Marrying Vega and Zen: The AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Review

The not-really-better nvidia 1030 they're comparing it against is ~$100, making the APU a much better choice indeed.

> With the Ryzen 5 2400G, AMD has completely shut down the sub-$100 graphics card market.

Well, almost. Integrated graphics generally take the place of additional CPU cores. For example, there is no 8-core Ryzen with integrated graphics. So if you need cores (like for compiling code) then you end up with a discrete graphics card even if you don't need fast graphics.

I actually wish Intel would make a cheap discrete graphics card for that purpose, because they have the most stable Linux graphics drivers.

I've never considered that as an idea before, but now am left wondering why it hasn't been done. Guessing the manufacturers make more money from full-unit upgrades than they'd expect to make from incremental memory unit purchases (even if they made the RAM slot proprietary).

Rumor is that an interposer alone is $20, and HBM is also rather expensive. Basically, you'd easily double the cost of these $99 chips if you put HBM2 onto them... maybe triple the costs if you consider that AMD should charge a margin and actually make a profit from these designs.

After that, the GPU would be too-strong on memory and too weak on compute. The minimum HBM speed 1024-bits / 250GB/s from one stack. Yeah, the same memory-bandwidth as a RX 580 with 2304 shaders, while the APU 2400G only has 704 shaders.

The Intel + AMD chip manages to solve the problem: the CPU, GPU, and HBM2 are all on the interposer. So the expensive interposer has a shared design. Second, the GPU is a fully dedicated Vega design that's roughly the size of an Rx 580. That way, the dedicated-GPU can "keep up" with the super-fast HBM2 RAM.

Be aware for 4K that almost no motherboards exist at this time that can pair one of these APUs with a HDMI 2.0 output. Almost all AM4 motherboards come with HDMI 1.4 outputs that limit 4K output to 30Hz - probably fine for movies, noticable in the UI, and not great for games (even if rendered at lower than native res). Though there are some current gen AM4 boards with HDMI 2.0 and native 4K60 output, it's somehow a premium feature that is bizarrely reserved for high end gaming motherboards.

The next generation of motherboard chipsets from AMD should remediate this, but motherboards with these will not launch before April.

Remember that this is the desktop APU, with 65W TDP. On the article they mentioned that AMD doesn't have any plan on the laptop APU.

Edit: oops, they released the laptop APU earlier, like ryzen 7 2700U.

I would have hoped that this wouldn't be an issue but looked at specs on a few itx boards and they are only listing HDMI 1.4. Major bummer if that is true.

For 4K@60 or 1440p@144, you would need a motherboard with 'Display Port' not just HDMI. That should eliminate quite a few.

Raven Ridge supports 4k60 via HDMI 2.0b. However, no current mobos do. New mobos with updated chipsets should and those are due out in April with the Ryzen refresh.

It looks like even though all motherboards are only officially HDMI 1.4, there are reports of 4k60 4:4:4 working just fine! YMMV, but this is good news nonetheless:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/7xd636/raven_ridge_hdm...

PC building is a nightmare right now between RAM and GPU prices. It's clear that they are not a valued demographic to parts manufacturers.

Anyway, I would recommend a Ryzen 3 + GTX 1050 at a minimum for a gaming computer. The performance here on GTA V, a several years old game, is pretty poor.

Most GPUs that are 2GB or less have been almost unaffected by the price hikes (geforce 1030/1050/1050Ti) because you need more than 2GB of RAM to mine Ethereum these days. It's the 4GB and higher RAM cards that have crazy prices.

If they can socket a Vega 16+ APU, they might be able to put a dent in the sub-$200 market. The Intel G platform uses Vega20 and Vega24 with HBM, but they aren't socketed.

Not that I know of so far, still only sell AMD A-XX laptops. Also looking forward to an AMD Ryzen Mobile (U) that can replace a XPS 13, since Intel is not an option.

No Dell laptops so far. Just these three:

ACER Swift 3 with Ryzen 5 2500U Vega8, 4GB

Lenovo IdeaPad 720S with Ryzen 7 2700U, Vega10, 8GB

HP Envy X360 with Ryzen 5 2500U Vega8, 16GB

There is an all-in-one

DELL Inspiron 7775 AIO, Ryzen 7 1700 CPU + RX 580 GPU, 16GB

I don't see right now how that would have more appeal than dedicated GPUs to them? Is there a market for "normal PC with small mining-capacity on the side" vs fairly dedicated rigs? I'd think nearly nobody is buying <$200 GPUs for mining?

I think everyone is expecting mining to fall and they don't want to invest the R&D and create the manufacturing , build the hardware and in the end it won't sell. Mining seems like a gamble so I would personally not risk it, if they want the miners can buy the regular GPUs

It sounds like Samsung is making something like that, based on vague announcement on their earnings call. They've been working on a new GPU for several years now, making a miner from it may help them validate the design while they're working on the drivers for general purpose & gaming usage.

BTC is ASIC based now. No GPU will ever compete in the BTC realm.

Etherium is Dagger-Hashimoto, which tries to be RAM-bandwidth bound. GDDR5 and HBM2, which can achieve RAM-bandwidths of 500+ GB/s (compared to a typical CPU+ Dual-channel DDR4 with only 50GB/s), so Etherium's best machine are the cheap GPUs with GDDR5. HBM2 (Vega64 and Titan V) are faster, but I don't remember if they win in price/performance. HBM2 might win in ongoing costs due to being more power-efficient.

Monero is Cryptonight, which tries to be memory-latency bound (Ideally: executing out of L3 cache of CPUs). Unfortunately, it seems like the miners have figured out how to parallelize it, as HBM2-based cards manage to perform incredibly well in Cryptonight.

Basically, the only cryptocoin that MIGHT be worthwhile on an APU connected to DDR4 is Monero / Cryptonight. Even then, because Cryptonight is primarily memory-latency bound, I doubt that the GPU-portion would be any faster than the CPU. The majority of the algorithm is waiting for L3 cache to respond.

The L2 Cache in GCN (and probably Vega) is 512kb and shared between 4 compute units. So its too small to execute Cryptonight. As such, why execute from the on-board GPU when the CPU already maxes out the L3 cache?

Cryptonight requires 2MB of low-latency access per instance. Threadripper with 16 cores and 32MB of L3 is basically the most ideal CPU setup. But Vega64 managed to outperform Threadripper by significant margins, probably because HBM2 RAM is incredible (and there seems to be some kind of unexpected parallelization trick in the Cryptonight algorithm)

rubbish for crypto but good value for games hopefully