Ryzen Boards Reign at Embedded World 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Ryzen Boards Reign at Embedded World 2018

electronicdesign.com

197 pointspepsi110 comments

> This pairs up with AMD’s VESA GPU.

Pretty sure they meant _Vega_, unless we're back in the 1980s.

Nah, VLB is making a comeback. Safer to assume it's this:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-vo-I4JcofN8/UJ6V0hBT2hI/AAAAAAAAAD...

VESA is still around, and many modern graphics cards support multiple VESA standards (e.g. VESA BIOS Extensions, DisplayPort, EDID).

They still should be VESA-compatible ;-)

Call me with AMD launches something that supports extended ISA.

Why would anyone call on you if they can just mail you the news?

I hear they even have electronic mail now.

I'm excited for a NUC-like device running a Ryzen processor for my home media server.

From what I've seen so far, none of the Ryzen APUs pack as much graphics power as the Vega-powered Kaby Lake Gs, which is disappointing.

I was hoping for a Ryzen NUC that would be powerful enough to use as an HTPC and ultra-portable gaming machine, but it appears that won't be happening.

Au contraire; the cheapo Ryzen APUs are awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBEJoAoW944

It's immediately visible AMD have no serious plans in the 65-100W package TDP territory if it gave the Vega to Intel instead of launching such a chip itself.

Who wants to guess this monster hybrid will only be available in Hades Canyon and some Apple machine and nowhere else?

A Ryzen "7" series APU with the same 4 core / 8 thread setup as the 2400G but with double the CUs (so 22 CU) and a big beefy L4 buffer like Intel uses in their high end GPUs to be able to use the extra gpu horsepower would be game changing.

Maybe in the Navi generation? It would make for a very pretty lineup to have, say, Navi 10 / 14 / 24 be APUs, Navi 36 / 44 be a budget discrete GPU pair, have Navi 56 / 64 be shrunk Vega cards, and then some high end 2080 Ti competitor series of new cards called Navi 80 / 88[1]. If they can get power under control and have the TDPs like up like 45 / 65 / 95 / 120 / 150 / 170 / 200 / 210 / 250 watts they could have a really viable lineup no matter what Nvidia pulls...

[1] Having a GPU called the 88 would just be marketing bliss. "When we get this thing up to 88 compute units you are going to see some serious shit".

2400G's 65W is waaaay to much for NUC. Even current dual-core 15W i5 can be quite noisy. And 2400G allows you to play games only on lowest details with >25fps anyway.

For home HTPC even an old BayTrail-based NUC is sufficient (Kodi/Plex) at 1080p though. I run one for ~3 years and haven't had any need to upgrade so far.

For gaming get one of those ZOTAC Magnus machines with 1070, as large as Mac Mini, quiet and powerful. I use one as a SteamBox and couldn't be happier.

Zotac did have Zbox's with Raven Ridge in them at CES, though:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12319/zotac-displays-zbox-ma5...

Besides the consumer Raven Ridge CPUs there are also 2 OEM 35w versions that are downclocked slightly while shaving off a huge chunk of TDP. They are named like 2400G but with an E on the end, ie 2400GE. I imagine if AMD really wanted to put the effort into a 15W chip they could manage a ~2.5ghz quad core with Ryzen modules.

Honestly curious: why get a ~$1300 Linux console over say a Nintendo Switch or regular PC? Seems to me SteamOS was a great idea but is dying? Anything I am missing, any killer apps/games?

It's a very fast, general-purpose computer; 1070 also can be used for crypto-mining, so when you aren't playing, it can run ETH/XMR/etc. mining and as it's pretty low power, you might even be profitable. Deep Learning model training can be done too if you have such a need as well. I bought it as I wanted to help SteamOS not to die and bought all AAA titles that were available on SteamOS.

I was under the impression the 2400G is already heavily memory-bandwidth limited, so unless memory gets a whole lot faster I don't see them packing all that much more into an APU.

I wonder if part of the agreement with Intel, AMD agreed to not bring out Ryzen 7 APU with better graphics to keep that segment competition-free? Currently there are no plans for anything higher than Ryzen 5 in the APU space.

Would that be anti-competitive behavior or just part of business?

IANAL but that sounds extremely illegal.

Would it be illegal for AMD to agree not to enter a competing part in that segment though? It's not as though they're colluding on price or squashing other competitors.

Kaby Lake-G is probably also very expensive. Maybe someone will combine Ryzen with a discrete Vega Mobile and it will still be cheaper.

I went for a microatx b350 chipset motherboard, ryzen 1500x (overclocked by 300 MHz), and a $85 geforce1030 2GB for my home media system. The geforce1030 has far superior H265/HEVC and similar GPU-assisted video decoding than anything possible with currently shipping intel or AMD CPUs. Same architecture as the 1060/1070/1080 in a low power fanless version. You wouldn't want to use it for 3D gaming but for high bitrate 4K video, it's perfect.

The highest bitrate movie I have plays with about 22% CPU usage spread across all four cores.

Is this still accurate with the release of the new ryzen apus? I have my doubts.

Specifically in the 1500x price point, the r5 2400G seems to have performance on par with a gt1030.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12425/marrying-vega-and-zen-t...

If I were doing the same build two months from now, probably not. But I don't think the new APUs are shipping in any commercially available real quantity yet, and many ryzen socket motherboards do not yet support 4K at 60Hz for their onboard HDMI outputs.

For 3D gaming (not video decode GPU-assist performance), to me, neither the gt1030 or the ryzen 2400G look like they have acceptably smooth framerates (45-60 fps) at 1080p high settings:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12425/marrying-vega-and-zen-t...

Its available now: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681911...

a B350 chipset motherboard linked from its product page:

"Supports 2 x HDMI with max. resolution up to 4K x 2K (4096x2160) @ 24Hz / (3840x2160) @ 30Hz"

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1681315...

motherboard support isn't quite there yet...

According to heise/c't magazine[1] (highly respected German tech publication), the Vega-based APUs support HDMI 2.0 even if the motherboards only advertise HDMI 1.4 support, as the pins are directly routed from the APU package. DisplayPort 1.2 works for 4K@60Hz as well of course. I suppose there's a risk the motherboard traces might be too low quality to carry HDMI2 signal speeds on some boards; hopefully board makers will revalidate and update specs for their boards. On the other hand, it may be worth waiting the 5-8 weeks until 400 series chipset boards come out which will presumably be designed with Ryzen G in mind.

[1] This is mentioned in their Ryzen G motherboard review/roundup (paywall): https://www.heise.de/ct/ausgabe/2018-5-AM4-Mainboards-fuer-A... - also the review of the CPUs: https://www.heise.de/ct/ausgabe/2018-5-Ryzen-Prozessoren-mit...

Those seem to be 25+W CPUs, plus whatever the rest of the system needs.

What's available these days that's x86_64 and is 15W or under, and comes on mini ITX boards? Slow is fine, as long as it's reliable.

The PCEngines APU2 boards[1] are x84_64, run around 10W, and have a smaller than mini ITX footprint (6"×6").

1. http://www.pcengines.ch/apu2.htm

Proud owner of an apu2c2 here. They make really reliable firewalls and perhaps other utilities like serving SIP for a small number of clients. The AES-NI instructions on those APUs also make them great for VPN. There are slots for mini PCIE and SD cards. However they do not have video output so access and configuration must be made through serial console or network.

Gigabyte have a range of small form factor machines they call BRIX. There are lots of models covering a wide performance range. There are a few which are fanless and might meet your power target but they don't state an obvious maximum power rating:

e.g. This one based on an Intel N3350 CPU with 6W TDP

https://www.gigabyte.com/Mini-PcBarebone/GB-BPCE-3350C-rev-1...

I have a number of these little gigabyte brix systems lying about for test/dev work and I like them very much. Fairly inexpensive and they aren't a project to get up and running - just stick ram in and insert a USB stick to boot from.

That's currently a gap for small boards. The ALIX boards have been the x86/32 bit answer for a while: https://www.pcengines.ch/alix.htm

I haven't seen a 64 bit solution that stayed relevant yet. Intel's Edison was the big contender, but has since died[1].

Gutting an ASUS Chromebox is a decent and cheap interim solution. They are well built, reliable, available, and cheap. Basically a subsidized Intel NUC.

[1]https://hackaday.com/2017/06/19/intel-discontinues-joule-gal...

Fortunately, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will be supported till 2021. And if i take a good look, 18.04 is only dropping support for some 32 bit installer images, not dropping 32 bit entirely:

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-S...

Guess I can stick to my old trusty Atom for a while more.

Something I've wondered: is there a way to buy a barebones PC (or even just a motherboard) with an Intel Core M processor installed? Presumed experience level: I'm willing to write an ACPI DSDT from scratch for it. :)

http://www.lattepanda.com/alpha-edition https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/139108638/lattepanda-al...

Maybe this would fit your usecase? It has an Intel m3-7Y30 onboard.

The closest I've seen is the Intel compute stick: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/compute-stick/intel-...

I question their commitment to this space though.

I wonder if buying a laptop with a broken screen would work for this.

Out of interest, why would you need to write a DSDT?

Laptop was my first thought as well; most of mine easily run under 20W even with a screen, and they're almost all x64.

https://orwl.org/ ?

> Slow is fine, as long as it's reliable.

That's not as easy as it sounds. A few years ago I bought a Q1900 board and there are stability problems which might come from the hardware: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109051

Ouch. I've been running an Atom D2500 as a home router / lightweight server since forever with no problems.

Unfortunately I don't think the motherboard allows 64 bit linux, and since 32 bit support is going to disappear in a few years I should be upgrading. I just have no idea what to :(

C275x maybe? I've got a Supermicro NAS based on it.

It sounds like you're looking for Intel's Atom or Edison line.

Yeah, except Intel are doing their best to make those lines extremely confusing. I can still find mobos with the Atom D2550 for sale ?!? And the Celeron J1900 that def- mentioned with that kernel bug.

And what really scares me is they have Realtek network chips. Or are these good these days? I need to route 1 Gbps of internet, and when I bought the D2500 you needed Intel network chips to do that without using 250% CPU.

Edit and sadly an ALIX apu2 won't do for lack of enough SATA ports.

Thank you! I have been scratching my head for weeks as to why my J1900 based NAS has been locking up.

> The module supports up to 32 GB of DDR4 memory with optional ECC support.

One huge benefit of AMD vs Intel. While Intel is busy milking their customers, AMD is innovating to offer more for less.

Anyone care to explain what this is and why it's significant? Don't know much about hardware.

It's a very powerful "embedded" platform, I was waiting for something like this for my home media/file server, so I don't have to keep PC turned on all the time. Also, another important point for me is passive cooling, as buzzing of cooling fan drives me crazy during night.

For build-your-own servers or NUCs?

these are cool and all, but the very low quantities that embedded boards are made in frequently make them much more expensive than going with something of a standard size/spec (170x170mm mini-itx, of which there are a ton of good Z370 chipset motherboards), and a discrete GPU like a $115 geforce1050 2GB. Unless you really need four video outputs off one board.

There's a really wide selection of sizes and shapes of mini-itx chassis available whether you need passive cooling, low profile height (no video card), low-profile height-only video cards, full height video cards, etc.

Some of these packages look absolutely beautiful. Being a hardware noob that has only worked with Arduino and Raspberry Pi, I'm used to having to buy all these overpriced accessories to fit into their boards. These mini mobos with integrated cooling fans and all the bells and whistles, look really awesome. Does anyone know how big the mini mobos actually are?

If you worked with RPi and want more computation power, you might consider Asus Tinkerboard.

It’s not on the same level with this new embedded Ryzen. But the tinkerboard is very compatible with the Pi, same form factor, same pinout, even the DSI displays are compatible.

And it’s much faster compared to RPi, both CPU, networks, and especially the GPU.

The newer Tinkerboard S seems to have sorted the 4k issues too. Should be a capable media playback device with the new hardware decoding support.

I have the older one, bought it about 6 months ago.

Indeed I wasn’t able to make it output 4K@60Hz video signal, but 4K@30Hz works OK here.

The first one is a standard, with a maximum size of 170mm x 170mm (6.7" x 6.7"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-ITX

The rest appear even smaller.

They might all be standard sizes. I'm thinking Mini-STX, Nano-ITX, or Pico-ITX. Its just those smaller form factors aren't very common.

They might be, but as far as I can tell the article didn't mention which standard(s) they are :-).

Wow, had no idea VIA made these boards. The pico and the mobile are awesome. [1]

Are they considered "embedded" due to not being able to add memory or change very much by adding/removing components?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile-ITX

VIA are still going? I have horrible memories of dealing with their kit 20 years ago when I did digital signage, as well as Geode chips which were even worse...

Depending on need and use, the Mini-ITX systems from Via are simple and reliable. I haven't used them much in the last 6-7 years, but at a previous business we used them with a flash card to ship OpenBSD firewalls to client offices for VPN connectivity. Problems were rare (and on-board AES acceleration a decade ago was pretty cool).

Interesting. I remember the VIA stuff had serious graphics problems (granted it was years ago) but the Geode stuff was worse to be fair, the hardware watchdog basically prevented any GPU events at all. How times have changed.

Well, we didn't run GUI desktops on them, they were headless firewalls, so I can't really comment as to how well graphics works, much less 3D acceleration. We weren't running Geodes either, as IIRC that was the super low power and low performance variation and didn't match our needs.

I am very weary of VIA after the APC. It was an awful experience, and in the end they just closed the community forum years ago, with a note that it would be reopening in weeks: https://apc.io/forum/

Embedded is subjective and in the eye of the beholder.

Mini-ITX are basically full desktop boards. They usually have a PCIe x16 and two DIMM slots. My current desktop/workstation is one of these (from 2013) (with a socketed Xeon CPU).

mini-itx might have been created by VIA but now it's a size standard made by all major motherboard manufacturers.

Rather because the CPU is soldered.

Different target markets: doesn't look like these have GPIO or any other low-level features. They're just small PCs.

So hook up an arduino on USB (or 10 of them) and have all the GPIO you could possibly want. They're less expensive than a good USB cable, which also means that if you make mistakes you blow up a $2 arduino rather than even a very cheap $200 pc (or even a $50 rPi)

Have a look to the UDOO x86, which is made by SECO. (disclosure: i do some work for them)

I'm amazed at how many adds this page has. (Had to turn off my adblocker to get the page to load)

Maybe try something like this, if adblocker is failing

    1. curl -o 1.htm http://www.electronicdesign.com/embedded-revolution/ryzen-boards-reign-embedded-world-2018

    2. sed -i '/<p>/,/<\/p>/!d' 1.htm

    3. firefox file:///1.htm

What is the purpose of the sed?

Specifically, it modifies the file in place (-i), Matches lines between paragraph tags(/PatternStart/,/PatternEnd/), Then, doesn't delete those lines matching the pattern range (!d), which has the effect of deleting all other lines outside the pattern range when passed the in-place argument.

Being partially sed stupid myself (or just plain stupid), I think its supposed to pull only the text between paragraph tags and save that to an htm file; then launch firefox and display that file, giving you only the pertinent text of the article (sans ads)

Remove Javascript and links to Javascript files that load ads, etc.

Preserve only the desired content: text describing the boards, links to manufacturers websites, links to images.

Looks like it is deleting everything not contained in paragraph tags.

Loaded perfectly with Firefox and uBlock Origin for me.

Ditto Chrome and uBO.

I use Safari and uBlock (not origin)

Yeah uBlock non-origin is abandoned (there have been 4 commits in the last 2.5 years). It's also no longer available in the Safari Extension Gallery. There is a fork of uBlock origin for Safari: https://github.com/el1t/uBlock-Safari - I use Linux so I can't vouch for it, but gorhill (author of uBlock origin) links to it in the readme so it's semi-official.

Blank grey page for me, without an ad-blocker.

Maybe it’s time for a next generation of game consoles?

Xbox one X and PS4 Pro were both recently released. What do you have in mind for next the gen console(s)?

Both Xbox and PS are already using AMD-designed chips. Despite new versions are recently released, they both are still based on the previous generation AMD microarchitectures, i.e. Polaris GPU + Jaguar CPU.

This new AMD chips combine new generation GPU (Vega) and new generation CPU (Ryzen). Both are much better than what’s in the current generation consoles.

And can they hit a $300 price point after factoring in the price of the case, the hard drive, the optical drive, the power supply, and everything else? At the same physical size? And the same noise level?

Looks like these embedded chips are either equivalent or very close to the recently released Raven Ridge PC APUs, Ryzen 3 2200G and Ryzen 5 2400G. They are offered for $100 and $170, respectively. Not that expensive.

What benefits does this bring to the consumer beside specs?

Consumers dont care much for specs. If they did the Xbox One X would be flying off shelves.

Excellent point.

Yeah, this could be the main reason why we won’t have Ryzen consoles anytime soon :-(

Would be awesome if AMD released an AArch64 + Vega SoC for the next Nintendo Switch…

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