lets chat about zen 5! Merge in any general chitchat zen5 threads here 
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I feel the hype train runs out of the steam, since AMD delays it for 2 weeks. Everyone should have gone back to school(or work) by then.
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The 4c8T Zen5 (non-c) Strix Point SoC (looks like an APU) is something I’d be interested in, but gosh, why only 16 PCI-E 4 lanes? At this point I’ll never decommission my power-hog threadripper 1950x, unless I’ll opt to not have any local storage and keep my os and data drives on a NAS.
But then, you can almost saturate 10 Gbps NICs with just 2 sata ssds in the right raid config and you won’t be getting the same speeds as a local NVME would (we’re talking 2GB/s for pci-e 3.0 x2, so we’re already past 10G speeds at this point and have lower latency, 'cuz local storage on nvm protocol, duh!).
The Granite Ridge has just a bare basic display out vga and doesn’t mention zen5 or zen5c, but has 28 lanes of PCI-E gen5. That’s great.
I don’t mind the difference between platforms (the pci-e version), but just the fact that the APU only gets so many lanes is ridiculous. I mean, sure, I can slap my rx 6600xt on a strix point APU (it only has x8 gen4 lanes), but that’s about it for expansion. About 4 lanes will be used for the I/O and 4 will be left for other misc., like 1x m.2 gen4x2, 1x m.2 gen4x1 and then we get a single pci-e x1 slot left.
If you want any kind of expansion, you have to buy into the expensive platform, that’s typically not as low-power consuming (doesn’t have to be as power-efficient, just to use less power full-stop than the more perf/watt, but more demanding counterparts).
Zen5c delivers more perf/watt than zen5 at the same core count, but something like a 4c8t zen5 (non-c) should consume less power than an 8c16t zen5c (because fewer cores to feed → less power utilized, even if the perf/watt is not as good).
I would really love to upgrade my current workhorse to something less power consuming (I don’t even need that many cores anyway, I just got a bargain on the forum), but:
- I lose pci-e lanes, so I can’t connect more than a GPU, a PCI-E USB card (for passthrough) and nvme ssds (I always go mirrored vdevs if I can), which means the NIC will suck - my guess is that at best strix point will come with 2.5G ethernet, I doubt we’ll see 10G on it
- because of that, I’d have to either sacrifice lanes from the GPU if the board even supports bifurcation (not acceptable) or sacrifice local nvme storage to attach a better NIC and use network storage - which introduces latency, is not as reliable and is slower (unless you manage to get a fancy FCoE card that does 25 or 40G).
- and of course, with janky m.2 to pci-e adapters, the pc case automatically needs to be larger than it needs to be, to account for the missing slots
I wish I could get excited, but ever since that lane upgrade from gen 3 to gen 4, but lower lane count happened, I was never able to get excited about new computer releases. And it’s a shame, because technology now allows all kinds of inter-connectivity over pci-e fabric.
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I guess you got confused with that diagram. It’s not a “4c8t Zen5 OR 8c16t Zen5C”, but rather a hybrid design that has BOTH clusters, so it has 12c/24t total with a mix of C and non-C cores. It should be mostly found in laptops and maybe some of those mini-PCs, hence why it it only has 16 PCI-e lanes.
I don’t think you’ll find those on your regular AM5 socket, but rather just soldered options.
It’s your regular desktop chip, think the new version of the 7600x/770x/7800x/7950x, those already have just a basic iGPU with 28 lanes. It’s also based on the regular Zen 5, non-C.
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OMG, so gross! I know that amd’s big.LITTLE design isn’t exactly similar to ARM’s or Intel’s (e-core) variants, but that’s certainly what I’m not looking for.
Thank you for the clarification, I appreciate that!
Maybe I have a complete memory loss, but I thought we haven’t gotten past the 24 lane mark yet. I might have been living under a rock at the launch of 7000 series ryzen. Even more embarrassing is that I thought we were talking Ryzen 9000 here and I completely forgot 7000 series is Zen5. Ooops.
Off-topic, kinda?
What I’m looking for is basically a 4 or 6 core (+smt) APU variant, ideally. I’d like to use the igpu for most tasks, but fire up a VM with the passed-through VM for when I want to lay back and play a more demanding game. Should be 65W TDP or less (I’d prefer a non-X CPU).
A while ago, I almost squeezed the trigger on a 5600g, but I had other plans back then, so I thought I’d skip 1 more generation… and then I thought I’d skip another gen with ryzen 7000. And here I am, with the 1950x still performing great for what I need, but at a very big power envelope.
Have you looked into the 8700g? 12 CUs, 20 total lanes (4 used for the chipset, so 16 free lanes), AM5, 65W TDP, 8c/16t of your regular Zen 4 core. here’s also the 8600G with 6 cores, but its iGPU only has 8 CUs.
28 lanes but 24 usable (the 4 non-usable lanes being reserved for the chipset).
So you get chipset (4) + GPU (16/8+8) + 2 CPU connected NVM-E (4+4) = 28
Something tells me AM4 still has a future for home-labbing! 
AMD is falling into the same trap Intel did in the pre-Zen era: complacency. For sure Linus made this statement, probably others as well: AMD is now basically competing with itself outside of the niche gamers market. (yeah, just face it gamers: in the entire IT industry, gamers are really a niche. That’s OK, enjoy your overpriced RGB-ified gaming rigs. Just don’t make so much noise for a small group 
)
I didn’t even know that’s a thing. I must be really disconnected (which I don’t think is that bad of a thing). It looks really tempting. The iGPU is only really needed to drive a 1440p@170Hz display (and maybe an epaper display at 5spf), do some bare basic encode / decode (video playback) and play doom 2 (opengl or vulkan, rarely software rendering which is handled by the cpu) at that resolution.
The idea is to not use a ton of power (and not output a ton of heat, which is the real problem), but I could do some things to lower my general power consumption and only use the system when I get an abundance of power.
Does anyone else see the recent short delay…odd?
AMD delays Zen 5 launch for further testing after quality issues emerge | TechSpot.
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Here is my guess.
AMD may fall short of claimed improvement. Let’s say 10% improvement instead of 16% as they presented. As right now, intel got instability issues, they want to wait for intel to drop the bios update to cripple intel chips’ performance further.
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7000 is zen 4 on AM5, 9000 is Zen 5 on AM5. Easy to get confused 
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I was actually in bed last night and I thought “wait a minute!” I looked it up and yes, 7000 was Zen 4. So is 8600G.
I got confused by this statement. The statement is accurate, I read it wrong. “Granite Ridge is the new version of 7600x / 7700x etc., the latter of which have iGPU with 28 lanes, the former also being based on regular Zen 5 (non-C).”
Is “Dual Decode Pipeline” Hyper Threading in one Hyper Thread? Or is it that it follows both branches of the prediction in one Thread?
it follows both branches of the prediction in one thread. kinda slick, tbh
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I believe it’s about improving decode for SMT, being able to decode the instructions for both threads in parallel. At least that’s what I get from “2 pipes support parallel independent instructions streams” + “SMT mode gives each thread a pipe”.
But after what Wendell said above and this post from chipsandcheese I guess it’s meant to to follow both branches:
Does this mean that Zen 4 is still a 4-wide decode µarch?
A question regarding 3D-VCache:
Is there a nice summary of non-gaming applications (VMs, software-defined storage, ethernet/router/firewall stuff) that lists what profits from the additional cache and what doesn’t care about it?