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Comment by biggc | Hacker News Reader

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...

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