AMD APU?

Norman · May 9, 2022

I know this is computer forum of computer enthusiasts but do we all see how much this can change the whole market. I see the good. Say tomorrow they said you could buy a 6500 with a 1080 in for 370 CND wouldn't you jump on that. I would be building systems for my kids, wife, even parents in-law. We knew this was coming look at consoles. Why is this taking so long?

da na · May 9, 2022

Why would you buy a console if AMD sold those on their own? And AMD would sell fewer GPUs and standalone CPUs if the APUs were that good. Companies would probably make less money. Just a theory

emosun · May 9, 2022

Whats the question you have? Is it why are apus taking long to advance in the pc market?

Apus are a compromise to selecting any cpu and gpu you would like regardless of use case. It would be extremely niche to hope the user base for a non optimized apu design would be high. Pcs have to do a lot more than a console so any x86 apu will still be unoptimized the same as any other pc setup.

You would not only need the apu itself , but also boards that have support for it which means adding display ports back onto the board. Plus a 100% unique programming language and architecture to make the high powered apu have a purpose and actually be faster than just buying any cpu/gpu combo the user needs.

Theguywhobea · May 10, 2022

You can't buy PC hardware at the same cost of PS5 / Xbox MSRP due to those being sold at a loss, but Sony and Microsoft make it up on the other end through software sales. PC component manufacturers can't sell their hardware at a loss.

Kedohawyr · May 10, 2022

Without an expensive shift in PC memory architecture it's not going to happen.

Dual channel DDR memory is fine for CPUs but it heavily limits what an iGPU/"APU" can do due to the limited overall bandwidth. A great example is when shortages encouraged NVidia to release a DDR4 version of the GT 1030 which performed horribly compared to the GDDR5 version.

The reason that consoles like the PS5 and XBox-whatever can get so much power from an "APU" is because they are built on a custom memory architecture. Instead of 2 channel DDR4 they use 12 channel GDDR6 mounted directly under the CPU to get the shortest possible circuit lengths. Instead of the GPU riding on the back of the CPU's memory controller it's more like the CPU is riding on the back of a GPU's memory controllers. The Steam Deck's custom processor uses a similar strategy only on a much smaller scale with 4 channel DDR5 feeding its modest iGPU.