Ryzen 2500u benchmark by The Tech Report (img heavy)

[AlTech]

7 hours ago, NumLock21 said:

The solder ram setup is only single channel not dual channel. Don't know about those with 2 ram slots.

That's stupid . APUs benefit a lot from dual channel.

[Bit_Guardian]

On 11/28/2017 at 9:27 AM, DocSwag said:

I'm willing to bet the thing is heavily memory bandwidth and latency constrained. I thought HBCC could help with that but it looks like it's not enough.

Why would you expect HBCC to help when the GPU and CPU are using exactly the same memory pool? HBCC was only ever going to help with caching to a GPU's dedicated memory setup entirely separate from the CPU.

[NumLock21]

4 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

That's stupid . APUs benefit a lot from dual channel.

The ryzen has dual ram slots, there is no solder ram, and where does it say single channel? I don't see any cpu z screen shots.

[AlTech]

17 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

The ryzen has dual ram slots, there is no solder ram, and where does it say single channel? I don't see any cpu z screen shots.

I think some slide said like 8GB single channel DDR4 or something. Don't quote me on that.

[The Benjamins]

35 minutes ago, NumLock21 said:

The ryzen has dual ram slots, there is no solder ram, and where does it say single channel? I don't see any cpu z screen shots.

 

18 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

I think some slide said like 8GB single channel DDR4 or something. Don't quote me on that.

 

The HP is dual, but the Lenovo and Acer are said to be single channel. (according to AMD slides)

[DocSwag]

4 hours ago, Bit_Guardian said:

Why would you expect HBCC to help when the GPU and CPU are using exactly the same memory pool? HBCC was only ever going to help with caching to a GPU's dedicated memory setup entirely separate from the CPU.

From what I've read my impression is that HBCC helps in memory bandwidth constrained environments.

 

Correct me if wrong, but that's what it seems like to me.

[Bit_Guardian]

17 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

From what I've read my impression is that HBCC helps in memory bandwidth constrained environments.

 

Correct me if wrong, but that's what it seems like to me.

No, but it will help in VRAM-volume-constrained environments where the CPU has its own independent memory pool.

[DocSwag]

6 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

No, but it will help in VRAM-volume-constrained environments where the CPU has its own independent memory pool.

Why exactly is this?

 

My understanding is HBCC stops grabbing unneeded data from RAM in order to stop wasting memory bandwidth... Why wouldn't this help?

[Bit_Guardian]

14 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Why exactly is this?

 

My understanding is HBCC stops grabbing unneeded data from RAM in order to stop wasting memory bandwidth... Why wouldn't this help?

Okay, think about it this way. Games do not NEED much more than 2GB of VRAM for 1080p high quality (Anandtech and others have run memory profiles during gaming which prove this). That said, if that space exists, they'll cache tons of assets and things into the VRAM so there's no asset streaming ever required. Now, this is an imperfect science, and certain regions of used and unused VRAM are interleaved because of drivers and no one wanting to spend the time to unwind the entire frame buffer payload, so when you don't have 6+GB of VRAM, you start losing minimum frame rate performance because of swapping in and out. What HBCC does is analyse enough of the program to see which regions aren't being used, and only moving them out while keeping everything that is used in. Or, if there's enough space to hold everything, it will use an AI to reorder memory for optimal access patterns, which again improves performance, because your cache miss ratio goes down.

 

It's a fancy hybrid of an IMC, TLB, and branch predictor in simplest terms. It will do next to nothing to help your constrained bandwidth except in the edge case I mentioned at the end of the first paragraph. That's pure marketing hogwash. And it's only really useful for a NUMA setup (VRAM and CPU RAM are different types and are completely separate pools, i.e. a dGPU setup). If you have an iGPU, or a GPU using the same memory pool as the CPU (such as with Intel's embedded Vega setup, assuming the HBM2 is a cache and not a dedicated memory pool), then HBCC is completely useless unless you run out of main system memory and are now streaming to and from disk.

[DocSwag]

9 minutes ago, Bit_Guardian said:

Okay, think about it this way. Games do not NEED much more than 2GB of VRAM for 1080p high quality (Anandtech and others have run memory profiles during gaming which prove this). That said, if that space exists, they'll cache tons of assets and things into the VRAM so there's no asset streaming ever required. Now, this is an imperfect science, and certain regions of used and unused VRAM are interleaved because of drivers and no one wanting to spend the time to unwind the entire frame buffer payload, so when you don't have 6+GB of VRAM, you start losing minimum frame rate performance because of swapping in and out. What HBCC does is analyse enough of the program to see which regions aren't being used, and only moving them out while keeping everything that is used in. Or, if there's enough space to hold everything, it will use an AI to reorder memory for optimal access patterns, which again improves performance, because your cache miss ratio goes down.

 

It's a fancy hybrid of an IMC, TLB, and branch predictor in simplest terms. It will do next to nothing to help your constrained bandwidth except in the edge case I mentioned at the end of the first paragraph. That's pure marketing hogwash. And it's only really useful for a NUMA setup (VRAM and CPU RAM are different types and are completely separate pools, i.e. a dGPU setup). If you have an iGPU, or a GPU using the same memory pool as the CPU (such as with Intel's embedded Vega setup, assuming the HBM2 is a cache and not a dedicated memory pool), then HBCC is completely useless unless you run out of main system memory and are now streaming to and from disk.

So basically you're saying it only helps when you have a decently large higher bandwidth cache?

 

That makes sense. Everything makes more sense now, including the name of the HBCC itself. Thanks for the info!

[Bit_Guardian]

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

So basically you're saying it only helps when you have a decently large higher bandwidth cache?

 

That makes sense. Everything makes more sense now, including the name of the HBCC itself. Thanks for the info!

Most welcome.

 

The other detail I missed about the interleaving memory is it's parcelled out equally amongst the GDDR5(X) or HBM/2 chips so that you get as much bandwidth as possible. You kinda shoot yourself in the foot if you dump everything into the first one or two chips.

[Derangel]

3 hours ago, The Benjamins said:

 

 

The HP is dual, but the Lenovo and Acer are said to be single channel. (according to AMD slides)

To expand on this: The HP has three RAM options:

8GB which is 4GB soldered to the motherboard and a 4GB stick in the single RAM slot.

12GB which is 4GB soldered to the motherboard and an 8GB stick in the single RAM slot.

16GB which is 8GB soldered to the motherboard and an 8GB stick in the single RAM slot.

[The Benjamins]

On 11/27/2017 at 5:16 PM, NumLock21 said:

Intel with MX150. CPU on the left and GPU on the right

 

AMD Ryzen with VEGA 8. Intel ones with onboard graphics has the same type of cooling as this one.

 

RAM is actually under the silver cover next to the M.2 slot

 

Sources:

1st pic, from me

2nd and 3rd pic from

http://apusilicon.com/

 

7 minutes ago, Derangel said:

To expand on this: The HP has three RAM options:

8GB which is 4GB soldered to the motherboard and a 4GB stick in the single RAM slot.

12GB which is 4GB soldered to the motherboard and an 8GB stick in the single RAM slot.

16GB which is 8GB soldered to the motherboard and an 8GB stick in the single RAM slot.

not according to these disassembly pictures

[WMGroomAK]

1 minute ago, The Benjamins said:

 

not according to these disassembly pictures

Exactly what I was about to point out...  All of the disassembly images that I've seen show a dual SO-DIMM slot setup and the RAM and SSD/HDD upgrade options look fairly simple to make yourself on these machines...  If I were to pick up one of these, I would honestly get the lowest tier HDD and 8GB RAM option and then just upgrade it myself.

[thorhammerz]

23 minutes ago, The Benjamins said:

not according to these disassembly pictures

It also doesn't make a lot of (production) sense to have a motherboard mixing soldered and unsoldered RAM - the main benefits of soldering RAM is to decrease costs (yay) and reduce the thickness (yay again).

 

If some of the RAM isn't soldered then the technical solution is a half-and-half compromise that provides neither benefits of soldering and creates issues with upgradeability/customization/scaleability (the whole point of having socketed RAM).

[Trixanity]

32 minutes ago, thorhammerz said:

It also doesn't make a lot of (production) sense to have a motherboard mixing soldered and unsoldered RAM - the main benefits of soldering RAM is to decrease costs (yay) and reduce the thickness (yay again).

 

If some of the RAM isn't soldered then the technical solution is a half-and-half compromise that provides neither benefits of soldering and creates issues with upgradeability/customization/scaleability (the whole point of having socketed RAM).

That's true but OEMs still spit out plenty designs with soldered RAM and a RAM slot or two.

[AlTech]

4 hours ago, The Benjamins said:

 

 

The HP is dual, but the Lenovo and Acer are said to be single channel. (according to AMD slides)

Ouch.

 

~~Also, i love how even AMD themselves are overshadowing this with the Ryzen 7 1700 + RX 580 laptop on Twitter and stuff .~~

[NumLock21]

 

The above post where I've said, solder ram setup only ran at single channel is wrong. Sorry about that. The CPU-Z program version 1.80, when I first ran it back in October was not able to properly detect the memory configuration. The latest version 1.81 (when this post was made), can detect it's running in dual channel. Also the CPU code name has been changed between the 2 CPU-Z programs.

Version 1.80 on the left and 1.81 on the right

[Derangel]

1 hour ago, The Benjamins said:

 

not according to these disassembly pictures

Could have sworn I saw a tear down on Youtube of the Ryzen version showing it with 4GB soldered to the board, but it looks like it was the Intel 8250u version.

[NumLock21]

36 minutes ago, Derangel said:

Could have sworn I saw a tear down on Youtube of the Ryzen version showing it with 4GB soldered to the board, but it looks like it was the Intel 8250u version.

That's the Intel 8th gen version, not the Ryzen one. Ryzen has dual ram slots. Intel on the other hand has it in the following configurations.

 

Ones with the option to add a Nvidia GeForce MX150

• 8GB in 4GB onboard + 4GB stick
• 12GB in 4GB onboard + 8GB stick
• IR camera for Windows Hello as default
• 1080P screen, 4K screen is $200 extra
• Can select Windows 10 Professional for an additional $70

Ones with no option to add a Nvidia GeForce MX150, onboard Intel graphics only

• 12GB in 4GB stick + 8GB stick
• 16GB in 8GB stick + 8GB stick
• No option for 8th gen Core i5 only 8th gen Core i7
• Standard HD webcam by default, $50 extra for IR camera for Windows Hello
• No option for Windows 10 Professional

AMD Ryzen model

• 8GB in 4GB stick + 4GB stick
• 12GB in 4GB stick + 8GB stick
• 16GB in 8GB stick + 8GB stick
• IR camera for Windows Hello as default
• Only 1080P screen, no option for 4K
• Can select Windows 10 Professional for an additional $70

 

[Subtle Corruption]

Trash results TBH.

[Derangel]

15 minutes ago, Subtle Corruption said:

Trash results TBH.

Not for a ULV APU. It's a 15w chip designed for ultrabook-class laptops. In most results it's close enough to the 8250u to be good competition and it beats the crap out of them when it comes to onboard graphics. If the 45w 7700HQ lost to it I would be seriously surprised. The dedicated MX150 was always going to do better in graphics tests because it 's a dedicated GPU. Memory latency is the only time it seriously fell behind. It actually beats the HQ in the memory read and memory copy tests, and comes in just under it in memory write. In a lot of tests it's trading blows with the two Intel 15w chips. It is definitely a better chip than the 7200u and, depending on price, could be a better option than the 8250u.

[GatioH]

On 27/11/2017 at 3:27 PM, Prysin said:

Second of all, the GPU is struggling with BAD frametimes:

Is this sarcasm?

 

The mx150 alone draws more power than the entire APU. The 2500U beats Intel’s integrated graphics, and that’s all it should really be compared to- another low TDP CPU. Sure it’s gonna be surpassed by a combo that draws more than 2x the power (7700HQ + mx150), isn’t that expected?

 

 

[Dabombinable]

1 minute ago, Derangel said:

Not for a ULV APU. It's a 15w chip designed for ultrabook-class laptops. In most results it's close enough to the 8250u to be good competition and it beats the crap out of them when it comes to onboard graphics. If the 45w 7700HQ lost to it I would be seriously surprised. The dedicated MX150 was always going to do better in graphics tests because it 's a dedicated GPU. Memory latency is the only time it seriously fell behind. It actually beats the HQ in the memory read and memory copy tests, and comes in just under it in memory write. In a lot of tests it's trading blows with the two Intel 15w chips. It is definitely a better chip than the 7200u and, depending on price, could be a better option than the 8250u.

Its also substantially beter than AMD's old CMT 19W APU (which need Turbo Core disabled if you want to play games smoothly-even those as old as Oblivion at minimum settings).

[Daniel644]

1 minute ago, GatioH said:

Is this sarcasm?

 

The mx150 alone draws more power than the entire APU. The 2500U beats Intel’s integrated graphics, and that’s all it should really be compared to- another low TDP CPU. Sure it’s gonna be beat by a combo that draws more than 2x the power (7700HQ + mx150), isn’t that expected?

 

 

WHY, if there are ultrabooks with GOOD battery life with MX150's and 8550u's then shouldn't this be compared to those? they are the direct competition for the R7 variant of these APU's after all and remember the MX150 only takes over when it's needed, so you don't have a constant hit to battery life and even still the MX150 is only good for accelerating workloads that can use the GPU, lets not kid anyone, NONE of these GPU's are gaming grade by any stretch of the imagination.