[HN Gopher] AMD's RX 7600: Small RDNA 3 Appears
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AMD's RX 7600: Small RDNA 3 Appears
Author : picture
Score : 60 points
Date : 2023-06-04 17:55 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chipsandcheese.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chipsandcheese.com)
| gyudin wrote:
| Yet their drivers still cause kernel panic and crashes even on
| their own demos lol
| mastax wrote:
| > It uses TSMC's 6 nm process, which won't provide the
| performance and power savings that the cutting edge 5 nm process
| would. In prior generations, AMD fabbed x60 and x600 series cards
| on the same cutting edge node as their higher end counterparts,
| and used the same architecture too. However, they clearly felt a
| sharp need to save costs with this generation, compromising the
| RX 7600 a bit more than would be expected for a midrange GPU.
|
| It's also so they only need to design one memory controller for
| 6nm. I believe I remember this corroborated from an AMD engineer
| interview around the 7900XTX launch. Memory controllers aren't
| just logic that can be "compiled" to whatever target node. They
| have specific electrical requirements that take substantial
| design work. For this generation AMD has a 6nm memory controller
| that they use both in this 6nm monolithic design and in their 6nm
| memory controller chiplets on the larger designs.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's analogue circuitry at the chip boundary far reaching into
| RF. It isn't like the high-level digital code like Verilog/VHDL
| which is relatively straightforward to port.
|
| The people who do that are the true gurus honestly.
| speed_spread wrote:
| The 8GB VRAM size limitation is the biggest downside for cheap
| local AI. My feelings is that current LLMs start producing
| interesting results from 12GB and above.
| kramerger wrote:
| It's "RDNA lite" for somewhat cheaper GPUs. It is not supposed
| to have tons of VRAM.
|
| Besides, the _really_ interesting LLMs use far far more than
| 12GB. But that sort of this changes from day to day here...
| cypress66 wrote:
| You're expecting too much from a cheap card. AMD offers many
| 16GB cards, and used RTX 3090s (24GB) are very affordable and
| are the go to for AI.
| tigeroil wrote:
| What do you consider to be affordable? In the UK used RTX
| 3090s still go for well over 1k.
| LaurensBER wrote:
| For a company that's very affordable, for an individual
| we're not there yet but I've seen some impressive demos
| running on a M1/M2 laptop so no doubt time will bring down
| the hardware requirements even more (and hopefully the
| price of used 3090s as well).
| epolanski wrote:
| Cards in the same bracket offered the same amount of VRAM 8
| years ago to be fair.
| smcleod wrote:
| Used RTX cards (of any spec) are super expensive here in
| Australia still.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Here's where the unified memory architecture of M1 Macs, gaming
| consoles, APUs, and other custom SoCs can shine and shows the
| inefficiencies of the traditional ageing desktop PC
| architecture in the modern world where the graphics VRAM is
| completely separated from the system RAM.
|
| I'd like to see PCs designed more like consoles or M1 Macs,
| with GDDR shared as unified RAM between GPU and CPU. I have an
| laptop with a last gen AMD APU that's no slouch, but the VRAM
| slice of total RAM is still fixed as configured in BIOS between
| 512MB and 4GB, instead of fully unified and dynamically shred
| by the OS, which seems highly ineficient and wasteful in the
| modern age.
|
| It's why PS5 and Xbox with their 16GB of fully unified VRAM can
| compete with gaming PCS witch need 16GB of system RAM and over
| 8GB of VRAM. Why have two separate memory zones where one sists
| empty most of the time and when needed is actually too small
| while the other is half empty, when you can unify them and make
| use of the whole pie as needed?
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| I can't imagine the SOCs are too far away for PCs. It does go
| against the upgradeability philosophy but I'm not sure how
| many users really care about that
| throw9away6 wrote:
| Who really upgrades pcs anymore. By the time you need to
| upgrade everything from socket to power standard is
| outdated
| beebeepka wrote:
| Certainly not the case with AMD AM4. Stats show that
| plenty of people have upgraded their AM4 builds.
|
| The Intel only crowd is such a sad bunch
| heavyset_go wrote:
| I'd disagree if AM5 follows the path of AM4.
| bee_rider wrote:
| A mid-lifetime upgrade where you pop in a new GPU, fill
| up any unpopulated ram slots, or add in a new drive, can
| be nice. CPUs last a really long time nowadays.
| throw9away6 wrote:
| So do gpus though. Are you really going to pop in a 800$
| gpu into 200$ worth of components?
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Depends how good the original was if it's worthwhile.
| GPUs don't need that much from the rest of the machine as
| long as it's somewhat sensible for gaming. Especially at
| 1440p or 4k the GPU is a huge portion of the performance
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Are you really going to pop in a 800$ gpu into 200$
| worth of components?
|
| Why not? For the right workloads, the GPU is the
| important thing anyways. It's not _that_ different from
| rotating disks through a machine.
| kramerger wrote:
| Is this different from integerated GPUs from Intel and AMD?
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| As exemplified in my post above, AMD integrated GPUs
| don't have unified memory, at least my 5000 series I
| bought in 2022. Maybe the new 7000 series changes this.
| fulafel wrote:
| They have had it for about 10 years, since Kaveri. See eg
| https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/54709-amds-heterogeneous-
| uni... or https://www.guru3d.com/articles-
| pages/amd-a10-7800-kaveri-ap...
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Not exactly. While that may have been the case way back
| in the past when AMD APUs were designed as a homonegnous
| CPU-GPU unit from the start, I can tell you that's not
| the case with the relatively modern 5000 series.
|
| I need to go in the Bios and specify explicitly how much
| of the system RAM I want allocated exclusively of the
| integrated GPU and the rest stays available for system
| RAM.
|
| The reason is because Ryzen 5000 APUs seem to be a job
| rushed out the door so they're just a Zen 3 CPU with a
| separate Vega GPU glued together on the same die, but
| they're not a homogenous design, designed to work as one
| unit, like the APU of the PS5, so memory wise they're
| unaware of each other, even though AMD calls them APUs,
| they're not really, but more like separate CPU and GPU on
| the same die.
|
| I wish I knew about this limitation at the time, as Intel
| chips with integrated graphics have unified memory.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I wonder if a clever enough driver+firmware could make
| that hot-adjustable (or truly unified, rather) with
| nothing but a software patch. It sounds like the pieces
| are all there.
| tsss wrote:
| I imagine if that ever happens it will only be used to nickel
| and dime consumers and you'll end up paying even more through
| forced upselling than with the inefficient VRAM we currently
| have.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The main argument I can think of for separating their memory
| is that, of course, GDDR can be optimized for bandwidth and
| regular ram can be optimized for latency or somewhere in
| between.
|
| But, memory latency continues to make poor progress compared
| to CPU speeds. So, since we're already going to need a
| complicated system of caches on the CPU side, maybe it is not
| such a big deal if CPU memory acts more like GDDR.
| rektide wrote:
| Almost twice the bandwidth of the rx580, from April 2017. About
| the same msrp.
|
| It'll be interesting to see how this holds up versus Intel, whose
| been doing pretty ok at this price point. Intel's initial launch
| was pretty rocky but the drivers have gotten much much faster
| already.
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