AMD's Mysterious Fenghuang SoC Spotted in Chinese Gaming Console

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The mysterious AMD Fenghuang is a complete system on chip (SoC) powerhouse made up of a quad-core Ryzen processor paired with 24 Vega Compute Units and 8GB of GDDR5 memory on a single chip.

Kaby Lake-G ushered in a new class of processors. Now that AMD's short marriage with Intel has ended, the red chipmaker is free to branch out and do its own thing. Jack Huynh, AMD's corporate vice president of its semi-custom business unit, announced today via the company's blog that it has created a new SoC for Chinese electronics manufacturer Zhongshan Subor.

The semi-custom SoC, codenamed Fenghuang, will power Zhongshan Subor's upcoming gaming console and PC. The Fenghuang chip harnesses the power of AMD's Zen processor and Vega graphics processing unit architectures. The SoC features a Ryzen processor with four cores and eight threads running at 3GHz and 24 Vega Compute Units operating at 1.3GHz. An Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) might be the first thing that comes to mind; however, the Fenghuang SoC is quite the opposite. APUs don't come with their own graphics memory, and the Fenghuang chip has 8GB of high-performance GDDR5 memory at its disposal. Jack Huynh also confirmed that the SoC will support the chipmaker's existing and next-generation technologies, such as AMD FreeSync, Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition software and Rapid Packed Math.

Zhongshan Subor demonstrated its gaming PC at its booth at ChinaJoy, one of the largest gaming and digital entertainment expos in Asia, held in Shanghai. The Chinese manufacturer stated that it plans to release the gaming PC in late August. The SUBOR gaming console, with the same specifications as the company's gaming PC and a customized operating system will be available by the end of this year.

Unfortunately, AMD didn't comment if the Fenghuang SoC will be available outside of its deal with Zhongshan Subor. Its specifications certainly look promising on paper, and the SoC has the potential to give Kaby Lake-G processors a run for their money.

Zhiye Liu
Zhiye Liu
RAM Reviewer and News Editor

Zhiye Liu is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Although he loves everything that’s hardware, he has a soft spot for CPUs, GPUs, and RAM.

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70 Comments Comment from the forums
  • InvalidError
    Inching ever closer to APUs with on-package GDDR or HBM which may bring about the extinction of sub-$200 GPUs.
    Reply
  • akamateau
    Fenghuang SoC and Kaby-G are both early evolutions of Exascale Node Architecture (ENA) within the Exascale Heterogeneous Processor (EHP).

    AMD goes on in great length about the Exascale APU in a White Paper titled "Design and Analysis of an APU for Exascale Computing".

    It is a pdf available here:
    http://www.computermachines.org/joe/publications/pdfs/hpca2017_exascale_apu.pdf

    Of course in the paper AMD is talking about 32 core cpu's with many gpu dies with stacked HBM memory.

    Interesting times are coming.
    Reply
  • newsonline5000000
    AMD you traitors , you gave us AM4 Socket that does not support this technology and now you give that technology to china ? Why not making The whole AM4 platform accepts such APU ?
    Reply
  • redgarl
    ^^ Because console is the test bed for this. It also means that AMD is looking for the PS5 and New Xbox business once again... maybe even Nintendo.
    Reply
  • newsonline5000000
    21200680 said:
    ^^ Because console is the test bed for this. It also means that AMD is looking for the PS5 and New Xbox business once again... maybe even Nintendo.

    You are not getting it , this is a PC and it runs Windows. AMD already made the same technology in Xbox one X and PS4 Pro .


    I was waiting and waiting and waiting for them to release the same hardware for Windows PC , and it never happened , and now they just give it to China . This is TREASON.

    I demand one , and if they release one with 16GB GDDR5 the better . because 8GB for a PC is not enough today. This is the system memory as well , not only the GPU memory.

    Reply
  • akamateau
    21200652 said:
    AMD you traitors , you gave us AM4 Socket that does not support this technology and now you give that technology to china ? Why not making The whole AM4 platform accepts such APU ?


    DUDE!

    Fenghuang is an SOC!! OKAY? GET IT? It is board mounted not socketed. It is also semi-custom just like 8 core Jaguar SOC was semi-custom for Microsoft and Sony.

    AMD still makes AM4 APU's. However you have to get realistic here, the GPU and memory bandwidth needed likely exceeds the pin-outs for AM4 now.

    When AMD gets around to releasing HPC APU's it may be on AM4. But I seriously doubt it



    Reply
  • akamateau
    21200705 said:
    21200680 said:
    ^^ Because console is the test bed for this. It also means that AMD is looking for the PS5 and New Xbox business once again... maybe even Nintendo.

    You are not getting it , this is a PC and it runs Windows. AMD already made the same technology in Xbox one X and PS4 Pro .


    I was waiting and waiting and waiting for them to release the same hardware for Windows PC , and it never happened , and now they just give it to China . This is TREASON.

    I demand one , and if they release one with 16GB GDDR5 the better . because 8GB for a PC is not enough today. This is the system memory as well , not only the GPU memory.

    I would suggest that you pay AMD $250million+- and they can fabricate a semi-custom SOC just for you.

    Of course you might also have to buy another 50 million copies or so.

    Reply
  • akamateau
    21200680 said:
    ^^ Because console is the test bed for this. It also means that AMD is looking for the PS5 and New Xbox business once again... maybe even Nintendo.


    AMD is already taping out the latest SOC for the Sony and Microsoft consoles.

    If you are a student of history here is a link to a Forbes piece that outlines just WHY AMD won both Microsoft and Sony Consoles. AMD will likely continue to provide Radeon silicon going forward
    Reply
  • newsonline5000000
    21200742 said:
    21200652 said:
    AMD you traitors , you gave us AM4 Socket that does not support this technology and now you give that technology to china ? Why not making The whole AM4 platform accepts such APU ?


    DUDE!

    Fenghuang is an SOC!! OKAY? GET IT? It is board mounted not socketed. It is also semi-custom just like 8 core Jaguar SOC was semi-custom for Microsoft and Sony.

    AMD still makes AM4 APU's. However you have to get realistic here, the GPU and memory bandwidth needed likely exceeds the pin-outs for AM4 now.

    When AMD gets around to releasing HPC APU's it may be on AM4. But I seriously doubt it



    they can make a Socket that takes SOC as well . not a big deal .
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    21200742 said:
    Fenghuang is an SOC!! OKAY? GET IT? It is board mounted not socketed. It is also semi-custom just like 8 core Jaguar SOC was semi-custom for Microsoft and Sony.

    AMD still makes AM4 APU's. However you have to get realistic here, the GPU and memory bandwidth needed likely exceeds the pin-outs for AM4 now.
    Whether or not it's socketed doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it being an SoC. I mean, even desktop Ryzen chips are sometimes referred to as SoCs because they have stuff like SATA and USB controllers included on the chip.

    Also, if we're talking about integrated graphics with VRAM included in the package, what does the external bandwidth (i.e. through the pins to the socket) matter?
    Reply