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Marrying Vega and Zen: The AMD Ryzen 5 2400G Review

AMD’s new launch of APUs hits the apex of the 2017 designs that tend the balance sheet black. After a return to high performance on x86 with the Ryzen CPU product line, and the ‘we can’t product enough’ Vega graphics, AMD has inserted several product lines that combine the two. Today is the launch of the desktop socket edition APUs, with four Zen cores and up to 11 Vega compute units. AMD has historically been aggressive in the low-end desktop space, effectively killing the sub-$100 discrete graphics market. The new APUs now set the bar even higher. In this review we focus on the Ryzen 5 2400G, but also test the Ryzen 3 2200G.

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The EVGA X299 Micro Motherboard Review: A Smaller Take on X299

The EVGA X299 Micro Motherboard is mid-range microATX offering aiming to please a wide range of users but isn’t marketed towards any one function in particular. It supports 2-way multi-GPU, includes a U.2 port, an M.2 slot, and has Wi-Fi connectivity via an included card. It sits as the second smallest commercial X299 motherboard, behind the X299E-ITX.

NVIDIA Announces Record Q4 2018 Results
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NVIDIA Announces Record Q4 2018 Results

This afternoon NVIDIA announced yet another record quarter, with revenues of $2.91 billion, which is up 34% from a year ago. Gross margin was 61.9%, and operating income was up 46% to $1.07 billion. Net income for the quarter was $1.12 billion, up 71% from a year ago, which provided diluted earnings per share of $1.78.

NVIDIA Q4 2018 Financial Results (GAAP)
  Q4’2018 Q3’2018 Q4’2017 Q/Q Y/Y
Revenue $2911M $2636M $2173M +10% +34%
Gross Margin 61.9% 59.5% 60.0% +2.4% +1.9%
Operating Income $1073M $895M $733M +20% +46%
Net Income $1118M $838M $655M +33% +71%
EPS $1.78 $1.33 $0.99 +34% +80%

For their 2018 fiscal year, NVIDIA racked up $9.71 billion in revenue, which is up 41% from a year ago. Earnings per share for the year were $4.82, up 88%.

NVIDIA has kind of hit a magic sweet spot, where they had been diversifying into growing markets, but have found themselves also swept up in the GPU fed craze of cryptocurrency, feeding their core business as well.

Gaming, which is their GeForce lineup, had revenues for the quarter of $1.74 billion, up almost $400 million from a year ago. But for the entire fiscal year, they haven’t even refreshed their lineup, although the Pascal series of GPUs have certainly been strong in terms of performance and efficiency. But you’d be lucky to find any in stock thanks to the copious number of GPUs purchased for mining coins. It’s not been ideal for gamers, but for NVIDIA’s R&D, and their investors, it’s been welcome news.

Professional Visualization was also up about 13% to $254 million. Growth here was attributed to the ultra-high-end and high-end desktop workstations, such as the Quadro GP100 launched earlier in the fiscal year.

NVIDIA’s foray into the datacenter is also paying off with substantial growth. Datacenter includes Tesla, GRID, and DGX systems, and for the quarter, NVIDIA saw revenues of $606 million, which are up 105% from a year ago.

Automotive was up a more modest 3% to $132 million, and we’ve seen NVIDIA get some big design wins with large automotive companies with their DRIVE platforms.

Automotive is powered by Tegra, and including the automotive sales, Tegra brought in $450 million this quarter, and the very popular Nintendo Switch is likely a nice chunk of that.

OEM and IP was $180 million for the quarter, which is up about 2.2%, and NVIDIA stated their licensing agreement with Intel concluded in the first quarter of fiscal year 2018.

NVIDIA Quarterly Revenue Comparison (GAAP)
($ in millions)
In millions Q4’2018 Q3’2018 Q4’2017 Q/Q Y/Y
Gaming $1739 $1561 $1348 +11% +29%
Professional Visualization $254 $239 $225 +6% +13%
Datacenter $606 $501 $296 +21% +105%
Automotive $132 $144 $128 -8% +3%
OEM & IP $180 $191 $176 -6% +2%

For Q1 2019, NVIDIA is forecasting revenues of $2.9 billion, plus or minus 2%.

Source: NVIDIA Investor Relations

SK Hynix Announces SSDs with 72-Layer 3D NAND ICs, Own Controllers
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SK Hynix Announces SSDs with 72-Layer 3D NAND ICs, Own Controllers

SK Hynix this week has said it has completed development of its enterprise-grade SSDs based on its 512 Gb 72-layer 3D TLC NAND chips as well as its own controllers and firmware. The drives will be available with SATA and PCIe interfaces and will target various applications. Select clients of SK Hynix have already received samples of its eSSDs.

SK Hynix’s SATA SSDs are based on the company’s 72-layer 3D NAND 512 Gb chips, and are designed to offer up to 4 TB of raw NAND flash memory. These drives are rated to support sequential read and write speeds of up to 560 MB/s and 515 MB/s respectively. When it comes to random performance, these drives are capable of up to 98K random read IOPS and up to 32K random write IOPS (but SK Hynix does not disclose queue depth and other factors).

As for SK Hynix’s PCIe-based drives, they come in an M.2 form-factor and offer capacities of 1 TB or higher. The manufacturer declares sequential read performance of up to 2.7 GB/s, sequential write performance of up to 1.1 GB/s, random read performance of up to 230K IOPS as well as random write performance of up to 35K IOPS. SK Hynix does not disclose feature set, but based on their images we can expect them to offer power loss protection.

SK Hynix’s Enterprise SSDs at a Glance
  7mm SATA M.2 NVMe
PCIe 3.0
Controller Proprietary SK Hynix Controllers
NAND Flash 72-Layer 3D TLC NAND
Capacity Up to 3840 GB Over 1TB
Sequential Read 560 MB/s 2700 MB/s
Sequential Write 515 MB/s 1100 MB/s
Random Read IOPS 98K 230K
Random Write IOPS 32K 35K
Pseudo-SLC Caching Supported (?)
DRAM Buffer Yes, capacity unknown

SK Hynix began production of 72-layer 3D NAND (3D-V4) 512 Gb chips, we believe, in the fourth quarter of 2017, but did not make any formal announcements on the matter. The new chips feature the highest bit density that SK Hynix can offer today and they also offer higher performance compared to predecessors because of a 13.5 MB block size, a reduced tPROG page programming time, and a 667-800 MT/s Toggle 2.0 interface (the manufacturer does not disclose exact data rate of its interface).

SK Hynix does not disclose any details about its datacenter-grade SSD controllers, but it is likely that they were developed by engineers from LAMD, a company that SK Hynix acquired back in 2012. Keeping in mind that we are dealing with 3D TLC NAND-based SSDs, it is highly likely that the controllers support an ECC technology based on an LDPC algorithm.

SK Hynix did not disclose when it expects to ship its enterprise drives to customers, but if its product catalogue is to be believed, the high-capacity SATA drives will be available commercially in the third quarter. Meanwhile, since we are dealing with enterprise SSDs, existing clients of SK Hynix will adopt them when they are satisfied with their real-world performance, reliability, endurance and other factors, so they may start using them ahead of Q3, or later.

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