By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
JRPGfan said:

51.2 GB/s of memory bandwidth..... + APU chip = low end / mobile belongs to AMD (for gaming).

Not so fast.

Even if DDR5 is ready by 2019, it's implementation into actual hardware will take longer. I don't expect an APU with DDR5 support before 2021 earliest. Even then, they will have to ramp up their RAM controllers. The 25.6 GB/s is with DDR4-3200, which AMD doesn't support yet (DDR4-2666 is officially the maximum, some DDR4-3200 do work, but not all). I do expect AMD to continue rising their support for DDR4, with the Zen 2 in the Raven Ridge successor finally reaching DDR4-3200 officially and DDR4-3600 in the subsequent one. Even then, in dual channel we're still below 60GB/s, which is barely enough for 16 CUs maximum without starving them to death with the low bandwith. There's a reason why the APUs stayed at 8 CUs for so long and only going up to 10 with Raven Ridge now.

DDR5 won't start with that speed. Just like DDR4 starts off at 1866, I expect DDR5 to start off as low as 4000 or even just 3600 while it would need 6400 for the 51.2GB/s per channel. So it will take a while until that bandwith is actually available for APUs, and by that time their power compared to high-end GPUs won't budge very much - it might even drop even further down the line depending on how fast the top of the line evolves.