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Comment by jackvalentine | Hacker News Reader

I’m guessing ‘SoC and IoT’ includes things like the CPUs in NAS appliances. I have noticed recently a huge proliferation of AMD Ryzen CPUs in these devices when a couple of years ago it was Celerons/Pentiums.

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The Steamdeck's APU (and others using the same tech) are becoming more common, not sure if those count as 'desktop' or 'console' though...

Valve is the only user of the AMD "Van Gogh" APU. Other handhelds are using regular laptop parts.

I think AMD originally pitched it for laptop makers since it was leaked in 2020: https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-mobile-apus-for-2021-2022-de...

But I suspect they rejected it because they don't care about IGP performance, just as they rejected Intel's "Iris" Broadwell CPUs and the hybrid amd/intel chip.

> NAS appliances

I love my Synology and love that they are going AMD. While some argue that having video transcoding on a NAS is wrong, it’s also very handy, but the AMD options I’ve seen aren’t a patch on quicksync.

That tech is unbelievably good and might be the only bit of Intel I like.

It helps that AMD is very generous with unlocking advanced features in even lower cost SKUs; low end Intel chips tend to be crippled in several ways.

I’m surprised those aren’t being shifted to much cheaper ARM chips.

Perhaps they're not cheaper.

I bet they will in due time. They have to recompile their whole stack to ARM, which probably isn't easy, but ARM is eating the world. It's only a matter of time.

That's what they said about Itanium too. /s

I think that's clearly not an apt analogy.

The 80-core ARM servers Hetzner provides are great. A nice midpoint between a slower general-purpose x86_64 server and an expensive and brittle GPU server.

I can easily see datacenters with these things in the future.

Probably a question of performance. NAS and IoT appliances have performance requirements too.

Majority of consumer nases are running the cheapest oldest arm and mips cpus they can find.

Low-end NASes have been using ARM for a long time.

The higher end x86 NASes are advertised closer to "home datacentre in a box" solutions that offer VM/container runtimes and third party software markets.

So far, x86 is significantly more user friendly and performant for these use cases: the "desktop-ish performance for desktop-ish prices" range doesn't really have many hardware options (Apple certainly won't sell theirs to OEMs, and the Snapdragon 8c is a bit on the low end, and the real data centre ARM many-core monsters are too big); and the software offerings aren't quite as user friendly either.

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