AMD “Renoir” Die Annotation Raises Hopes of Desktop Chips

VLSI engineer Fritzchens Fritz, well-known for high-detail EM images of silicon dies and annotations of them, lately revealed his work on AMD’s 7 nm “Renoir” APU silicon. His die-shots had been annotated by Nemez aka GPUsAreMagic. The floor-plan of the silicon reveals that the CPU part lastly dwarfs the iGPU part, due to double the CPU cores over the previous-gen “Picasso” silicon, unfold over two CCXs (compute complexes). The CCX on “Renoir” is visibly smaller than the one on the “Zen 2” CCDs present in “Matisse” and “Rome” MCMs, because the L3 cache is smaller, at four MB in comparison with 16 MB. Being MCMs with disintegrated reminiscence controllers, it makes extra sense for CCDs to have extra last-level cache per CCX.

We additionally see that the iGPU options not more than 8 “Vega” NGCUs, so there is not any scope for “Renoir” primarily based desktop APUs to characteristic >512 stream processors. AMD tried to compensate for the NGCU deficit by dialing up engine clocks of the iGPU by over 40% in comparison with these on “Picasso.” What caught our eye within the annotation is the PCI-Express bodily layer. Apparently the die certainly has 20 PCI-Express lanes moreover an extra four lanes that may be configured as two SATA 6 Gbps ports due to SerDes flexibility.

This would imply that “Renoir” can lastly spare 16 lanes towards PEG (PCI-Express graphics, or the principle x16 slot in your motherboard), moreover four lanes towards the chipset-bus, and the ultimate 4 lanes allotted to the M.2 NVMe slot that is wired to the AM4 socket, on a typical desktop platform. On the cell platforms, “Renoir” processors spare not more than Eight lanes towards PEG (discrete graphics), together with when paired with discrete GPUs such because the GeForce RTX 2060 (cell), which is able to gen 3.zero x16. Previous era desktop APUs corresponding to “Picasso” and “Raven Ridge” spare not more than Eight PCIe gen 3.zero lanes towards PEG, even on the desktop platform. x16 PEG functionality would bolster the credentials of desktop “Renoir” processors for premium gaming PC builds, utilizing a few of the prime SKUs such because the Ryzen 7 4700G.