Crunchathlon wcg [monthly run - race xxxviii]

[Dirk Broer]

BOINCStats Willy has done the impossible: he was able to come up with hourly WCG scores, so the WCG challenge can be held:

[euphoriabuzz]

Im in on this one. Good luck Team.

[plonk420]

me too! here's to hoping my $60 Gigabyte board with uncooled SOC VRMs holds up! (SOC/GPU crunching MW@H)

do i have to sign up anywhere? or just crunch?

[Dirk Broer]

me too! here's to hoping my $60 Gigabyte board with uncooled SOC VRMs holds up! (SOC/GPU crunching MW@H)

do i have to sign up anywhere? or just crunch?

Crunching WCG and being an AMD User is all you need here

What Gigabyte SOC board are you using? An AM1 board?

[plonk420]

AB350M-DS3H... 4 phase CPU with a teeeeny heatsink (but entire setup only runs ~105 watts. CPU-only crunching only uses 80 watts or so), but SOC above the CPU socket is 2 phase and has no cooling.

but now that i think about it, the GPU portion only seems to bump up the power consumption ~25 watts, so the wattage of the SOC phases are probably low single digits (no idea the math behind calculating the TDP of the VRMs)

[Dirk Broer]

Ah, that's not a SOC (System-On-a-Chip), that's an APU (Accelerated Processing Unit). An AB350M-DS3H mobo still has an AMD X370 Chipset, a SOC mobo has the chipset integrated in the CPU (such as with the AM1 platform, or more recently: EPYC!). On your board the four VRMs on the left of the Socket are for the CPU, while the two above are for the memory controller and the GPU part of the APU (the IGP).

I have no multimeter, but my A12-9800E APU has a TDP of 35 Watt, running on the Asrock A320M Pro4 together with a SSD and two sticks or RAM. My guess is that the total power consumption running BOINC stays below 50 Watt.

My AM1 systems -with their TDP of 25 Watt- will have an even lower power consumption. And all busy with WCG at the moment.

[plonk420]

the SOC of a Ryzen CPU controls DDR4, USB, some PCI-e, some SATA. the SOC of a Ryzen APU controls the aforementioned, plus contains the GPU. the voltage has to get processed for those components, so they go thru the SOC VRMs. i'm guessing that's why AM4 mobos have at least 2 VRM phases for the SOC (AMD planning ahead, i guess)

see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrw...+OR+350+OR+370

and https://www.hardwareluxx.de/communit...e-1155146.html

[Dirk Broer]

the SOC of a Ryzen CPU controls DDR4, USB, some PCI-e, some SATA. the SOC of a Ryzen APU controls the aforementioned, plus contains the GPU. the voltage has to get processed for those components, so they go thru the SOC VRMs. i'm guessing that's why AM4 mobos have at least 2 VRM phases for the SOC (AMD planning ahead, i guess)

see https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrw...+OR+350+OR+370

and https://www.hardwareluxx.de/communit...e-1155146.html

What you call SOC with Ryzen, is a combination of the CPU/APU and what AMD calls chipset.

For more on chipsets, read this wikipedia article about AMD chipsets

For more on SOCs, read this wikipedia article about System on a chip
More on the EPYC SOC (You won't find a chipset on an EPYC mobo -nor on an AM1 mobo)
This is an overview of AMD SOCs using the Jaguar architecture

VRMs are Voltage Regulation Modules. My Asrock A320M Pro4 has six VRMs for the APU and three for the Memory controller and the IGP.
The new Asrock X470 Taichi has no less than 16 VRMs, 12 for the CPU or APU and four for the memory controller and the IGP, so you ca have a great range of vCore, GPU and RAM voltages on your machine in case of over- or underclocking.

[plonk420]

the SOC is actually its own part of the CPU/APU and gets its own power phases. see my links (the german forum's the quickest, but it's also in each of the videos linked). it's separate from the chipset, too. it kind of took over a moderate amount of chipset duties.



your A320M Pro4 has 3 phases (doubled or nearly) for CPU, 3 for SOC (see hardwareluxx link), and 1 for memory power (see any of the AM4 youtube videos linked regarding memory VRM). i guess the SOC has just the IMC, but doesn't touch power; the power is just cleaned/converted by the VRM right by the RAM slots)

edit: hrm, hardwareluxx seemed down just now... backup here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180329...e-1155146.html

[Dirk Broer]

I am sorry to say that the German site is severely wrong on the SOC information. If you do not take my word read about it at the AMD site or at wikipedia.
AMD has presently *NO* SOC on the AM4 platform, nor will they ever have. Ask at AMD if need may be.

APU=CPU+GPU integrated in one
SOC=CPU+GPU+Chipset integrated in one Examples: AM1 SOCs, EPYC SOCs, SBC SOCs (e.g. Raspberry Pi with its Broadcom SOC, Udoo Bolt with its embedded Ryzen)

Any mobo that has a chipset does not have a SOC on it, per definition. Again: Ask at AMD if need may be.