Friday, August 3rd 2018
AMD Unveils its Most Powerful Semi-custom SoC for a Chinese OEM
Chinese PC maker Zhongshan Subor believes that there is space for a class of devices between game consoles and gaming desktops, targeted at Chinese gamers that game a lot online, and won't mind a little productivity on the side. The same class of people are repulsed by the idea of gaming desktops from traditional OEMs, which tend to be overpriced; and don't want to burn their hands building their own PC. For them, there's a new console-desktop; which runs common PC OS, plays PC versions of games, and runs PC apps, while exhibiting some characteristics of a console (perhaps a dashboard, and a highly customized user-interface stack), called simply SUBOR.
A part of what makes SUBOR affordable compared to OEM gaming desktops is because every component is purpose-built, including the SoC at the heart of it. This semi-custom SoC is codenamed "Fenghuang." The chip is a cut above the one that powers the PS4 Pro or Xbox One X. It combines a 4-core/8-thread CPU based on AMD's latest "Zen" architecture, compared to the low-power "Jaguar" derivatives that power the fastest consoles. The CPU runs at up to 3.00 GHz of clocks, and has 4 MB of L3 cache. The GPU is equally impressive: based on "Vega," it packs 24 NGCUs, translating to 1,536 stream processors, and the latest feature-set, including DirectX 12 and Vulkan. The GPU engine ticks at up to 1.30 GHz. 8 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide interface, is hardwired to the SoC (no memory expansion). The SUBOR will be unveiled at China Joy 2018.
A part of what makes SUBOR affordable compared to OEM gaming desktops is because every component is purpose-built, including the SoC at the heart of it. This semi-custom SoC is codenamed "Fenghuang." The chip is a cut above the one that powers the PS4 Pro or Xbox One X. It combines a 4-core/8-thread CPU based on AMD's latest "Zen" architecture, compared to the low-power "Jaguar" derivatives that power the fastest consoles. The CPU runs at up to 3.00 GHz of clocks, and has 4 MB of L3 cache. The GPU is equally impressive: based on "Vega," it packs 24 NGCUs, translating to 1,536 stream processors, and the latest feature-set, including DirectX 12 and Vulkan. The GPU engine ticks at up to 1.30 GHz. 8 GB of GDDR5 memory across a 256-bit wide interface, is hardwired to the SoC (no memory expansion). The SUBOR will be unveiled at China Joy 2018.
52 Comments on AMD Unveils its Most Powerful Semi-custom SoC for a Chinese OEM
Secondly, MS are the ones developing Windows, so they have access to everything and are not bound by patents and licensing restrictions to themselves.
Same cannot be said about some third-party company: they can license any existing edition they want and build on top of it, they can collaborate w/ MS on developing something slightly customized (it'll cost lots of $$), but nothing more. Microsoft won't undercut their own projects, like the XBO you've mentioned.
But that's just for the PC version of SUBOR device. The "console" counterpart may still run customized debian or maybe they'll just license SteamOS from Valve.
I see that version of the OS being better suited to it's actual namesake: Enterprise. Some organization/company with it's own portal and that limits what employees can do on a computer. I see no reason why a user at home would want to tie their hands behind their back. It's not like 1991 and I've got to have some highly tuned system for that precious 640k :p A modern computer can handle a lot of extraneous stuff.. even the crap.
As well, I would love to see such designs/chips from AMD released to everyone else. Custom mobos and what not (like other companies building their own design mobos for such chips).
I can always dream.
Guessed, VEGA + GDDR6 is real after all.
Cheer!
I wouldn't mind having one of this baby sitting under my TV
It's also why processors have their own onboard memory in the form of L1 and L2 cache. Because even system RAM, despite how fast we think it is, is orders of magnitude slower than the cache onboard the processor.