[AnandTech] AMD: "No Chiplet APU Variant on Matisse, CPU TDP Range same as Ryzen-2000”

They're still pushing HBM on the desktop front, and they started talking about "heterogeneous computing" again, this is definitely where i'd place my bets, especially after how well the Intel/AMD APU turned out.

They've been pushing for CPU, GPU and memory on a single chip for some time. But it is weird that they wouldn't do just that using chiplets, perhaps Zen 3 they shrink the io die as well to make the room for HBM and that's when we see chiplet APUs just in time for the next round of consoles. Total stab in the dark but im sure not an unreasonable thought. I guess when they make a GPU chiplet could also be relying on an in development architecture, perhaps post GCN. So many potentialities but i don't doubt they will get there eventually.

I guess a bigger question is how well could infinity fabric facilitate a GPU chiplet.

Almost.
They could still use all of the good dies for Threadripper and give us something funky like 14/28.

Guess there are 2 kinds of people, after all...

I mean, it's a possibility. It didn't occur to me because they didn't do that with previous flagships 1800X and 2700X.

The key phrase is "at this time"

AMD doesn't quite have all the pieces they need yet, but they are closer then ever.

I'm thinking its going to be 2021 or 2022 before we see the chip they really want to build.

I think they are waiting on two things.

1. shrink the I/O die a little, some of the stuff on the I/O doesn't shrink well, but by going to 7nm+ on it they can probably shrink the die 20-25% And by the time they do that 7nm+ should have been in mass production for 2+ years so its costs should have dropped a bit. Also the CPU and GPU might be on 5nm by that point since risk production of 5nm starts this year at TSMC.

That's enough room for a beafed up (say AVX-512 support, and just plain wider) 8/16 processor, and a on die GPU that performs somewhere between a RX580 and Vega 56


2. HBM3. HBM3 is supposed to be cheaper, and have higher densities yet again, this should mean 8 gigabyte 4 high stacks, and the possibility of 2 HBM chips on the package with a somewhat shurnken I/O die, so no need for the GPU to go to the DDR5, while still having way more then enough space and bandwidth for any 1080p gaming.

AMD would then own a huge, huge chunk of the market.

It was speculated for a year or two that Navi would be multi chip design based on the roadmap language AMD put out, but last I heard that roadmap changed and people stopped thinking Navi would be a bunch of little chips all working together.


Maybe this chiplet thing will breathe new life into those old theories?

Navi being multichip/chiplet was a theory based on AMD saying "Scalability" was a feature of Navi. The description was dropped from later roadmaps but so were all feature descriptions. The theory made another round after AMD started talking about Infinity Fabric but was quashed in this article https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd-navi-monolithic-gpu-design

Whether the meaning of scalability was misunderstood from the start or they decided to drop/delay those plans is unknown.