AMD SmartShift — это отличная технология, однако для большинства она так и останется недоступной
Мобильные процессоры AMD Ryzen 3 поколения выглядят лучшим конкурентным решением в борьбе с Intel, если говорить об ультрабуках и игровых ноутбуках. Грядущие Ryzen 5 4600H, Ryzen 7 4800H и Ryzen 9 4900H будут напрямую конкурировать с Intel Core i7/i9 H-серии, тогда как текущие Ryzen 5 3550H и Ryzen 7 3750H могли сравниться только с Intel Core i5.
Новые процессоры AMD Ryzen H-серии получат поддержку технологии SmartShift. Об этом компания говорила на CES 2020: SmartShift позволяет объединить энергопотребление ЦП и ГП в единый показатель, который будет регулироваться в зависимости от текущей нагрузки. Для сравнения, в стандартных современных ноутбуках лимиты энергопотребления процессора и видеокарты отдельные и фиксированы. Решение от AMD позволяет повысить производительность в некоторых играх до 10%, а также на 12% улучшить процессорную производительность без каких-либо дополнительных усилий.
Однако, главная проблема SmartShift заключается в том, что для работы этой технологии обязательно требуется процессор AMD Ryzen и дискретная видеокарта от AMD. Уже понимаете в чем дело, да? Зайдите на любой интернет-магазин и вы заметите, что подобных ноутбуков буквально единицы. Мы знаем о выходе всего одной модели с поддержкой данной технологии — Dell G5 15 Special Edition.
На CES 2020 мы спрашивали у представителей AMD, почему нельзя применить эту технологию и к моделям со связкой Intel-AMD или AMD-Nvidia, вроде грядущего Asus Zephyrus G14. По словам представителей компании, все дело в том, что данная технологи требует наличия контроллеров шины Infinity Fabric, которые имеются в современных видеокартах и процессорах AMD, ведь именно между ними и происходит "магия". Выходит, что если вдруг производители не начнут тоннами выпускать ноутбуки с начинкой только от AMD, технология SmartShift будет недоступной на 99% игровых моделей.
What Is AMD’s SmartShift And What Does It Do?
At CES 2020 AMD delivered on their keynote as well as delivering quite a few new products and product detail. In those deliveries were the final specifications and pricing for their 64 Core render crushing Threadripper 3990X, their champion 1080p pushing RX 5600XT, and their new 3rd Generation Ryzen 4000 Series mobile Renior based processors. The last of those in the list ushered in a new level of mobile parts from the company delivering high performance but low power 7nm Zen 2 cores to the laptop market. They also introduced a new technology that AMD has been working on, SmartShift. But, it seems that SmartShift has either confused many or they’re getting the wrong impression of what it does as I did when it was quickly covered on stage.
AMD Ryzen 4000 Mobile CPUs
The AMD Ryzen 4000 Mobile processor, also known as ‘Renoir’ would have traditionally been referred to by many as an APU as it sports the CPU portion along with a discrete level graphics component on board, but this go around we’re just referring to them as CPUs. The Renoir family makes improvements over the Picasso family by not only moving to 7nm but also utilizing the Zen 2 based cores and doubling the available core and thread count. Interestingly enough they have chosen to stick with Vega based GPU cores and reduce the largest available Compute Unit selection down to an 8CU model. What’s really interesting for me is that they managed to design this chip without using the chiplet process they used with the 7nm based Zen 2 CPUs used in the desktop, so when these are hopefully ported over to the AM4 socket things could get interesting for the entry level enthusiasts out there.
AMD Ryzen AM4 Desktop CPU Refresh To Include 9 New SKUs, Prices Leaked: Zen 3D, Cezanne ‘Zen 3’, Renoir ‘Zen 2’ Chips For The Mainstream Masses
The big kicker here in the line is the fact that AMD will be delivering double the core and thread count available on this generation over the last, and doing so even at the 15w level. Their Ryzen 4000 U-Series will start as a modest 4 core and 4 thread level with the Ryzen 3 4300U with 5 Vega CUs and climb all the way to the Ryzen 7 4800U with 8 cores and 16 threads sporting at 1.8GHz base clock with a 4.2GHz boost clock along with 8 Vega CUs. Don’t worry, this isn’t just a low power part, there are higher performance H-Series as well. The 45w Ryzen 5 4600H packs 6 cores and 12 threads pushing a 3.0GHz base to 4.0GHz boost paired with 6 Vega CUs, the 45w Ryzen 7 4800H is bringing the 8 cores and 16 threads with a slightly reduced 2.9GHz base and a higher 4.2GHz boost with 7 Vega CUs.
Now SmartShift
First off, I want to clarify what SmartShift isn’t and that is a form of Heterogeneous System Architecture or HSA. I’ve been following the APU scene since Llano was being introduced because the future is fusion after all, right? When the A10 7850K was being prepped we got to hear a lot about HSA and how that was going to finally marry the CPU and the GPU for sharing memory between each other as well as workloads, and while there are a ton of programs now that do benefit from shared workloads and GPU acceleration that is not what is going on here.
AMD SmartShift is actually something I got excited for once I got to sit down with AMD’s Robert Hallock and discuss a bit more during CES. I had misunderstood it to be a way of one component helping the other, but in fact, it’s more along the lines of one component getting out of the way of the other in mobile form factors. The image above is very important for explaining what is going on in the process as the OS selection is a non-issue as this is a strictly hardware-based control measure and works on a silicon level.
The Platform Control is doing all the hard work here, but what is it doing? A very common way manufacturers cool laptop components is with a shared heat pipe arrangement and while that is effective in cooling one or the other things get dicey when both components are in full swing as their combined heat becomes a chore to deal with, but what if there was something controlling the level of intensity that either ran at? With and Intel and NVIDIA based solution both are wanting all the power they can get when they’re active, sure they’ll raise and lower based on load but when there is an AMD CPU and GPU sharing the same cooling solution and power source they can uniquely work together.
Back with the older APU setups, there was a bit of power balance between the CPU and GPU portion of the chip when once a GPU accelerated workload was active it would reduce the CPU to a much lower clock speed to reserve the absolute most power for the GPU, but that wasn’t always the best way to handle it. Fast forward to Raven Ridge and Picasso CPUs and that problem was no longer here, sure there was still a little balance going on to stay within the socket power limit unless you were going ham on the overclocking.
But what if you could take that principle and apply it to a Ryzen 4000 Series CPU along with a dedicated RX 5000 Series GPU? Well, that’s the idea. So what is happening is Platform Control (PC) is measuring workloads on the fly and based on what the exact moment workload is the PC is able to shift the power to the component that is in most need of it allowing for higher boosts. This can result in higher performance in the CPU portion for tasks that lean on it heavily and higher performance in the GPU side for tasks like gaming.
Basically, if you were playing a game and the CPU is sitting at 3.5GHz full bore at 35% utilization (just an example) and the GPU is hitting 100% utilization but not reaching full speed because of thermal/power constraints on the entire system it can dynamically pull back the CPU and increase the GPU available power resulting in overall increase in the experience and performance.
Something of note that came from an earlier interview and is discussed in the topic of PCIe Gen 4.0 AMD has made it clear that the iGPU and dGPU cannot operate at the same time, as when one is active the other is not and is completely turned off.
AMD has found that this can, in cases, increases the performance by as much a 10+% in applications where the balance is out of line already. This is a unique option that is given to exclusively all AMD based systems as it won’t exist when paired with another dedicated GPU vendor, so if it has a Ryzen 7 4800H and an RTX 2060 then it isn’t possible because of the way the components work together. I see this as being something AMD tries to leverage heavily in the coming months and further as it could give them a package edge.
AMD представила технологию SmartShift полгода назад, но хотя бы какое-то распространение она получит только в следующем году
Технология SmartShift была представлена компанией AMD ещё в начале текущего года вместе с мобильными процессорами Ryzen 4000. Она предназначена именно для мобильных ПК. Суть её работы достаточно проста: SmartShift отвечает за перераспределение лимитов мощности между CPU и GPU в режиме реального времени.
То есть, если в какой-то момент времени, к примеру, в игре, процессор нагружен лишь частично, а нагрузка на видеокарту максимальна, SmartShift «заберёт» у CPU неиспользуемый запас мощности и направит его на видеокарту. Таким образом, в целом ноутбук не выйдет за пределы определённого суммарного лимита потребления, а производительность в игре увеличится.
К сожалению, как и сами мобильные CPU Ryzen 4000, технология SmartShift достаточно медленно поступает на рынок. На самом деле намного медленнее, чем CPU. Как стало известно, на данный момент есть лишь одна модель на рынке с поддержкой этой технологии — Dell G5 15 SE. Это ноутбук, основанный на CPU Ryzen 7 4800H и видеокарте Radeon RX 5600M. Более того, согласно заявлению Фрэнка Азора (Frank Azor) — соучредителя Alienware сейчас работающего в AMD — до конца текущего года на рынке больше не появится ноутбуков с SmartShift.
Причина — инерция рынка ноутбуков, обусловленная тем, что производители формируют дорожные карты примерно за год и не всегда могут учесть заранее появление новых технологий. Но Азор добавил, что в следующем году мы можем ожидать более широкого распространения SmartShift.
Amd smartshift как включить
If you own a Dell G5 SE (AMD) then this is the place for you. Engage with other owners and feel free to discuss any issues, updates & modifications.
After spending 2 days fighting with Dell on getting a SS ticket open and being told to call a different Number on Monday I decided to write this 'safety' guide on how to disable this stupid feature and get more STABLE performance out of the laptop. I still do not have a SR from Dell as of this Post and I am pissed off about it.
These steps are taken on BIOS 1.5.0, work on 1.4.4 and 1.3.0 — Validated and tested.
FOLLOW THE STEPS EXACTLY! There are injection points that control voltage, power profiles, and can damage the hardware.
I hate being a dick, but — If you cannot follow direction DO NOT DO ANY OF THE BELOW STEPS. You can Brick your system!!
Once the drive is prepped Create a folder called EFI in the root of the drive then open the folder and create another folder inside called BOOT, then copy RU.efi to drive:\EFI\BOOT and rename it to bootx64.efi.
The next step requires a USB Keyboard, the onboard Keyboard does not function under RU. You also need to enter your BIOS and disable Secure Boot for this to work.
With the USB Flash drive in and your external keyboard ready to go reboot the laptop and when the screen goes dark start to push F12 until you get the following Boot Menu.
You need to select your USB Flash drive and it might be -2 like it was on mine due to how Rufus builds these filesystems.
Now that RU is loading we need to wait for the entry screen to show up, takes 30seconds or so
At the above screen press Alt and C together twice, once to get rid of the popup and once to enter the configuration menu
We need to select UEFI variable and press enter to get a list of possible entry menu points
This is the first page that shows up, PageDown to get to page two.
On Page two we need to select D01SetupConfig and press enter to get into the screen we inject data into.
This is the BIOS entry screen in its entirety, The Red column on the left makes the first digit we are working with and the red column at the top makes the 2nd digit. For Entry point 72 we need to go down to row 70 and over to column 02, this is the entry point to enable S3 Sleep. You will see the Block of Text between the Column and Row at the top left shows we are on block 72. Change the default value of 00 (they are gray colored) to 01 (turns yellow) to enable the feature then press enter. Make sure the screen looks just like the screenshot and do not change anything else!
To disable SmartShift we need to go down to row 90 and over to Column 08 to get to entry point 98, the default will be 01 (Yellow) and we want to change it to 00 (turns gray) and press enter. Again, You will see the Block of Text between the Column and Row at the top left shows we are on block 98. Make sure the screen looks just like the screenshot and do not change anything else!
Now to write the values out to NVRAM we press Control and W.
To reboot the system Press ALT and C then arrow over to Quit and press enter to start POST.
Once the system is up you can do the following two steps to validate the changes.
S3 — Open an admin level CMD and type out powercfg -a and hit enter. As long as you see Standby (S3) listed then you can properly sleep your laptop now, no more s0 or Hibernate crap.
Opening Radeon setting you will see that Smartshift is gone from the performance graphs/charts
Open any Game/GPU application and load up HWInfo to validate the STAPM/SMU reading while the GPU is loaded. Also take a look at your CPU and GPU clocks, CPU should be 4Ghz+ and the GPU should be 1500mhz+ for their averages after a game load-in and graphing reset on HWinfo
Granted on my example my GPU clocks are 1400
but thats due to the CPU bound game I am running right now. I am not running Ryzen Controller in the below screenshot either.
Ryzen Controller now directly talks to the CPU and does not affect the GPU any longer.
I still have more probing to do before I release any more possible injection points, as there is a lot of things we can do on that BIOS screen, but for now this should prove to be useful I think.