 57

Diamond Member
Aug 19, 2007
4,026
6,740
136
35W RTX 3050 is a crime in laptop considering how fast 890M/140V are it basically destroys the battery life for not that improved performance.

I meant 35W (probably more like the 28W) for the APU.
 

adroc_thurston

Diamond Member
Jul 2, 2023
7,070
9,816
106
lol look at this silliness. The 'kek already picked up on our discussion this morning and has an article about it!! They must have a bot scraping "Kepler_L2" instances in these forums....

View attachment 129555

moooooooooooooom moooom mom get the camera i'm in the TV
1756838789952.png
 

adroc_thurston

Diamond Member
Jul 2, 2023
7,070
9,816
106
A bit sad to see the iGPU being kind of relegated to a 2nd class citizen. At least with the Zen5 and previous monolithic APUs the iGPU would get access to the same process node.
10-15% speed ain't gonna make or break them, and N3p slots will be a lot more free.
It's a normal tradeoff.
 

Joe NYC

Diamond Member
Jun 26, 2021
3,633
5,174
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I think MLID mixed up with the clock speed.

Turin Zen5 (N4P) 8-core 32MB vs Turin Dense Zen5c (N3E) 16-core 32MB:
All core: 4.1GHz vs 3.35GHz.
Boost clock: 4.1GHz vs 3.7GHz

Zen6 (N3P) 12-core 48MB vs Zen6c (N2) 32-core 128MB ?

Yep, I still think only Zen6c is fabbed by N2 node. Is MLID referring to Turin or desktop Zen5? Cause Turin Zen5 is able to boost up to 4.1GHz ???

MLID made a reference some time ago that Zen 6c Venice base clock is in 4 GHz range and he made it sound like that was the base clock. Which is similar or higher than boost clock high core count Zen 5.
 

Joe NYC

Diamond Member
Jun 26, 2021
3,633
5,174
136
yeah it is, q3'26 ramp too.

Pretty much everything Zen6 not tied to gfx13 is 2026.

Makes sense, and there is no problem if desktop CPU has some RDNA3.5 graphics.

What I am wondering is if there are any notebook Zen 6 parts that might launch in 2026, with older generation GPU. There doesn't seem to be any info about that.
 

Joe NYC

Diamond Member
Jun 26, 2021
3,633
5,174
136
A bit sad to see the iGPU being kind of relegated to a 2nd class citizen. At least with the Zen5 and previous monolithic APUs the iGPU would get access to the same process node.

It's part of the IOD / SoC in most instances, so it would be very wasteful to have anything better than N3P.

If you look at standalone dGPUs, they are not moving to N2 either (including NVidia). The only exception is Mi400 datacenter GPU, and that one is chiplet based, so only the compute portion will be N2.
 

DavidC1

Golden Member
Dec 29, 2023
1,833
2,959
96
Well, as Raven Ridge/Picasso clearly proved, relatively powerful iGPUs don't do much for the ASPs you can ask, so they're mostly just a cost adder and it makes sense to prioritise cost over performance for them.
Raven Ridge/Picasso had the mountain of poor previous products and their accompanying reputation to compete with. They were good products, but, look at what they were selling against. Follow on products dealt with limited availability due to factors including OEM recalcitrance, AMD not wanting to over produce, and improving competing products as Tiger Lake improved a lot over previous Intel iGPUs, making that not as much of a competitive selling point in the market.

The other issue AMD continues to face across much of the market is that those processors are continually placed either in bottom end laptops that don't do them any favors with power/thermals, or, if they are in anything better, they are paired with dGPUs that take the place of the iGPUs. While they did gut the bottom end of Nvidia's mobile stack of cheaper dGPUs, leaving almost nothing on the market below the xx50 series, Nvidia responded by making the xx50 series cheap enough for laptop vendors to sell in the "in between" market that exists above barely above junk level volume retail models and the lower end gaming and professional market devices.

The market never really got to speak because there was barely an opportunity for it TO speak. I can count on one hand the number of laptops that were marketed without a dGPU, but had other useful gaming oriented features, decent power profiles for the CPUs, decent cooling, and weren't priced higher than other laptops that came with xx50 series dGPUs.
Nvidia responded exactly the same way they did back with Iris Pro - cutting the price of the low end parts so there's no cost advantage.

You get iGPUs for three reasons:
-Cost
-Battery life
-Form factor

The regular iGPUs achieve all three marvelously. The Halo iGPUs increase cost, and the smaller form factor generally further increases cost. In addition, it's pretty much useless in desktops because the price factor gets further compounded by having it all in a single chip.

Part of the fault is in the vendor that makes them. If Intel had Iris Pro priced at i3 + Iris Pro, then it would have been more competitive. Same with AMD. Why not offer Ryzen R3 level with the Strix Halo? Both vendors make Halo iGPUs with a fundamentally different reason than regular iGPUs - make more money. They pair halo iGPUs with halo CPUs to force upsell. Also, modern iGPUs are in reality not really "free" either. Because back in the chipset graphics days, you could pair the lowest CPU with the best chipset graphics. Now you have to spend $100 or more for the highest. Are you *really* saving money? It's all a clever marketing trick. Heck, if you really cared about consumer value, you'd offer Strix Halo/Iris Pro graphics with a Celeron CPU and price it accordingly.

Which Nvidia can attack easily since they are an established vendor.