Friday, May 13th 2022
AMD's Integrated GPU in Ryzen 7000 Gets Tested in Linux
It appears that one of AMD's partners has a Ryzen 7000 CPU or APU, with integrated graphics up and running in Linux. Based on details leaked, courtesy of the partner testing the chip using the Phoronix Test Suite and submitting the results to the OpenBenchmarking database. The numbers are by no means impressive, suggesting that this engineering sample isn't running at the proper clock speeds. For example, it only scores 63.1 FPS in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, where a Ryzen 9 6900HX manages 182.1 FPS, where both GPUs have been allocated 512 MB of system memory as the minimum graphics memory allocation.
The integrated GPU goes under the model name of GFX1036, with older integrated RDNA2 GPUs from AMD having been part of the GFX103x series. It's reported to have a clock speed of 2000/1000 MHz, although it's presumably running at the lower of the two clock speeds, if not even slower, as it's only about a third of the speed or slower, than the GPU in the Ryzen 9 6900HX. That said, the GPU in the Ryzen 7000-series is as far as anyone's aware, not really intended for gaming, since it's a very stripped down GPU that is meant to mainly be for desktop use and media usage, so it's possible that it'll never catch up with the current crop of integrated GPUs from AMD. We'll hopefully find out more in less than two weeks time, when AMD has its keynote at Computex.
Sources:
OpenBenchmarking, via VideoCardz
The integrated GPU goes under the model name of GFX1036, with older integrated RDNA2 GPUs from AMD having been part of the GFX103x series. It's reported to have a clock speed of 2000/1000 MHz, although it's presumably running at the lower of the two clock speeds, if not even slower, as it's only about a third of the speed or slower, than the GPU in the Ryzen 9 6900HX. That said, the GPU in the Ryzen 7000-series is as far as anyone's aware, not really intended for gaming, since it's a very stripped down GPU that is meant to mainly be for desktop use and media usage, so it's possible that it'll never catch up with the current crop of integrated GPUs from AMD. We'll hopefully find out more in less than two weeks time, when AMD has its keynote at Computex.
22 Comments on AMD's Integrated GPU in Ryzen 7000 Gets Tested in Linux
Next time test with Quake 3 Linux on a CRT monitor. Think that would be more fitting towards a news post, about an iGPU that's claimed to be as fast as a 3060 mobile.
The only surprising thing is that someone already has the product in hand to test.
But otherwise, what's the point of transitioning to RDNA3 anyway?
I mean ... you're assuming that this person has the time, resources and freedom to install whatever OS they want to and run whatever software they want to. That is quite the assumption given that this is early hardware in very limited distribution. Most likely they used what they had - a Linux install and a widely used Linux (+many other OSes) benchmarking suite. That's all. Nobody is claiming that this is a good benchmark. I guess it might be getting RDNA3, though if these chips are to lauch in early H2, that seems unlikely to me (unless AMD has already had the RDNA3 design ready for a while). I'd expect a 6+ month delay between the first RDNA3 GPU-only product launch and any product integrating it, given history and the difficulty of coordinating these things between design teams, the time frames for die layouts and tapeouts, etc.
Also, why on earth are "Linux nerds" more likely to have more free time than the average person? Like ... what? How does that make sense? Do you have access to some kind of survey telling you this? And you're arguing as if they have access to this PC in their free time. Again: what?
To be clear:
- This is early test hardware, either QS or ES, and definitely not available to anyone outside of labs with some degree of access control
- It might be that engineers working there are allowed to play with this hardware on their off time, in the lab, but that is quite unlikely given that such hardware is rare and difficult to get ahold of.
- There is absolutely no reason to expect a hardware engineer, linux programmer, user, sysadmin, whatever, to be a gamer, or to be particularly versed in benchmarking (or interested in it). If my impressions from these forums are anything to go by, there seems to be somewhat of an inverse correlation between people working professionally with hardware and Linux and the likelyhood that their enthusiasm for PC hardware is related to gaming. A lot of people just like to run servers, do server tasks, program, make stuff, render stuff, whatever. And the vast majority of people doing this do not know how to benchmark a PC for those tasks -that is a separate skill that is not necessary for performing those tasks.
- Not everyone working with stuff like this has it as a hobby. Some people just have a job, and do other stuff on their free time. Not every engineer is an enthusiast.
It is absolutely possible that the person running the tests is an enthusiast, and that they for some reason thought these were relevant gaming tests, but ... that seems pretty unlikely, all things considered. Incompetence is not the most likely explanation for the selection of these particular benchmarks.
Because these will be based on an MCM (chiplets) design and made mainly for desktop use which will eventually use a dGPU, they just added a small iGPU just to make things work, just like how intel does have iGPU on all of it's CPUs (minus HEDT).
AMD will still make monolithic die APUs, starting with laptops, and might make some for the desktops as well as the actual successor to the 5600G/5700G, lets call them the G-series. So 7600G & 7700G will come eventually as a Graphics focused APUs, these will max out at 8C as usual but will bring faster iGPU, and because these will have higher TDP than laptop versions (65W compared to 35-45W), these will definitely have more power than 5700G, as even the mobile focused versions (TDP <35-45W) is rumoured to compete against 1660/3050.
I'm interested more in the VCN Engine. As we will have a G-series for APU gaming. But seeing this to focus more in the CPU side with just basic iGPU, I wonder if they gimmicked the VCN Engine as well, especially the newer video formats like AV1 & VP9.
It could be the ideal CPU for a Plex media server, the 5600G/5700G is also good, but it doesn't support AV1, so it will depend on software decoding, I don't know if the CPU side can handle it (never used/tried AV1/VP9 before). My 5800X CPU sometimes becomes sluggish when handling high bitrate x265 decoding/encoding with Plex (the GPU is old & doesn't have HW x265), so I doubt it will be able to handle AV1/VP9.
I mostly agree with you, and don't think we'll see a wholesale changeover in Ryzen 7000, but it will be coming sooner rather than later. Intel has already shown off their MCM mobile CPUs after all, and AMD can't afford to be left behind - and we know that they've been working closely with TSMC on interconnect tech for several years. What I'm more "realistically" hopeful for is that we might see an experimental MCM desktop APU in the 7000 series, where you have an IOD, CCD, and a small GPU die on the same package. Navi 24 already seems like a good candidate for this (even if it's somewhat redundant, as it wouldn't need its memory controllers in such an implementation), but if current RDNA3 rumors are correct about them moving PCIe and memory controllers to separate dice from the GPU die, a small RDNA3 die would be a shoo-in for an MCM APU with a decent CU count. Still, none of this is likely to work well or be economically feasible unless those interconnects are available in high volume and at low costs.
But again, considering what Intel is doing, and how TSMC has been promoting their progress in several different exotic chip packaging technologies for several years, I would be rather surprised if AMD didn't start adopting these in some form with Ryzen 7000. The tech should be ready by now. And given that through-package Infinity Fabric is the main barrier against mobile MCM usage (both in its high power draw and package thickness requirements), this could easily cascade into a rather dramatic reconfiguration of AMD's APU stack.