AM1 - AMD's Insane Budget Platform (Telegrams for Die Shrink)

Hi Tom! Thank you for this opportunity. Listening to Broken Silicon 119 with your great guest Daniel Nenni helped me to come up with a question. I want to know if AMD had the chance, are they even interested in a market segment like this? They see that their customers have been willing to pay top dollar for what they have been able to offer. They are making record profits while just barely being able to meet demand on a lot of their products in various segments. In my opinion, they should get back to this market segment, however, are they willing to do so? They have no incentive to do so.

Mark Smith

I have mixed feelings of this. While cheap low end desktop APU sounds good, it took for ages to get rid of 4core cpus(this is what I found Monet to be, 4C). APU is great way to boost desktop graphics in cheap way though, to give entry for as many people as possible. How feasible is this? Consoles are pushing 8cores and powerful gpus. And thinking raspberry Pi breaths from other low cost side, room is smaller than 10 years ago.

Timo H

I remember back in 2016, when I was working for an online retail shop and was tinkering on improving our entry level builds so they could run Doom with no issues. This was the time when the first games that required quad threaded CPUs started to appear. The cheapest option back then was Athlon 5350 (and some lower tier from the same family). Compared to the dual core Pentiums without HT and the i3s, those Athlons were dirt cheap. 1050 Ti just got released so I did a quick test with an ASRock AM1 mobo and a basic single fan Palit card on a 1080p screen. It ran great by default. Then I checked the settings and i got surprised that it was configured on Ultra. I turned on the frame counter and the surprise was real - 60+ FPS in highly intense battles. Compared to the Pentiums that couldn't even start the game it was real achievement. Some time later I checked the performance with RX 550, but I got disappointed by the significantly lower performance despite it was the 4GB variant.

I have an 5150 with an MSI board that I bought from Fry's electronics(RIP) many years ago.. but I never put it together.. you've got me curious(lol)... I was going to put an linux box together to see how it performs(we'll see) one of my many unfinished projects.. Looking forward to your utube post..

Greetings Dan and esteemed guests. My question is what do you think the role of these ultra-budget chips will be in the future of mobile computing? With things like the Steam Deck and GPD Win 3 on the market, I see a clear interest in more portable devices. These devices have relatively high-draw chips for their size, meaning beefier components all around, especially the batteries. How do you feel about the prospect of things like the Sony Vaio P-series (slim, low power, ultra-portable) coming back onto the market? The p-series was pretty flimsy in terms of power in its day, but I feel that modern advancements in processor technology would really give such a form-factor a chance to shine. Yes, modern smartphones are BLAZING fast and often quite capable of a lot of the low-spec work that would be done on a machine, but we haven't quite yet reached software parity between mobile and PC and I feel it would be a good gap-filler in the mean time, not to mention the possibility of ARM and x86/64 melding together over time with things like the Apple M1. Thank you for all that you do, keep up the killer content.

Gwen Farron

Where would an AM1 equiv fit today? Seems like Intel ate that entire market with their low end z8350 and NUC celeron/pentiums (which are under 15w)

My hope for ultra budget PC/Soc is the ability to order (very cheaply) a specialized processing unit. For example I want to implement a DNN (like Inception-ResNet V2 ) and I have 30 bucks . I want a way that will implement that (and nothing else) and it will be cost effective .I imagine something like a RISC-V with special extension for computer vision. Oh and also I the minimal order quantity to be 1 pcs not 10 000 pcs.

Valko Milev