AMD Quietly Launches Recycled Xbox Series X APU as 4700S Desktop Kit | Hacker News Reader

AMD Quietly Launches Recycled Xbox Series X APU as 4700S Desktop Kit

tomshardware.com

81 pointsAlupis57 comments

Hah it's always fun when some of the complex trade offs of chip manufacturing spills over to the general public.

People always seem perplexed at first when you ask them if they really thought that anyone can place 15,000,000,000 transistors on millions of chips without any errors. Then you ask what they would do with the "broken" chips and suddenly they understand.

Since most of the transistors go towards cache, what do they do with individual broken cache bits? Obviously they have size variants, but not that many.

Overprovision like SSDs I would imagine

Memory is the easy bit. You just overprovision and then disable the broken cache blocks via fuses.

Logic is harder because you might have to disable the entire core.

That is an extremely common practice in the industry. Every large chip design house does this to maximize line yield - it is called "binning" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_binning#Semiconductor_...

Of course binning is common, but creating a retail SKU to sell the fail bin from a semi-custom (Xbox) is always newsworthy.

There was something similar with the previous Xbox generation: https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/316299-amds-a9-9820-8-cor...

It's a shame IMO that AMD won't ship desktop APUs with a large GPU and GDDR6. They're willing to sell the tech to MS, Sony, and some random Chinese company, but not to consumers.

The simpler explanation is that they’ve decided the demand just isn’t there.

Their current APUs aren’t bad for casual gamers doing budget builds. Scaling them up significantly would require larger power supplies, bigger heatsinks, and other expenses. By the time an actual gamer is going through the trouble of building such a system, they’re likely to just buy an entry-level GPU so their CPU and GPU don’t have to be upgraded together.

Big PSUs and monster heatsinks are things today's consumers have in spades.

But GPUs are so rare that a modern mid-level costs $1000 and my 1080Ti is currently worth double what I paid for it three years ago. I think a good APU would be very welcome in this hellscape.

I think a more realistic reason is AMD doesn't want to cannibalise its GPU sales.

What is the "random Chinese company" you are referring here?

Edit: thanks for the quick answer!

Edit 2: regarding this company, it's actually not called zhongshan. The company is called "小霸王” or little master. A acclaimed early gaming console and amateur pc manufacturer. They coped the original FC and pirated a lot of the games. But because gaming console was banned in China (the ban was lifted Google to see details), the console was labeled tutoring console. I learned basic on them. This project with Amd supposes to be reviving the gaming console after the ban was lifted. But the project is now officially dead, according to report https://3g.163.com/tech/article/EF1RBUIS00097U7T.html?spss=a...

Zhongshan https://www.anandtech.com/show/13153/amd-creates-quad-core-z...

Subor, yes. It was also the second most popular Famiclone in post soviet republics, after the Micro Genius imported under the Dendy brand. (Nintendo never sold their NES there officially so the clones flooded the market). I remember Subor's "NES with a keyboard" as well, it was a rare sight and a weird machine - no persistent memory, little RAM, yet programmable in a BASIC dialect. We used to have home computers for this purpose, like Spectrum or various domestic models.

A related cool-idea-that-won't-happen would be some less-locked-down form of Windows in an XBox. More so than last gen's Jaguar cores, this console gen's CPU cores should be fine for PC use for a while.

It'd probably have to be kind of a VM in a 'game', to avoid revamping the outer OS. They'd probably want to nerf the GPU in Windows to reduce folks' temptation to use it to route around the XBox store (for graphically intense games at least), and maybe price Windows to make up for decreased game revenue per console. Even given all that it might let folks with XBoxes cheaply "get a PC" of sorts, and so come a bit closer to the rest of MS's world.

Probably technical, business, and other issues with that, but again, I did say fun idea that won't happen.

The Xbox already runs all games and apps in VMs, it’s part of how suspending works. Running Windows 10 in one should be relatively easy, it’s mostly an input problem.

It almost certainly requires a heavily customized OS. Those chips are designed for the CPU and GPU to share a unified address space on the GDDR6, there is no traditional DDR memory.

Playstation does it just fine and it's freebsd-based.

Like all iGPUs...

Most iGPUs do not use a unified address space. They use system RAM, yes. But they get a partition of it to themselves, and the size of this partition is often tweakable in the graphics driver settings.

The M1 Mac is one of the few laptops that actually does have fully unified memory.

https://eclecticlight.co/2020/11/11/how-unified-memory-blows...

I don't believe that's true. And the driver/bios settings don't really do what people think they do. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

And zero copy buffers and unified address space are totally a thing on Intel, AMD, and Nvidia(Tegra) igpus. Sounds like there's more than a bit of "Apple Magic" in that blog post.

AMD APUs have had a unified address space for ten years or so.

Are they maybe already at production capacity for RDNA2 with their existing RX 6000 series and the PS5 and Xboxes? I'd imagine with the semiconductor shortage that'd play a role in deciding to keep their APUs on a larger node for a while longer.

A large CPU with a small GPU would nice, while we're wishing.

> A large CPU with a small GPU would nice, while we're wishing.

My biggest annoyance with switching to AMD has been this. My previous Intel system has a Core i7 4790K, Intel's top tier CPU for their consumer platform at the time, and it had an iGPU.

It was not an amazing iGPU by any means, but it was more than enough to support two additional monitors "for free" which was wonderful while nVidia had a bug preventing the GPU from going in to low power mode in certain multi-monitor configurations. It also meant I had plenty of ports to support three monitors, a VR headset, a TV, and have some space left over.

When I upgraded to a Ryzen 9 3900X I tripled my core count and gained a fair amount of per-core performance, but I lost those extra ports. Now my graphics card is maxed out and I have to switch the HDMI cable between the TV and the VR headset.

They've slowly been moving the G models up the lineup, but it's still not possible to get a truly high-end CPU from AMD with an iGPU. It would be really nice, especially these days with standalone GPUs being unobtanium.

100% correct.

The other option is AMD motherboard manufacturers start shipping boards with the E9260 or something onboard.

Also while we're wishing, a sub $100 modern GPU that can drive multiple 4k monitors, gaming performance be damned.

Considering the fact that most of AMD's CPUs do not include an iGPU, I don't really get why they haven't launched something like that for the workstation market.

That would be what the Radeon Pro WX 2100/3200 targets.

The nvidia equivalent would be something like the Quadro P400.

Of course, pricing, even on these cards, is a bit crazy right now.

There are Ryzen mini-PCs with multiple 4K display outputs, e.g. Asus PN50, Gigabyte Brix Pro, ASRock 4x4, starting around $300 barebone.

The Intel DG1 is quite good for that, apparently, but they don't sell it at retail.

https://www.amd.com/en/processors/ryzen-with-graphics

Too large?

The speed of those GDDR6 chips probably doesn't matter at all, because in normal Zen 2 parts the fabric only does 32 bytes per cycle at up to ~1.8 GHz, which is just shy of 60 GB/s. The GDDR6 in the Xbox Series X (what a stupid name) does something like 600 GB/s - a 1:10 mismatch.

The memory bandwidth is for the benefit of the GPU, not the CPU.

And that part has a broken/fused off GPU...

Yeah, not terribly useful.

>the AMD 4700S only supplies one PCIe x16 expansion slot, which is restrained to a x4 signal. This means that the list of supported graphics cards is very limited as well.

Worth noting (without further information) that "supported" does not necessarily mean "Only works with, and nothing else."

There's nothing I see about this APU (be it the onboard GDDR6 or UMA of the APU) being inherently incompatible about a PCIe3 x4 (electrical) slot that only limits it to working with cited cards.

Assuming you can still get drivers supported on contemporary OS', that hardware is compatible with cards as old as the 2005 ATi X800 and Nvidia 7000 series GPU's, or as new as the 6900 XT and 3090's, to any (PCIe) cards in between. Granted, the newer high end cards will saturate the 4GBps link on this APU in heavier loads, and see restricted performance, but they'll still be perfectly functional.

This is something that was often discussed in the eGPU community only having x4 PCIe lanes to work with, but you could still plug in 980's, 1080TI's, Vega 56's etc if you were so inclined, and they'd work fine, and would still outperform lesser cards, they just wouldn't quite perform to their fullest potential.

TL;DR: "Supported" and "Compatible" are not the same thing, and is likely just AMD heading off potential complaints from people trying to put high end cards into this for a SFF build.

> AMD only provides drivers for Windows 10, meaning the AMD 4700S isn't compatible with prior versions of Windows, much less Linux.

But how much does that actually matter on Linux? If it's just temperature sensors, that doesn't really matter.

It's an APU, so if it doesn't work with AMDGPU in the Linux kernel that will be pretty bad.

According to the article, "APU with a disabled or defective iGPU" and "the AMD 4700S lacks display outputs".

Presuming you plug in a Radeon card, what does that matter?

I got a bit excited until I read about the lack of Linux driver support - which makes sense. Could probably cobble together what you need since the parts seem pretty standard here, but that's a little more work than I was hoping.

This basically is a cheap NUC alternative.

What driver support would you even need? Thermal sensors? There's no iGPU even so basically everything should just work.

That's a strange offering. An Xbox CPU with a broken GPU, no video, and a slot that only accepts weaker graphics cards. What's the target market?

There’s a surprisingly sizable market for small, moderately powerful x86 solutions. These end up inside a lot of integrated solutions ranging from digital signage to the control boards inside of various pieces of equipment.

A lot of small tech companies write software first and then figure out what hardware to run it on later, which ends up being some variation of these compact solutions that can be bought in volume and usually have a certain availability lifetime that can be counted on.

In short, me.

Running Qubes, my VMs have no access to a GPU in any case. So, the cheapest thing that can drive a monitor is all I want to plug in anyway.

That presumes Linux can be persuaded to run on it. The article suggests not, but offers no hint (that I found) why not.

$300 would be pretty expensive for what you get imo.

$300 gets you (apparently) the motherboard, 8GB of ram (non-upgradable, I assume the 16GB version costs extra), and 8 Zen 2 cores.

A Ryzen 3700X is $280 from a respected retailer in my search. And the lowest cost mini-ITX AM4 motherboard is $100, so I mark it down as motherboard for $40 and ram for free, not a bad deal given current prices.

16 GB isn't quite enough for a comfortable Qubes experience, although my laptop squeaks by with that. So, pass.

Yeah... at least throw a couple fast network interfaces on it to make it a useful server. But as is, it's a head scratcher to figure out a good use.

Cheap OEM office PC? They don't need fancy graphics, will only run Win10, and the 8 core CPU is probably adequate. Maybe they had a high defect rate and this might avoid offset the fab costs, if they can sell them at a profit. And given the high cost of real CPUs and GPUs right now, this might have a place. That was probably the reasoning of whatever market analysis that went into this decision.

> the 8 core CPU is probably adequate

What does a “cheap OEM office PC” need even 8 cores for?

…I just realised I’m old now. People do actually use those cores for keeping loads of browser tabs open.

*sigh*, remember when office PCs only needed to run Office 97 and maybe Netscape 4?

Bro, I remember when multitasking became possible.

Even cheap GPUs are $70+ these days though, sadly. Would be nice if someone would build something new for low end instead of gt 710 as well.

Yeah its sad how bad GPU inflation has got :(

It’s windows 10 only though. For all 13 people who run windows servers.

Presumably it's "Windows 10 is the only officially supported OS", which is very different from "only runs Windows 10"

Someone who needs 8 Zen2 cores, I guess. But everything else on the board is below average if the price is really around 300.

Why not just sell the chip itself?

The chip won't fit in any existing socket, so you need the custom motherboard with it.

Looks like AMD is copying Shenzhen fly by night factories now :)

7 Jan 2021 'We ran Windows on an Xbox! … Sort of' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf_YK2kSN_g A9-9820 ~Xbox One S by a chinese company calling itself "Funhouse"? https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/316299-amds-a9-9820-8-cor...

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