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AMD Debuts Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X For Prebuilt PCs (techreport.com)

Posted by msmash on from the further-expansion dept.

AMD announced two new second-generation Ryzen CPUs this morning. From a report: The Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X bring Precision Boost 2 and XFR 2 to quad-core Ryzens without integrated graphics, but there's a catch: these chips appear to be available exclusively to system integrators and OEMs for use in prebuilt systems. AMD is debuting the Ryzen 5 2500X in cooperation with Acer in the form of the Nitro 50 desktop PC. AMD says the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X each use a single enabled core complex (or CCX) from the two available on Pinnacle Ridge Zeppelin dies to get their four cores. Recall that the Ryzen 5 1500X instead used two cores from each CCX to get its core count. A consequence of this architectural change versus the Ryzen 5 1500X is that the Ryzen 5 2500X now has 8 MB of L3 cache, down from 16 MB. That puts both the Ryzen 5 2500X and Ryzen 3 2300X on par with the Ryzen 3 1300X and Ryzen 3 1200 on a cache-capacity basis.

6 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. It's official by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 2

    CPUs now have more cache memory than my first PC (8088) had of storage space.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  2. AMD making use of otherwise broken chips... by willy_me · · Score: 2

    So AMD found a defect and had to bin the part. But instead of throwing to the trash they decided to disable to broken silicon and sell the part for cheap - for computers that will also probably be cheap. Both Intel and AMD have done the exact same thing for years. This is news because? New part numbers one needs to remember to avoid?

    1. Re:AMD making use of otherwise broken chips... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So AMD found a defect and had to bin the part. But instead of throwing to the trash they decided to disable to broken silicon and sell the part for cheap - for computers that will also probably be cheap. Both Intel and AMD have done the exact same thing for years. This is news because? New part numbers one needs to remember to avoid?

      Binning, as you say has been going on for years and is actually planned from the beginning.

      It is almost guaranteed that whatever the hell chip you used to post this, it was likewise binned with either something on it disabled, or at less than the possible performance level because it wasn't up to snuff.

      Telling people to avoid these chips is borderline retarded.

    2. Re:AMD making use of otherwise broken chips... by Tough+Love · · Score: 2

      Catering to the budget PC market, which at the moment is nearly all Intel. The $200 small form factor PC market is a reality, perfectly adequate for the majority of home and business users. AMD apparently wants a piece of it, ideally a large piece.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
    3. Re:AMD making use of otherwise broken chips... by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      There's no need to remember to avoid anything. You are right now posting using a chip that was sold using the exact same methods. This isn't exclusive to AMD, or even the microchip industry. Part binning and feature disabling has been commonplace for the best part of 40 years. We can largely thank it for low cost devices. Even your high end parts are likely binned in this way unless you bought the absolute top of the line.

  3. Re:Exactly like with the 2200/2300 then. by edwdig · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The entire product line is one chip design. They burn out fuses in the chips to disable features to make the lower end ones.

    When you make chips, you produce a big wafer that gets cut into individual chips. There will be defects in the wafer. You can generally predict roughly how many defects there will be, but not where they will be. So you design your chips so that portions of them can be disabled.

    You get a perfect chip with no flaws? That gets sold as the top of the line part. You get a chip with defective cores? That one has cores disabled and gets sold as a lower end chip. Maybe the cores are fine, but there's flaws in the L2 cache? Disable part of the cache and put it in a lower end bin. Or maybe everything works, but the chip starts to get unreliable if you clock it too fast. Again, into a lower end bin.

    Chips get designed this way because it means you can still sell most of the chips that have flaws in them. You'll still get some unusable chips, but most flaws can be worked around to produce a product you can sell.

    If the market wants a lot of low end chips, sometimes you end up disabling working features to meet demand. It's way, way cheaper to do that than it is to set up a separate manufacturing line just for the lower end chips. This is more likely to happen later in the lifecycle of a particular chip, after manufacturing has been running for a while and the flaws have been worked out. It's usually not worth setting up another manufacturing line to make lower end chips when this happens.