AMD, the Van Gogh APUs will take advantage of these new memories?
AMD
According to a boot log of a Linux kernel published by AMD itself, the new generation APUs known under the code name "Van Gogh" will be equipped with a 256-bit DDR5 memory interface. If this information is confirmed, these chips could offer a noticeable leap in performance in memory-intensive workloads, such as video games.AMD Van Gogh should integrate CPU cores based on the Zen 2 microarchitecture and an RDNA2 GPU, making it very similar, at least on paper, to the SoCs that the Sunnyvale company has designed for Microsoft's Xbox Series X and Sony's PlayStation 5. The processor is expected to be made using TSMC's N7 process technology, although this indiscretion has not been confirmed by AMD.
This month, one of AMD's software engineers released a Linux kernel boot log for the 'Van Gogh quad-core APU (marked as AMD Eng Sample: 100-000000405-03_35 / 24_N, family: 0x17, model: 0x90, stepping: 0x1), thanks to which we learned about support for a memory interface 256-bit DDR5. The latter is certainly not new for high-end desktop CPUs and gaming consoles, but for mainstream processors it could be considered excessive. However, if AMD wants to offer high graphics performance with an APU, a 256-bit DDR5 interface is a pretty logical choice.
From the point of view of the operating system the type of memory used is not very important, which is why there are modern CPUs that can work equally well with both DDR4 and LPDDR4X. DDR5 has numerous similarities to LPDDR4, but with a different addressing range than existing memory types. and LPDDR5 and DDR5 also share several similarities. It is possible that a system still in development may incorrectly detect LPDDR5 as DDR5 (especially with a preproduction BIOS). This could also cause the board to count multiple 16bit LPDDR5 or 32bit DDR5 memory channels as different 64bit DDR4 channels, indicating a "256 bit DDR5 interface".
The prototype of the motherboard used to make running the Van Gogh APU is codenamed Chachani-VN, but not much is known about its specs. Recall that, previously, other names had been spotted for the Van Gogh platform, including Celadon (an FP6 mobile platform), Mytle (an AM4 desktop platform) and Artistic (an unknown desktop platform). Only Celadon is mentioned in the boot log, so a mobile system was most likely tested.
MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk is an AM4 socket ATX motherboard compatible with all AMD processors. You can find it on Amazon at a discounted price.
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