Clevo + Ryzen: possible?

Let's see what they come up with this year

 

here an article about amd summit ridge and raven ridge cpus
http://wccftech.com/amd-pinnacle-ridge-raven-ridge-processors-confirmed/

 

You broke the socket :O ?

 

The most common failure of an LGA board, is indeed bend pins. LGA is crappy design and I fail to see what the benefit is, other than saving a few more cents for GrIntel and offsetting the cost to MoBo manufacturers. It makes some sense in servers where it is much more likely to change the CPU(s) and keep the MoBo (not uncommon to be done a few times over throughout the lifespan of the MoBo), thus reducing the waste. The ease of use and durability goes to PGA.

 

I actually agree a bit with you here.

I liked the older style where the pins were on the CPU, but I don't know if there is any advantage or reason for this.

Buuuuut, it would be almost impossible to delid if the pins would be on the CPU - or at least the task would be way more difficult...

 

Primarily the reason to go LGA is for increased pin density. PGA is just bigger in every dimension.

I'm sure there's also some trivially small efficiency gain by shortening the travel distance between the board and CPU and likely also makes the entire socket much smaller in profile vs PGA. It may also help with heat dissipation into the board (commonly used benefit with BGA as well).

 

Delidding Ryzen is unnecessary, it's well soldered like pre Haswell

 

This. Thankfully you don't need to do it with Ryzen. Yet another place where AMD haven't cheaped out. All you have to do is get the CPU and put it in your machine. No void warranties because of the delidding, as well as no extra tools and no hard to fix bent pins (even if there are bent PGA pins, you can fix them in no time with an automatic pencil or something like that, good luck fixing LGA). For an end user PGA is superior design. I already said where LGA has some advantage.

I'd like to see proof about it. Have you seen the "dots" on the flip side of an LGA processor? Same size if it was PGA.

You obviously haven't opened a PGA socket. The "travel" difference is next to non-existent (if there is any at all).

 

Unfortunately there's no AMD whitepaper on the new AM4 socket which looks pretty dense. Assuming it is the same 40mm * 40mm as AM3 it would be getting close to Intel LGA density, but still not matching it. If you compare the AM3 socket and the 1156 however the difference is huge.

AM3 chip at 941 pins (socket) in 40mm * 40mm package completely covered in pins: http://support.amd.com/TechDocs/40523.pdf
Intel's Socket 1156 has 1156 pins (socket) in 37.5mm * 37.5mm package with almost 30% of that space actually being empty.

AMD's own server CPUs use LGA for the increased density (socket G34 or LGA1944).

If you don't believe me, just flip an Intel 1151/1150 chip over and count the points across the entire width vs an AMD chip. AM4 is 39 pins across a 40mm length (basically 1mm pitch including .5mm spacing either side) and a 1151 is 40 pins across a 37.5mm length (about .91mm pitch).

Of course, neither LGA nor PGA approach BGA density which has overshot them by a mile (which is also why BGA is preferential for SoC applications).

I'm referring to the distance from the CPU -> PCB (ie literally how far the electrons have to travel). In the case of AM3 (likely the same with AM4), the CPU stands at ~4mm off the motherboard PCB. Intels LGA1150 (quickest whitepaper I could find) has the CPU sitting 2.5mm off the motherboard PCB since the pins "compress" slightly.

 

I agree here. And I'm well aware what AMD uses in their server solutions. So I'll repeat myself - PGA is superior for end users especially given that most of them are hobbyist and it's their first time to change a CPU. A friend of mine is LGA 1366 fan and got quite a few MoBos on the cheap precisely because of bent pins.

And then they make 90º angle and travel ~1mm and then make another 90º angle and travel another 0.5mm before reaching the chip*. What is the total?

* OK these last 0.5mm could be accounted in the total height.

 

But void warranties if if you use Liquid metal and the labeling on IHS disappear But NOOO problem. How many processors will break?

 

I intentionally missed that part, but yeah, quite a few people destroyed their CPUs attempting delidding.

 

Regarding warranty and almost none chips break. The warranty is not so important when the chips already work. If yooo understand Yooo use liquid ultra on IHS. Goodbye warranty as explained above. Then very rarely chips go to hell.

 

Not anymore, especially BGA. As I said, I know for a few people that ruined their CPUs. With delidding tool, this risk is reduced to minimum, but you still have to pay extra on top of already expensive CPU.

 

I think there's a but of disconnect here. @Papusan is referring to the general failure of a CPU during regular use. How often is the CPU really at fault for a hardware failure, and you have the send it in for warranty replacement. My guess is RAM or MoBo have higher failure rates.

@triturbo, now you are talking about CPU failures that occur due to the deluding process. Of which no manufacturer would replace under warranty.

 

Yeah, if the chips work as intended, forget the warranty for your processor. You will will most likely never use it. Why should I stop using liquid metal due avoiding warranty? Some say you shouldn't do it because you miss the warranty

 

Yes and no. Yes, I was talking about delidding and warranty implications. No, I didn't ment only that - you can't delid BGA can't you? So yes the general CPU failure is much more common nowadays, especially for BGA CPUs.

 

You both have correct
Many of these unwanted BGA chip sits in Apple-similar thin flimsy laptops with inadequate cooling capacity. There are as you know several reasons why you should avoid them like plague or cholera. Not only inadequate performance. Possibility for decent overclock is like zero!! All in all, designed for tablet, smartphones or 14" or smaller mini laptops. That can be be replaced after a short time, just as mobiles.

 

What? I've never seen something more untrue. CPUs certainly don't just *fail* just like that; if a computer doesn't work, it is much more likely that either the power delivery, the boot disk, or a peripheral component has failed.

 

And you have checked that in your local repair center? There's more than one reason I'm writing GrIntel. And BTW CPUs failed before, but to repeat myself - "it's much more common now, especially for BGA". Don't believe me? Take a good look, you'll see the signs eventually.

 

I've worked at a computer repair shop before. A dead notebook motherboard occurs usually because of a popped transistor, or poor current delivery. Some notebooks work entirely fine; they were thrown away because their cheap pre-installed hard disk drives failed and started clicking. We installed low-capacity SSDs instead and sold them at bargain prices, after cleaning up the internals and applying thermal paste (I didn't do this, I usually evaluated the failure points and gave quotes to customers).

For all the derision against BGA, it is used so much more widely than PGA or LGA and is significantly more durable, just because no one with butter fingers would meddle with the pins because they couldn't get to the pins.

RAM and SSD chips are mounted to their PCBs using BGA. GPU chips, likewise. The PCH, same thing. Literally every chip you see is soldered to a board, save the CPU.

 

Actually, I had the BGA melt on an older dell, and it kept melting ever since.

We have BGA reballing centers in Romania since Romania is not a very rich country and those people keep ovening and reballing laptops and BGA chips for a large profit on the backs of the poor people who purchased BGA without knowing what those are.

Maybe this is not as often met outside, but in Romania, it is a very common occurence.

 

Europe in general I think is better for repair than the US.

 

But GPU, SSD, RAM or PCH are not as burdened with heat. It has always been a major challenge to cool the processor. Just look at the use of liquid metal on cpu vs. Gpu.

 

Same here (Bulgaria). The most wide-spread laptops, are the second hand ones. So either they end-up in a repair shop eventually, or they were there already (and repaired of course) before someone bought them. BGA reballing, chip exchange, chip swapping, you name it. Every second shop has a rework station.

Is the most common problem. BIOS and chipset/hub are fighting for second. CPUs are nowhere near that, but I never said they were. I said that they fail, they are not bulletproof, at least not anymore. I agree on the rest.

 

The sad part is that people don't have no choice and after a CPU has borken its original BGA once, it needs reballing / tinkering every 3-5 months or so.

I am sad for the owners who get this man...

Actually, one of the problems with BGA ultra thin designs is all laptop heat.

P775 can do 100C on the CPU, but the SSD and HDD will stay cool, while I had worked with laptops where 90C on CPU and 90C on GPU meant that the whole thing was hot to the touch and the SSDs and HDDs were overheating.

Innteresting thing to witness.

And that is what hurts us Eastern Europe people in general. Those repair methods generally don't last long; I would never buy BGA solely because I had to deal with all that balling and such nonsense...

The motherboard - from what I understood - is cooked inside an over for the reballing process - so that's even more the reason to be wary of it.

 

If the CPU is doing that it may be a case of the internal balls (between the die and package rather than the package and motherboard) that are having issues.

 

With a proper soldering-desoldering machine that would not be necessary, but those are expensive.

 

GPUs these days actually run significantly more power and heat through them than CPUs. The difference is GPUs can transfer away heat much more effectively.

The reason they "seem" cooler is due to chip layout. GPUs basically scale with cores so they end up much more uniform across the die, which in turn creates a fairly even spread of heat. The key to heat dissipation is transfer surface, and GPUs can make the most of it.

CPUs are almost the opposite. Logical cores take up very little space (typically less than half in fact) and so leave very little room for heat transfer. That's why CPUs often use heat spreaders to try and increase that available surface area.

That's almost universally not the actual solder balls between the motherboard/cpu breaking down. It's usually the substrate layer inside the chip warping. Funnily enough, it has just as much chance happening with socketed CPUs but most people don't go any further than saying "oh the CPU is dead", rather than jumping to the conclusion of having to reball/reflow.

 

This is possibly why Ryzen appears to run so cool; it isn't an APU yet. Frankly speaking, I think it'd be better if the 'integrated' GPU was removed from the CPU package again, because it's a waste on high-end CPUs which are likely paired with a discrete GPU. Ryzen has so much more of the die used by the cores than Kaby Lake—see below.

AMD Ryzen:


Intel Kaby Lake:

 

That looks pretty interesting, but I don't exactly undrstand what is going on

 

To be fair, Ryzen competes with Socket 2011 chips on a technical level which also lack the integrated GPU. The other thing to consider, is removing the GPU from an Intel chip doesn't necessarily improve things as you're just making the entire thing smaller and not increasing thermal transfer properties. Ryzen only "appears" to use more space because they've just got twice as many cores shoved into a similar package size.

The small socket (115X) range also finds it's way into pretty significant business ranges so it'd be hard to justify cutting the GPU back out.

Fact is integrated GPU is a hard one and I'm still on the fence about it. While many enthusiasts would jump immediately to "get rid of the iGPU we don't need it!", it's not quite so clear cut.
It's basically a little "ahead of it's time" in a sense. The iGPU is fairly robust and efficient for what it is, it's just that it doesn't really get used much. Back when Intel first started bundling the GPU there was some pretty heavy drive to "make the gpu do more than display/3d" and theoretically it was a good idea. There were lots of ideas about pushing calculation to the GPUs etc. It just never culminated in any useful scenarios where it'd get used to it's fullest.

A more recent parallel where this has been done right has been video decoding/encoding ASICs. NVEnc, QuickSync and VCE are all ASICs which have been integrated into their parent chips and have been highly successful.

This one has drawn outlines all the "stuff" on a Kaby chip:

 

So much space wasted on iGPU!!!

 

Maybe the thermal performance would actually be worse without the extra die space contacting the heatspreader...

 

Rather put in more cores than iGPU. Let us have more choices. So can ODM put in low binned BGA chips with 3/4 of the silicon with iGPU for Turd's. Choices!!

 

Nice talk.
I can't agree more.

 

Mobile APU does suck but their desktop lineup is fine .
AMD Turbo Core doesn't work (I tried) and mobile APU is not overclock-able , that's why it sucks
However, this is desktop Ryzen on a mobile form factor , I don't see anything wrong with it . All desktop Ryzen CPUs are unlocked , you can overclock them to ...let say 3.8GHz and undervolt the CPU at the same time . R7 1700 has TDP of 65W which is a lot lower than i7 7700k , temp shouldn't be a problem as long as you undervolt it

 

Yes. More cores = more fun for us

I haven't used AMD before since my AMD HD old days era so cannot say if they're good or not.

But competition for the existent ones is always good to have!

 

iGPU and Optimus / Enduro was made to make laptops give more battery life but the fundamental flaw of the "shim" optimus technology is awful, It's a failure the handoff can never replace the original HW pipeline..Then came this MUX which was a bit better but again scrapped off later on now some do deploy it still, I agree it's useful in many cases like a GPU failure / BIOS flashing / etc but it's all power user stuff & only valid when Mux is there but no one cares about Mux on low end, the usual stuff is flawed and pointless. This battery life thing and thin and light made the Windows Aero go because low end CPUs would get rekt if they run that Aero, Now we have this Pastel Junk from Win8+..

Intel ruled the market since the i7 series and this ultrabook scene "thin and light" norm, thanks to Intel for this vision and Apple's too - Macbook Air. People were like "Oh my gawd look at it how thin they are and packs an i7" but it's a ULV CPU, People don't care about most of the root structures, nothing at all. They just want the tech which is like a bait from the OEMs and corporates and wham the OEMs shove that onto the mass market, Now what happened ? MacBook Pro 2016 - RAM/SSD everything soldered JUNK, Now they are rebelling but their outcries didn't even make the OEMs twitch.

The iGPU should have been removed from Haswell chips where the FIVR roasted the machines, Plus who uses an iGPU (Massmarket not Quicksync etc stuff) on a K processor ? Complete waste of die space. It's just sitting there, Absolutely no use at all, HEDT doesn't ship that crap tech. Ryzen took a good approach be it their R&D or market stance plus Zen is made for Servers where their design choice shines, I'm hoping that upcoming K series CPUs or the 75W+ CPUs don't pack this stupid tech give us more cores without wasting the efficiency of the CPU die.

Also if Ryzen 16 core rumor comes alive it'd be awesome and thanks to Ryzen for this kick we needed to the IPC game again, Competition helps us consumers in every possible way..I'm just happy for this even if the Ryzen is not an effective choice for gaming but has significant advantages due to the price/socket/quality.

 

Optimus plus hardware switch is a great solution IMO

 

It would have been great since... forever.

Never ceased to amaze me why this feature wasn't implemented.

 

Optimus is actually pretty awesome on a technical level and addresses the very specific issue of discrete GPUs drawing too much power under idle/2D conditions. That is a problem that simply can't be fixed because the reduction in power consumption by using an integrated gpu is just too great.

One thing that'll greatly increase Optimus' usability is VRR support though. Once G-Sync/Freesync can be introduced into the Intel pipeline a significant number of the "problems" associated will actually disappear.

To be honest, Aero was absolute garbage. There was zero reason to render the desktop to a 3D surface at the time as you have to fight with stuff like V-Sync issues, problematic context switching etc. Not to mention the whole glass and gradients style is god-awful.

That's more about manufacturing costs. They're not going to manufacture a separate 7700K processors with no on-die GPU when the rest of the range does have one.

Besides, the small socket Intel gear is for standard consumer level. You should be using Socket 2011 for heavy productivity and actual high performance. It has existed, without onboard GPU, for ages.

 

I have to say, Optimus was a great thing for battery life. Sacrificing a few % of GPU performance for double the runtime is an easy decision imo. That freedom of longer runtime is actually the only thing I miss most having moved to a SLI DTR monster.

 

Or yooo can have both You can probably find cheaper if you go for a used one.

 

Friends don't let friends buy Celerons
or 1366x768
or 32gb of soldered storage

If I really NEEDED something portable I'd replace the hinge cover on the W110ER I have here gathering dust and use that. Despite being nearly 5 years old it would crap all over that yumcha POS in every single way you could measure

A couple years ago portability mattered, when I was lugging it between workplaces and one of those workplaces had a pub next door where I would sit outside in the beer garden on a looooong lunch working (...sometimes). Now it's just upstairs, or downstairs, or lounge room, or out on the rear deck or studio, it lives in a 20m radius always near a power point

 

Actually, you do buy these machines, as they are the cheapest machines you can get atm.

Install ChromeOS (Neverware) or Linux and you are good to go.

Great burner laptops... for whatever you need them for, literally has the same price as 1 or 2 of my uni text books

 

Exactly. Why pay more than you have to? +- $ 150 is at the right level for BGA. But you can make a better deal if you come across a used one that have survived previous owner.

 

Burner laptops alright. If I had to actually use for more than 10 minutes straight I'd want to burn it.

How on earth did simply saying Optimus was good for something get to here ??!...

 

Smartphones cost more than that.

 

clevo + ryzen would be awesome. cheaper too maybe