AMD's presentation at CES 2020 contained more interesting details about the company's innovations and its closest partners than the press releases published at the end of the event. Representatives of the company talked about the synergistic effect, which is achieved through the use of AMD graphics and CPU in one system. SmartShift technology allows you to increase performance by up to 12% only due to the dynamic control of the frequencies of the central and graphic processors for a more optimal distribution of the computing load.
The idea of ββoptimizing the use of hardware resources has been haunting developers of mobile components for a long time. NVIDIA, for example, within the technology allows you to "on the fly" switch from discrete to integrated graphics to optimize power consumption, depending on the type of computing load. AMD has gone one step further with SmartShift, unveiled at CES 2020, to dynamically change CPU and discrete GPU frequencies to provide the best balance of performance and power consumption.
The first SmartShift-enabled laptop will be the Dell G5 SE, which will combine a 7nm Ryzen 4000 series mobile hybrid processor with Radeon RX 5600M discrete graphics, which is one of the main conditions for SmartShift technology to work. The laptop will hit the market in the second quarter at a price of $799.
In games, the use of SmartShift technology will increase performance by up to 10%, in applications such as Cinebench R20, the increase can reach 12%. The technology will be applied to both mobile and desktop systems. The main thing is that the AMD central processor in them is adjacent to a discrete graphics card based on the Radeon graphics processor. Among other things, in mobile systems SmartShift will allow you to increase battery life without recharging.
Tiny 7nm die Renoir remains monolithic
At CES 2020, AMD CEO Lisa Su Renoir 7nm APU sample. According to preliminary data, a monolithic crystal has an area of ββββno more than 150 mm2, and this arrangement distinguishes it from desktop and server relatives. By the way, Renoir processors also do not provide support for PCI Express 4.0, being limited to PCI Express 3.0. The Radeon graphics subsystem (without specifying the generation) in the maximum configuration offers eight execution units, and the third level cache is limited to 8 megabytes. It becomes clear what AMD had to "save silicon" on. However, this did not affect the computing cores - there can be up to eight of them on such a compact crystal.
Lisa Su explained that for the twofold increase in the energy efficiency of Renoir processors compared to 12nm predecessors, one should mainly thank 7nm technology - it was this factor that determined this superiority by 70%, and only 30% relate to architectural and layout changes. The first laptops based on Renoir will appear in the current quarter, by the end of this year more than a hundred models of laptops based on these processors will be released.
As Lisa Su added, AMD intends to develop and release more than twenty 7nm products this year and the previous year. This includes second-gen 7nm products, but AMD told AnandTech editor Ian Cutress that the Renoir APUs unveiled this week use exactly the same first-generation 7nm technology as Matisse or Rome. . AMD products using the so-called EUV lithography will be launched by TSMC a little later - according to unofficial data, closer to the third quarter of this year.
Source: 3dnews.ru