Ryzen 4000 APU's in Jan - Does that mean B550 in Jan too?

Jedibeeftrix

Limp Gawd
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Hi all,

We know we're about to receive a new Zen2/Vega derived APU produced on 7nm.
It will be announced at CES.

I have some questions for which I know we don't have answers - but I want your considered opinion:

1. If it is announced in Jan at CES2020 - do we expect immediate availability, or might it be closer to March/April before we see them in the shops?

2. Do we expect to see the launch of a mid-range motherboard chipset at the same time? Doesn't make sense to sell $150 APU's with $200 x570 motherboards...

3. Given i'm considering a 6-year cool-n-quiet htpc - is there any hope the video-decode and display-output portions will support AV1 decode and HDMI 2.1?

4. Do we expect the supported memory speed to increase beyond the DDR4 3200 used by Zen2/Ryzen3000 parts? We know that IF/mem-speed is fine one-to-one up to 3600 speeds, and APU parts do tend to arrive with faster memory speed support to feed the GPU portion. I ask because i'm not interested in overclocking - and 2x8GB DDR4 3200 is really cheap right now!

5. We 'know' the GPU is vega derived, but on 7nm. Do we have feel for the level of improvement in gaming performance offered over a 12nm Zen+ 3400G? For reference - my current haswell i5 mITX htpc has an AMD r7 270x in it (pitcairn).
 
Your questions appear premature mostly. Very little is know about Renoir.


"Today's Renoir sample seemingly features eight Compute Units (CUs), which works out to a total of 512 Stream Processors (SPs). Assuming that Renoir does employ Vega, then this chip should carry the Radeon Vega 8 branding.

clock speed of 1.75 GHz. It's unknown if it was running at the reported speed during the entire benchmark or is 1.75 GHz is the peak boost speed. Either way, it's pretty impressive, since you would normally see such high clocks in discrete graphics cards, not on an APU with integrated graphics.

Like the previous Renoir chips, the one spotted today also appears to work on a "Celadon" motherboard. This is the second time that we're seeing that codename, so we suspect it's for the Renoir platform. The continued use of DDR4 memory implies that Renoir might not support LPDDR4x memory, as previously suggested."

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-renoir-apu-specs-benchmark-results
 
Hi all,
2. Do we expect to see the launch of a mid-range motherboard chipset at the same time? Doesn't make sense to sell $150 APU's with $200 x570 motherboards...

Flash the Bios and B450 MB and you are set to go. I expect 6-8 core version of this APU to be quite pricey as well. Say $250 for the 6 core, $350 for the 8 core, and they might leave 4 core duty to the 14nm part.
 
3. Given i'm considering a 6-year cool-n-quiet htpc - is there any hope the video-decode and display-output portions will support AV1 decode and HDMI 2.1?

This seems to be the most important part of your post, and generally speaking, I'd say not a chance. AMD tends to tail Nvidia with respect to codec support (and quality of their transcoders), like they do in most things. Intel was keeping up until they hit trouble with their 10nm process, so while they likely have something ready to be produced, we're not likely to see it in a desktop part soon.

Most likely, you'd need to get a next-gen Nvidia GPU for that level of support -- whenever those come out.
 
and if not - which is probable on the desktop st least - might we hope for DDR4 3600 speeds supported...?
 
and if not - which is probable on the desktop st least - might we hope for DDR4 3600 speeds supported...?

Unless AMD does something with the IMC, yeah.

Not something we can really expect absent an announcement, so the new APUs will likely fall in line with currently released Zen 2 products.
 
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