Report: Ryzen "Raven Ridge" APU Not Using HBM2 Memory

While the Radeon RX Vega discrete graphics cards are making use of the ultra-fast HBM2 memory, it appears the newly-launched AMD "Raven Ridge" APU featuring Zen CPU cores and Vega graphics is not using HBM2 memory.

Instead of the Vega graphics on Raven Ridge using HBM2 memory, it appears at least for some models they are just using onboard DDR4 memory. FUDZilla is reporting today that there is just 256MB of onboard DDR4 memory being used by the new APU, at least for the Ryzen 5 APU found on the HP Envy x360 that was the first Raven APU system to market.

The Radeon Vega mobile graphics performance is a huge letdown in their initial tests shared. In fact, this APU was "barely beating NVIDIA's 840m GPU."

This is a big letdown if all Raven Ridge APUs indeed are just using DDR4 memory onboard rather than HBM2. The Envy x360 is also a bit of an odd-ball in just using a single memory channel, odd for being the launch laptop of Raven Ridge.

Also making it a bit more of a sticky situation for Linux users is the Raven Ridge APU with its new "DCN" display engine is still seeing a lot of code churn for AMDGPU DC and not all of the DCN 1.0 code merged for Linux 4.15. Thus the Raven display support might not even be in good shape until Linux 4.16.

Hopefully we'll learn more soon.