AMD's mobile Ryzen 70xx with Zen 4, RDNA 3 and XDNA AI
[14:14 Thu,5.January 2023 by Rudi Schmidts]
AMD has unveiled a wide range of new notebook chips at CES 2023, including its first chiplet-based processors for laptops. These 5 nm chips of the Dragon series are similar to the current desktop Ryzens with up to 16 CPU cores. AMD also showed its new 4nm Phoenix series for the first time, which we think will be the most exciting AMD laptop product for 2023. These chips are not only monolithic like Apple's Silicon, but also offer a configurable hardware AI accelerator (Ryzen AI engine, XDNA AI) for the first time. The used structure width of 4 nm is also finally on a comparable level with Apple's M1/2 chips.
There are also other new designs, which will all be launched as 6nm Mendocino, 7nm Barcelo-R and 6nm Rembrandt-R series at the beginning of this year. Therefore, it is not easy to get an overview, so we will try to compress the most relevant:
AMD Ryzen 7045: Dragon
The 5nm Dragon Range HX series is AMD's first mobile chiplet architecture on a laptop platform and is primarily intended to appeal to mobile "extreme gamers" as well as media creatives. The focus here is on many CPU cores and only little GPU performance. In practice, these processors are combined with dedicated mobile GPUs from Nvidia or AMD in large and well-ventilated laptop designs.
The flagship Ryzen 9 7945HX has 16 cores and 32 threads, just like the desktop PC models. Intel even relies on up to 24 mobile cores with its recently introduced laptop chips, but eight of them are performance-reduced efficiency cores. AMD's chip accelerates up to 5.4 GHz, has a massive 80 MB of cache, and has an official TDP rating of 55-75 W+. No wonder that some manufacturers are already whispering that this will get you into typical CPU desktop performance realms as long as the ventilation is sufficiently sized.
AMD specifies that these processors can be powered with up to 100 W in selected laptop designs. It is thus up to the OEMs to define the top performance via the casing. AMD also has 12-, 8- and 6-core models in addition to the top model in this Dragon series, which largely reflect what is already known from the Ryzen desktop PC lineup.
AMD's own first benchmarks only compete against themselves. For example, AMD claims that the 7945HX is 18% faster in single-threaded work and 78% faster in multi-threaded work than the Ryzen 9 6900HX, the flagship of the last generation. The first Dragon models are to be launched as early as February 2023.
AMD Ryzen 7040: Phoenix
The Ryzen 7040 HS 'Phoenix' chips are -as already mentioned- far more exciting for mobile applications and are in direct competition with Apple's M1/M2 silicon for the first time.
AMD also primarily sees the application field in ultra-thin notebooks. These 35-45 W chips have up to 8 Zen 4 CPU cores with 16 threads and are monolithically manufactured on a die in the currently most modern TSMC 4 nm process. In addition, there are up to 12 CU-RDNA3 GPU units on the chip, which also let us expect high performance for an integrated GPU - especially since faster memory is finally available for connection with DDR5. AMD also offers a model with 6 cores and 12 threads besides the full configuration with 8 cores.
The Zen 4 cores and RDNA 3 graphics in the Phoenix chips should be impressive in their own right, but the new XDNA architecture could ultimately prove to be the most interesting feature. This is the first time AMD has integrated FPGA technology (which it acquired with Xilinx last year) as a configurable AI engine. In the live presentation, Lisa Su spoke of up to 12 AI TFLOPs, which is unlikely to be comparable with other integrable accelerators considering the configurability, however. AMD's new solution should primarily stand out from the competition with particularly short latencies.
AMD also confidently claims that its own XDNA engine is supposed to be faster than Apple's neural engine in the M2 processors - which is already in its second generation. For future image and video processing, such engines will become the next turbos and the course for these technologies is set today.
AMD is working on its own XDNA API to drive software development. A cooperation with Microsoft to use the new engine in Windows is already known, with several new features like camera tracking and eye focus functions to be available soon. AMD has also presented an AI roadmap - so special XDNA 2 and 3 chips will follow. AMD will also scale and offer corresponding APIs from Phoenix to supercomputers. In any case, it sounds like they want to seriously take on Nvidia's CUDA for the first time.
It should be possible to buy the first Phoenix notebooks as early as March 2023.
AMD Ryzen 7035 and 7030: Rembrandt-R and Barcelo-R
The 6nm Rembrandt-R and 7nm Barcelo-R chips are a refresh generation equipped with the Zen 3+ and Zen 3 architectures, respectively. Rembrandt features the RDNA 2 graphics engine, while Barcelo is equipped with Vega. Due to the slightly older process, these models are likely to be offered at a lower price and come in correspondingly inexpensive designs. Which will probably make them interesting for price-sensitive buyers as well.
Whether accelerated 4:2:2-10 bit decoding has finally been integrated into the new processors is not yet known. There are no corresponding specs from AMD yet. AMD (as well as Nvidia) still doesn't seem to have realized that this format is used very often by the mobile creators.
;)
;)
;)