Thursday, September 15th 2022
AMD "Zen 3" Tested with the Faster Boost Clock-Speed Ramping Speed than Snapdragon SoCs
AMD's "Zen 3" architecture, particularly in its low-power mobile iterations, change their clock speeds at a very high rate of speed (switching between lower idle clock-speeds to higher boost clock bins), finds a study by Chips and Cheese, which tested 17 processors across brands and machine-architectures, including mobile SoCs. The interesting finding here is that the Ryzen 7 5800U "Zen 3" mobile processor has a much faster speed-ramp than even SoC powering handhelds, such as the Qualcomm Snapdragon 821, returning a ramp-time of just 1.6 ms, compared to 19.6 ms on the Snapdragon. We now see why AMD likes its processors to run detached from the 10 ms tick-rate of Windows internal power-management (the rate at which the OS reports its workload to the processor, so it could respond with a higher performance state). A rapid boost clock ramp rate allows the processor to better ration its power budget in response to workload.
Source:
Chips and Cheese
16 Comments on AMD "Zen 3" Tested with the Faster Boost Clock-Speed Ramping Speed than Snapdragon SoCs
I don't think it's a big risk they could even develop the custom cores together with another company, maybe Samsung, Broadcom etc.. or just use the standard "Cortex" core developed by ARM + Xilinx's NPU/ASIC and their RDNA3 GPUs
So for the time being, it's more that AMD is content to let Samsung improve RDNA for mobile, and see if Samsung can improve their ARM IP to make a powerful hybrid SoC. Samsung seems to be floundering though, with doesn't bode well for AMD's ambition to expand some of its footprint into the mobile space.
At the same time, Lisa Su was on record stating that they kept their ARM project off to the side, warm but not entirely forgotten, in one of the early Zen interviews, but that their focus is regaining their competitive footing in the x86 space. And this was before the much more recent agreement with Samsung, so the Samsung/AMD joint project may have put their ARM side-project on ice.
Even better they have been able to make one CPU core design for both mainstream and server/data centers, it would be even better if they could use the same chiplet design on mobile as well. Now that AMD has much more revenue coming in they can think about spreading into other segments though the segments that they are in now are ones that have growth in the future (primarily server/data center).
There are even some rumors going around that AMD will take a regular Zen4 chiplet with 8 cores and pair it with a Zen4C chiplet with 16 cores to have a 24 core 48 thread CPU for AM5/X670 to counter the 13900k and its 24 cores and 32 threads. Also heard that AMD might add 3D v-cache to this hypothetical chip to not only make up the lost cache on the paired down Zen4C chiplet, but to surpass the total cache amount on the 16 core/32 thread 7950x. This may just be rumors that never come to fruition, but it sounds extremely logical to me and we know for 100% fact that AMD already has the Zen4C chiplets for Bergamo, so it doesn't seem too difficult to replace one of the regular 8 core Zen4 chiplets from the 7950x with a Zen4C chiplet from Bergamo and create a 24 core/48 thread consumer desktop chip for AM5 to neutralize any claims by Intel that they have more cores available on their consumer desktop platform (which they will assuredly make since with Zen4, AMD has for all intents and purposes, taken away the possibility for Intel to claim a frequency advantage since it reaches 5.8Ghz and could even go higher). I'd even be willing to bet that the Zen4C core is a more performant core than the e-cores found in alder/raptor lake if AMD is creating a 128 core/256 thread Eypc SoC entirely out of Zen4C cores/chiplets...at the very least I'm sure they'll be much more efficient.