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[Bofferbrauer2]

vivster said:

I'm getting frustrated with my 1050ti. I can't play Hearthstone on one monitor while watching video on the other without stuttering. I really need a 3050ti in my life.

Looks like I'm not the only one here with a 1050Ti

And yeah, those start to get really slow. In mobile GPUs, the MX450 already comes awfully close to the 1050Ti, only getting hampered by the slower and less memory. And Zen 4 APUs should also not be far off anymore

Pemalite said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

The question will be if infinity cache will be implemented into APUs. After all, the size of the cache should cause a pretty big increase in size for such small chips, and a smaller one would probably not bring very much benefit anymore. And without the infinity cache or some bolted-on fast memory chips as LLC, they are really limited by the RAM bandwidth.

Zen 4 next year should solve (well, alleviate) this problem, as it comes with DDR5, and probably also will bring some RDNA variant, which as far as I know needs a bit less bandwidth than GCN even without infinity cache already.

I expect the Infinity cache in the Zen 4 APUs to be half or a third of the size of the one in Big Navi (32 or 24 Megabyte). Less would probably not bring much benefit anymore, while more would make then too expensive for the performance gains.

My prediction for the Zen 4 APUs: 12 slightly altered RDNA2 CU with 2.1Ghz clock speed (not more CU because it will probably only support lower speed DDR5 early on, like DDR5-4800 for instance) in the 6800H and 1.8 Ghz in the 6800U; should be enough to beat Baffin (RX 560), Zen 5 (or whatever will follow after Zen 4) should increase the CU count to 14 or 16.

Infinity Cache would likely be prohibitively expensive unless AMD can justify it by unifying that cache for CPU operations in order to justify the transistor expenditure... Which isn't likely to happen in a cost sensitive product like an APU.
Then Again, Intel did just that with it's CPU's and Integrated Graphics with Iris Pro.

DDR5 isn't likely to cure our limited Ram bandwidth... Keep in mind that Dual-Channel DDR5 4800mhz is still only offering 64GB/s of bandwidth... Which not all can be dedicated to graphics, it's shared with the CPU cores and other logic as well.

In short, it will be a step up over a Radeon RX 530 or Geforce 1030 thanks to architectural efficiency gains. (I.E. Working Draw Stream Rasterization and Primitive Shaders plus improvements to Delta Colour Compression.)

It will be great for 1080P and lower gaming, but higher probably won't be viable until DDR6.

Considering that Zen 3 APUs (which thankfully won't be OEM only like the Zen 2 ones) come with now 16MB of L3, I do think with a shrink to 5nm adding 16MB of infinity cache should be doable. The chip would get somewhat bigger due to the additional CU and cache, but not overly so.

Also, I know DDDR5 ain't the cure, but it will still boost the bandwidth quite a bit. Hence why I only went with a modest increase to 12CU with Zen 4. But it will certainly help, and with the infinity cache, allow to get close to Polaris performance (as in the RX 470) in 2023-2024

Pemalite said:

I am surprised people still have quad-cores.... Honestly cannot remember in recent history using a quaddy.
Even my $800 AUD notebook has a 6-core CPU... And my phone has an 8-core chip.

Been using a 6-core or better CPU since 2010 starting with the Phenom 2 x6 1090T.

How do they handle in modern games and software?

Still using a quadcore (7700HQ) - but most of my games are either oldies or the are indies, so the quadcore is sufficient for me most of the time.

Last edited by Bofferbrauer2 - on 10 January 2021