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Thread: Chipsets

  1. #1
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    Chipsets

    Chipsets can be funny things, if you have an eye for it. Let me give an example.

    During the days of the various FM sockets (FM-1, FM-2, FM-2+) the high-end chipset was changed with each socket

    FM1: A75; FM2: A85; FM2+: A88
    The low-end A55 chipset however soldiered on from Socket FM1 right up to Socket FM2+, just as some cheap AM3 and AM3+ boards still featured ancient AM700-series chipsets, while there were high-end AM800 (Socket AM3) and AM900 (Socket AM3+) series as well.

    In the new AM4 socket we see the same thing again: the high-end X370 chipset was followed by the X470, which soon will be replaced with the X570 as the super-chipset.
    The medium segment saw the B350 chipset making place for the B450 chipset, which might very well be replaced in its turn with the B550 later this year.
    The low end A320 chipset however already saw two generations of Ryzen CPUs/APUs and might very well greet yet another generation.

    To top it of, the AMD's low-budget AM1 platform didn't need a chipset at all, as the CPUs that were used in them were SOCs (as in System-On-a-Chip), CPU, GPU and Chipset happily blended together.
    This gave the hypothetical opportunity to use the AM1 boards with both x86 SOCs and ARM SOCs, which unfortunately never occured. You would have to flash the BIOS before such a change of course, but we've all been there and done that before, haven't we?


  2. #2
    NeoGen's Avatar
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    You are absolutely right Dirk, business generally follows the path of least cost, and usually more actively on the lower end parts as you noticed.
    On the mid to high end parts they know they have customers willing to pay extra $$$ for extra features so they're actively producing more for them.
    The lower end customers are more cost conscious and not swayed to pay extra $$ for one or two features they may or may not need, so business can't get more money from it anyway, and therefore won't expand on it either, just let it become stale until it forces the customers to pay for the mid or high end parts to get the additional features they need.

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    Now you know what would be the ultimate APU? One that includes a small amount of RAM embedded on the APU as well as the graphics! CPUs already come with the memory controller integrated anyway, so if you could get even just 1Gb of RAM, that would be enough to power it on and install a large amount of Linux Distros out there. Of course more expensive APUs could include larger amounts of RAM, and naturally you would be able to expand the system RAM by adding RAM chips to the motherboard as well.

    But imagine you just have to buy the motherboard and plop in an APU and that's it. That would make a lot of low end systems pretty easy to build.

  4. #4
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    NeoGen, did you just announce someone's new product line?
    Somewhere in an office high-rise in Seoul, an engineer just cursed in Korean ...
    That would be funny.
    Expect some NDA letters in your inbox. haha.
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    Haha! I would love to see it made but I'm sure probably many people before me have thought about it too, and it still doesn't exist.

    Hey, I'll propose one more to any Korean engineers reading here, how about ditching the L1, L2 and L3 caches that are so small they barely hold anything and make just one large central L1 cache for all, for example 128Mb? I'm sure it would be more useful than 64kb per core (or whatever the current L1 cache values are these days) and it would save CPU cycles as well, because each time the CPU is running an instruction that needs to lookup to see if a certain piece of data is in cache or not it has to go to all three levels of them, in the multiple cores as they are spread, and if it is not anywhere then it has to fetch it from RAM, or even worse from HDD. So if you have only 1 cache for all, it would take away all the time wasted on those fetches back and forth, because it's either right there or it's not. The cascading data fetching model (CPUregisters->L1cache->L2cache->L3cache->RAM->SSDcache->SSDdata) has to be chopped down, it's ridiculously long these days. And I'm no engineer but I would bet money that several of those layers hold the same exact data because they're not checking against each others if the neighbors already have it or not, which is duplication and just a waste.

    But I'm no engineer, so I'll now pass the microphone to any engineer that would like to explain why things need to be done the way they are and/or can't be done simpler.
    Last edited by NeoGen; 04-21-2019 at 02:27 AM.

  6. #6
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    For some reason I think that the chipset you are discussing here already exists, not as a x86 SOC but as a ARM SOC, and perhaps even as such never thought about thing as an ARM Cortex-M or Cortex-R -the A-series taking all the glory.


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    AMD Socket AM4 Chipset overview: what fits where?

    Socket AM4 Bristol Ridge Summit Ridge Raven Ridge Pinnacle Ridge Picasso Matisse
    Manufacturing
    process
    28 nm
    14 nm
    14 nm
    12 nm
    12 nm
    7 nm
    Internal graphics
    No: Athlon X4
    Yes: A6, A8, A10 and A12
    No
    Yes
    No
    Yes
    No
    Cores/threads
    2/2 - 4/4
    4/4 - 8/16
    Athlon:2/4
    Ryzen: 4/4 - 4/8
    4/4 - 8/16
    Athlon:2/4
    Ryzen: 4/4 - 4/8
    6/12# - 16/32
    A320
    Yes
    Yes
    Yes*
    Yes*
    Yes**
    Yes**
    B350
    Yes
    Yes
    Yes*
    Yes*
    Yes*
    Yes*
    B450
    No
    Yes
    Yes
    Yes
    Yes*
    Yes*
    X370
    Yes
    Yes
    Yes*
    Yes*
    Yes*
    Yes*
    X470
    No
    Yes
    Yes
    Yes
    Yes*
    Yes*
    X570
    No
    No
    No
    Yes
    Yes
    Yes
    #=so far
    *=might need BIOS update
    **=depends on board/BIOS size (e.g. okay with MSI A320 MAX boards with their bigger BIOS chip)
    Last edited by Dirk Broer; 10-07-2019 at 08:21 AM.


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