
AMD Launches Ultra-Low-Power Ryzen Embedded APUs - 1900jwatson
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15554/amd-launches-ultralowpower-ryzen-embedded-apus-starting-at-6w
======
unwind
I work in (way smaller) embedded development, so I was curious about the low-
level I/O capabilities. If you say "this SoC is for embedded", I am going to
wonder about the SPIs, I2Cs, UARTs, and GPIOs.

I surfed up the "product brief" [1] which states:

• Up to 4x USB 3.1 (10Gb/s) / 2x Type-C® with ALT. DP power delivery capable

• 1x USB 3.1 (5Gb/s)

• 1x USB 2.0

• Up to 2x SATA ports

• NVMe support

• eMMC5.0, SD3, or LPC

• Up to 16L of PCIe® Gen3 (8 lane GFX, 8 lane GPP) and 7 link max

• 2x 10 Gigabit Ethernet

• 2x UART, 4x I2C, 2x SMBus, SPI/eSPI, I2S/HDA/SW, GPIO

So ... that's pretty good, then. No clear number on the GPIOs but I guess it
will be at least "a handful" since these are no small packages.

[1] [https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/v1000-family-
prod...](https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/v1000-family-product-
brief.pdf)

~~~
Avamander
I wonder when we'll get a SBC with it.

~~~
frankharv
The Udoo with Ryzen has been around for 2 years now.
[https://www.udoo.org/udoo-bolt-the-amd-ryzen-based-maker-
boa...](https://www.udoo.org/udoo-bolt-the-amd-ryzen-based-maker-board-is-
live-on-kickstarter/)

~~~
Avamander
It's not with this ultra low power embedded APU though.

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ink_13
Hopefully this means passively-cooled SoC Mini-ITX boards that don't cost an
arm and a leg. I've been speccing out a new home NAS and had hopes for
something along those lines, but both the SuperMicro (A2SDi-4C-HLN4F, ~$350)
and ASRock (EPYC3251D4I-2T, ~$880) options I found struck me as overpriced.

For comparison, when I did this five years ago, I was able to get an Athlon
5250+motherboard for $137. It's a little surprising that I can't seem to do
any better after all this time.

~~~
anonsivalley652
I already went far, far down that rabbit-hole for a max capacity 3.5" HDD +
ZIL SSDs + L2ARC SSDs FreeNas 4U 10 GbE NAS on Supermicro/ASRock Rack DIY and
Dell, HP, Lenovo and iXSystems. For home use, you're better off buying a used
2U-4U Supermicro or Dell box with an old Xeon or two. They're so cheap, buying
new is like throwing money away on a new car with instant depreciation. In the
Bay Area, you can even order up and swing by UNIX Surplus for some deals,
although sometimes they're higher than the usual sources.

I was going to get some of the WD HGST HC530 14 TB self-encrypting drives
until they came out to ~$600 each. (Ouch.) The regular ones are <$400, similar
to the ones BackBlaze uses.

~~~
darkwater
> For home use, you're better off buying a used 2U-4U Supermicro or Dell box
> with an old Xeon or two.

But these are not passive-cooled at all and are very, very, VERY noisy in a
home environment.

~~~
alkonaut
And also the electricity cost over the lifetime (say 10 years 24/7) is quite
substantial. It makes no difference for a powerful server but for a small low
power thing it can be quite a chunk of the total cost.

------
baybal2
I was at embedded world this week, and Asrock, Gigabytes, MSI were all showing
rack mounted servers with consumer grade Ryzens.

Just by looking at revision numbers at their boards, it seems clear that they
already went through quite a number of iterations, just as usually happens
with more proper server mobos.

There must be a demand for them.

~~~
jmt_
Historically I've always gone with Intel, but I've been wondering if new AMD
CPUs would work well hypervisor hosts. A Ryzen Threadripper 3990x for example
has 64 cores, 128 threads, and supports ECC RAM. Intel by comparison doesn't
offer anything close to those numbers on a single CPU. So, does anyone have
any thoughts as to why using the 3990x or some other similar AMD product
wouldn't be a great idea compared to using some Intel solution? Is the, say,
dual Xeon approach better in some way I don't know? I can't tell if Intel is
actually better these days or if they just benefit from all the contracts
they've been able to get with major manufacturers over time.

~~~
name6454
I can tell you why I just choose a dual Xeon workstation over a thread ripper,
despite it being considerably more expensive for lower performance: memory.
The threadripper motherboards apparently max out at 256 GB of ram. I put 1 TB
on the Xeon machine and could have gone higher if I needed it.

It is really too bad, but 64 cores with a max of 256 GB is super unbalanced.

~~~
jmt_
Definitely an important factor, didn't check the max RAM. Kind of surprises me
that AMD would put all this work into building a many core/thread CPU only to
have a 256 GB RAM limit but if it's intended for gamers/workstations and not
servers then I guess 256 GB would be plenty for that. But I agree it's
unbalanced regardless.

~~~
dr_zoidberg
That's the market -- EPYC is the server oriented product, and it supports a
lot more RAM, though I think still less than Intel (I hand-wavily remember 4TB
for EPYC, 6TB for Xeon, but with a huge price difference between them).

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Zenst
I read about this the other day and still somewhat supprised it has two 10 GbE
ports. I say supprised, and wonder if it has the horsepower to drive them at
that speed. Thinking along the lines of a firewall type application.

Be very interesting in tests when they come out and what kinda thruput you can
sustain.

[EDIT ADD] My surprise/excitement stems from the aspect that to get that kinda
feature on mainstream motherboard, you're always looking at the higher end of
the offerings.

~~~
fulafel
It's been 20+ years since 1 GbE came around, 10 GbE came in 2006, but for some
reason the adoption has lagged hugely in SMB/consumer gear.

~~~
c2h5oh
1 Gbe is just marginally slower than consumer grade HDD and matches the
fastest residential/SME internet connections. For most 1Gbe was a noticeable
upgrade while 10Gbe isn't, while cost of hardware is noticeably higher.

10Gbe has decent adoption where it makes sense.

~~~
icedchai
Modern systems have NVME SSDs which can easily fill a 10 gig connection, both
read and write speed. It would be nice to see higher speed ethernet on more
hardware. I have some 10 gig equipment but it's a couple generations old ebay
special.

~~~
smueller1234
Disaggregated home SSD? Err, wow!

~~~
fulafel
What do you mean by disaggregated?

SSD is certainly cheap enough for home NAS now.

------
anonsivalley652
As long FreeBSD plays nice* and hw components are chosen to have drivers, it
seems like the perfect chip to put on a SBC for a compact, solid-state pfSense
box.

* iXSystems mentioned to avoid AMD for FreeNAS, although maybe it is obsolete advice or doesn't apply to pfSense.

~~~
nicolaslem
AMD APUs are quite popular as passively cooled routers running pfSense or
OPNsense.

~~~
anonsivalley652
After looking at specs and prices, I think I'll just get a used SFF ECC
workstation and slot in a quad 10 GbE copper card and a cryptographic
accelerator. I can't see the point in paying more for new *sense-specific
gear. It might have a fan, but I can always throw in a Noctua if I'm worried
about it.

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mister_hn
This is also a good time for HPE to make a Proliant Gen11 with Ryzen..the
Gen10 is really inefficient in terms of speed and power consumption

~~~
sigio
They just released a microserver gen10+ .... and that one just switched from
opterons back to xeon's.

I'd like to see EPYC's and Ryzens, but i'm not holding my breath

~~~
chiefsucker
I have a Gen8 and it has a Xeon.

I just want to put some perspective to “switched from”, because HP _used_ Xeon
processors in its prosumer servers, so I don’t really see switching them back.

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lukeh
[https://www.techradar.com/au/news/apple-macs-could-ditch-
int...](https://www.techradar.com/au/news/apple-macs-could-ditch-intel-cpus-
and-switch-to-amd-going-by-clues-in-macos)

------
egberts1
AMD is now riding ahead of Intel in the hardware security arena, by like a
mile.

Today’s Flush-Flush KASLR vulnerability

[http://cc0x1f.net/publications/kaslr.pdf](http://cc0x1f.net/publications/kaslr.pdf)

~~~
StavrosK
This makes me wonder, do companies spend resources trying to find flaws in
competitors' products and publicize them? It would make sense.

~~~
randie63
But with this logic, intel could finance this so much better than AMD. But we
still see mostly Intel with security issues

~~~
StavrosK
Maybe AMD just doesn't have that many issues.

~~~
randie63
That's what I wanted to say :)

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alberth
The threadripper 3970x seems the the ultimate sweet spot on perf & cost.

It has 32-cores all operating at an amazing 3.7Ghz (a solid 40% freq faster
than most cpu in market and especially at that core count)

I’d love to have a rack mounted server with a 3970x

[https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-
threadripper-3...](https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-
threadripper-3970x)

~~~
moondev
I just built one last week! Love it so far. Running esxi and virtualizing
everything I can think of. The pcie 4.0 nvme speeds are incredible

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philliphaydon
I wonder if the R1102G can playback 4k video, would be awesome for a small
media pc passively cooled with a snes emulator.

~~~
jotm
I've recommended this before - you don't need a special/low power processor
for that!

Technically, any processor with a hardware video decoder will work fine as
long as you limit the TDP to something your cooling can manage. Especially
mobile processors.

You can easily limit TDP on any major OS - now if you'd use some custom
software, you'd need to implement it yourself, it's rather easy to do via MSR
editing, Intel has their list of processor MSR's freely available.

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acd
This will be very nice CPU in a home media Kodi server consuming very little
power!

------
jandrese
Is there any clue what the MSRP is going to be for these chips? I'd like to
get a sense of how much a SBC mounting one of these is going to cost.

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hundunpao
how does this compare to a raspberry pi?

~~~
hedora
In addition to being faster CPUs, these have much faster I/O buses.

The RPi 3 could only talk to its 1GBit card at ~300MBit. The 4 can max out
1GBit.

These have 2x10GBit in the CPU package.

Put another way, these can be a high performance NAS/router, and
simultaneously run the equivalent of a few RPis in VMs. Previously, AMD built
an APU without embedded video.

Hopefully they will continue to do so, and those will sell well into the
embedded/appliance space.

~~~
StillBored
And ram capacity, which makes a huge difference with modern software stacks.

------
pearjuice
Honestly if you are not long on AMD by now, you are missing out. AMD will
defeat Intel. It's just a matter of time.

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zelienople
If you are going to use a marketing buzzword like "APU" in the title, please
do us a favour and explain what it means.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Uni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Unit)

APU = "the marketing term for a series of 64-bit microprocessors from AMD..."

Excuse me for not keeping up with the latest corporate-speak made-up BS.

~~~
washadjeffmad
Forgiven! And here's an explanation for others that doesn't require a new tab:

APU = CPU + iGPU (on the same die)

AMD CPUs contain no integrated graphics, so this makes the function of AMD's
APU (c. 2011) branding similar to Intel's historical i-series (c. 2008).

Don't ask me to explain Intel's current i-series branding, though. Apparently
as of 2018, not all i3/i5/i7/i9s contain integrated graphics, so it's not
quite as clear as AMD's "APU means on-die iGPU" is today.

