Chrispy_My experience with STAPM and a couple of 2000-series APUs is that AMD are so nearly there with their current-gen APUs. Battery life suffers compared to Intel because AMD's 1st-gen Zen/Zen+ CPU cores seem to eat up power at lower clockspeeds and don't clock down as hard as Intel's U-series do when idle.

I actually think that getting the CPU portion of the power draw down is more important that the Vega IGP, so if Renoir APUs are 7nm Zen2 cores and 12nm IGP and IO, they'll be fine.

Ideally, the whole thing will be at 7nm but with the 2700U I bought myself in February, and with some STAPM power-budget tweaking thanks to modified BIOSes and RyzenAdj, I can say for certain that the 4C/8T of Raven Ridge load can comfortably use 15-18W and will never consume less than 5W in a normal system. The Vega10 IGP will add maybe 8-9W at full load and peak clocks but rarely get to run at those speeds because most laptops OEMs set a STAPM limit of somewhere between 15-25W (20W in my case). That means that before long, the CPU is using the lion's share of the power budget and the Vega cores are throttled back to 25% of their ideal clocks, despite being the more important part of the equation when the IGP is active in a 3D or GPGPU compute application.

At 15-18W potential peak CPU core usage the IGP really suffers in a Ryzen APU, and most people will be buying Mobile Ryzen for the Vega cores, otherwise they'd just get an Intel with worse graphics but better battery life. In the case of the 15W ultrabooks, the IGP is throttled down to pointless speeds. In the case of 20W and 25W models, the IGP is running sub-optimally if the CPU is busy. TSMC's 7nm seems to have huge efficiency gains so even if ONLY the CPU cores in Renoir were moved to 7nm, that 15-18W CPU peak draw could drop down to Maybe 10-12W, leaving far more headroom for the IGP to do their thing in the ideal 15W power budget.

My preference would be for AMD to better balance their APU power budget in hardware so that the Vega cores get first dibs on whatever power is available. It's actually self-balancing, because if the CPU clocks drop too far from IGP greed, the IGP will stall and free up power budget for the CPU. The current CPU-first implementation doesn't really work. The CPU clocks up and overfeeds the IGP which then rejects frames because it can't process them fast enough. It's a stupid waste :(

CityCultivatorI also have a 2700u. I used ryzenadj to keep the system always in fast mode (by setting the slow and stapm time to forever). My stapm limit is a measly 15W. Without ryzenadj the gpu would be useless. On sustained loads, the cooling can dissipate about 25W (with ryzenadj).

Chrispy_You need to use the hex code of the binary value. Which reminds me, I derped up; 2c4t is 1E, not 15!

bugSo you meant 3 is hex for binary 11. Gotcha.

Chrispy_Yep. Brainfarts are my specialty.

• AMD can make Navi work with an APU, but they don't want to provide a GPU solution in the APU that makes casual gamers just skip a discrete AMD GPU when building their computer.
• AMD developed Navi with Sony and Microsoft money and there's some provision that AMD can't use Navi in APUs until after console release so as not to overshadow the custom APUs.
• AMD is out of time and money to make Navi work with the APUs that aren't really their profit center right now.
• The GPU part is going to be integrated into the IO chip and Navi was never validated on the larger lithography.

danbert2000Here I was all excited for Ryzen 3 APUs because we could finally get decent IPC on the CPU side and a Navi iGPU, but apparently that makes too much sense so we must wait for two whole cycles of APUs to get the best AMD can make.

danbert2000Here I was all excited for Ryzen 3 APUs because we could finally get decent IPC on the CPU side and a Navi iGPU, but apparently that makes too much sense so we must wait for two whole cycles of APUs to get the best AMD can make. Big miss for AMD, and you have to wonder if:

• AMD can make Navi work with an APU, but they don't want to provide a GPU solution in the APU that makes casual gamers just skip a discrete AMD GPU when building their computer.
• AMD developed Navi with Sony and Microsoft money and there's some provision that AMD can't use Navi in APUs until after console release so as not to overshadow the custom APUs.
• AMD is out of time and money to make Navi work with the APUs that aren't really their profit center right now.
• The GPU part is going to be integrated into the IO chip and Navi was never validated on the larger lithography.

Whatever the case, AMD will be looking pretty weak on APU performance if Intel is able to push out Gen 11 integrated graphics on their chips anytime soon. Hopefully they figured out some way to up the number of compute units to at least beat the existing chips in graphics performance.

danbert2000Here I was all excited for Ryzen 3 APUs because we could finally get decent IPC on the CPU side and a Navi iGPU, but apparently that makes too much sense so we must wait for two whole cycles of APUs to get the best AMD can make. Big miss for AMD, and you have to wonder if:

• AMD can make Navi work with an APU, but they don't want to provide a GPU solution in the APU that makes casual gamers just skip a discrete AMD GPU when building their computer.
• AMD developed Navi with Sony and Microsoft money and there's some provision that AMD can't use Navi in APUs until after console release so as not to overshadow the custom APUs.
• AMD is out of time and money to make Navi work with the APUs that aren't really their profit center right now.
• The GPU part is going to be integrated into the IO chip and Navi was never validated on the larger lithography.

Whatever the case, AMD will be looking pretty weak on APU performance if Intel is able to push out Gen 11 integrated graphics on their chips anytime soon. Hopefully they figured out some way to up the number of compute units to at least beat the existing chips in graphics performance.

BrusfantometWell, AMD is capable of making a bigger GPU for an APU solution, just look at the Intel i7 8809g.
Note that the Vega chip in those implementations has its own dedicated HBM2 framebuffer, removing the need to share bandwith with the CPU.

If you compare the Vega 8 in the 2200g with the Vega 11 in the 2400g, there is a 50% increase in raw power, but the gaming performance is really close. Shure, "Renoir" has potentially higher ram speeds (4266 MHz compared to 3200 MHz) but that is peanuts (68 GB/s and 51 GB/s) compared to the dedicated bandwidth of the 8809g at over 200 GB/s.

In short; memory interface speed is holding AMD APUs back, and nothing short of a dedicated HMB2 chip for GPU memory on package will solve that.

IceShroomPerfect example of APU is APU's used in console like Xbox 1/PS4. Another is Subor Z+.