AMD reveals a new APU with a bigger Vega GPU

In 2018, AMD posted a 40% year-over-year revenue growth in Q1 and 53% in Q2 2018, showing a strong growth across multiple fields. The growth was backed by the strong sales of the Ryzen CPU and the Radeon GPU, both of which were revamped with the new Zen and Vega architecture respectively. Earlier this year, AMD combined the power of the two successful products with the Ryzen 5 2400G and the Ryzen 3 2200G, codenamed Raven Ridge. It was the driving factor of AMD's success during the first quarter.

However, as AnandTech found out at launch, while the graphics performance of the higher-end Ryzen 5 2400G widely exceeds that of Intel competitors, when compared to discrete GPUs, it operates closer to the GeForce GT 1030. Compared to the likes of the Intel Core i7-8809G, an Intel solution that integrates Kaby Lake CPU, larger Vega GPU, and HBM2 graphics memory into one package, a wholly AMD-made solution was still lacking in performance. But today, AMD finally changed this by announcing a semi-custom chip commissioned by Chinese firm Zhongshan Subor.

Zhongshan Subor demonstrated a new PC featuring AMD's new custom-made chip at the gaming exhibition ChinaJoy on August 3rd, and the firm plans to release the product in late August. Subor is also developing a gaming console with the same hardware and a proprietary OS, which is planned to launch by the end of 2018. What is important to note is that the chip powering the Subor PC and the gaming console does not exist on the market as of yet.

Much like Raven Ridge, the new chip features a quad-core Ryzen CPU running at 3Ghz with multithreading enabled. But the GPU is a different story, with 24 Vega CUs running at 1.3Ghz. This is the same core count as the RX Vega M GH used in i7-8809G while running at a slightly higher clock, and more than twice of the Ryzen 5 2400G's 11 CUs. The Radeon Vega GPU used in the new semi-custom chip supports all of the AMD-specific technologies including the Radeon FreeSync, and is managed by the Radeon Software Adrenaline Edition software like discrete Radeon graphics cards.

For now, as the new design is a custom-made solution provided exclusively to Zhongshan Subor, users will not be able to buy the chip separately. Yet the existence of an AMD APU with a potent graphics performance suggests a more widely available version in the future.

Source & Image: AMD via r/hardware