Friday, December 31st 2021
AMD's Upcoming Mobile Rembrandt APU Makes an Early Appearance
If you've been waiting for more details about AMD's next mobile platform, then you're in luck, as the motherload has dropped today, with lots of details about the new Rembrandt APU's that are launching next year. Not only has a picture of the first motherboard, with adhering laptop showed up, but we also have a mostly complete block diagram and a list of expected SKU's, even though not all SKU models are revealed as yet.
AMD's Rembrandt APU will be its first APU with PCIe 4.0 support, which in itself might not be worth the wait, but if paired with the right GPU, this might help increase the performance somewhat compared to the previous generation of APUs from AMD. The bigger news is USB4 support, plus a new GPU which we so far don't know too much about, but it's speculated that it'll be called Radeon RX 680M and should offer 12 compute units. DDR5 memory support is also expected, so Rembrandt clearly has a new memory controller, since the APU is still based on the Zen 3 architecture.
It looks like we can expect as many as 24 different SKU's, with a TDP of either 28 or 45 Watts for now, split between two different packaging types, FP7 and FP7r2. The first three models that have been revealed are the Ryzen 7 6800H with a 4.7 GHz boost clock, the Ryzen 9 6900HX with a 4.9 GHz boost clock and the Ryzen 9 6980HX with a 5 GHz boost clock. All three CPUs are said to have eight cores and 16 threads. The leaked notebook is the Alienware m17 R5 from Dell and it's said to sport up to a Radeon RX 6850M XT GPU with 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, in addition to its Ryzen 9 6980HX APU. The motherboard picture is said to have a Radeon RX 6700M with 10 GB of GDDR6, as it's from a lower-end model. It looks like we have some competition to look forward to next year between AMD and Intel in the mobile space, that is if the current shortages of everything doesn't ruin it.
Sources:
VideoCardz, @ExecuFix
AMD's Rembrandt APU will be its first APU with PCIe 4.0 support, which in itself might not be worth the wait, but if paired with the right GPU, this might help increase the performance somewhat compared to the previous generation of APUs from AMD. The bigger news is USB4 support, plus a new GPU which we so far don't know too much about, but it's speculated that it'll be called Radeon RX 680M and should offer 12 compute units. DDR5 memory support is also expected, so Rembrandt clearly has a new memory controller, since the APU is still based on the Zen 3 architecture.
29 Comments on AMD's Upcoming Mobile Rembrandt APU Makes an Early Appearance
A faster architecture with way more memory bandwidth might finaly mean acceptable 1080p performance in newer game. My hope aren't very high but i am very interested to see
As for the 24 SKUs, i wonder if there are different sky for LPDDR5 and DDR5 too
If so, having a full amd ecosystem would be a huge perk as the iGPU will be used for lighter loads and the discrete GPU will back it up with horsepower when needed.
Intel iGPU + Nvidia GPU can switch between them depending on the load but cannot work together, whereas dual graphics would do exactly this.
RDNA2 and DDR5 might make for an amazing sub-25W laptop, RDNA2 scales down well to the 6600XT and most importantly, the performance/Watt is amazing.
The thing is, internally a 1x 4.0 lane provides enough bandwidth for all sorts of peripherals, ports etc laptops often miss out on. 10Gb USB 4 ports? Thunderbolt? 5Gb ethernet? can all be done easier now
Alder Lake may be more efficient than Rocket lake but we already know it's not a game-changer in terms of performance/Watt at "65W" TDPs, more of an evolutionary step that brings Intel up to the peformance/Watt level that AMD have already been operating at since Renoir a couple of years ago.
What I would like to see (but probably won't) is some higher-quality midrange laptops that don't compromise on cooling to be as thin as humanly possible. Call me crazy but a 3060 gets to mostly stretch its legs at about 90W TGP, which is fine in a mainstream 1080p gaming laptop and can be cooled quietly and unobtrusively if the laptop's base is allowed to be 20mm thick instead of 12mm thick. Thin&light is great but it starts to get overly compromised for cooling and battery runtimes once you move into dGPU territory, utterly defeating the purpose of a thin&light.
There will always be fancy $4000+ flagship laptops with two power bricks, a 3080 and all the trimmings but I think the target audience for most gaming laptops is people sitting on a sofa in a social environment with their SO, kids, whatever. Noisy, heavy, barely-portable and inconvenient laptops look cool on the trade show floor but really aren't popularly desirable.
Whoops, that turned into a cynical ramble. Hope I'm wrong, but it's better to be a pessimist who gets better news than they expected, than to be an optimist who is constantly dissappointed by the usually underwhelming reality.
Some people consider it sacrilege to say anything bad about Ampere as it is nvidia's most advanced architecture, and 8 nm Samsung is just sooo goood... but hey, people, let's look at the facts! The desktop 3060 eats about the same power as a 2070 and performs at the same level as the 2070 - not to mention that the 2070 isn't more than a 1080 with raytracing and DLSS support. Ergo, performance/watt hasn't changed since Pascal. All the higher tier chips throw efficiency out of the window. Ergo, Ampere isn't as advanced as it's advertised to be. It's a slightly reworked Turing built by Samsung instead of TSMC, nothing more.
Chips with such high power and cooling requirements should have no presence in a laptop in my opinion.