Not all chips on a wafer perform well, some of them turn out to be partially defective, allowing you to create new lines of the same product at a lower price. But, in consoles where the specifications are fixed in all models that partially defective chips appear on the wafer, or which do not give the expected performance in quality tests, this forces them to be thrown away altogether.
A few weeks ago there were references to a new AMD CPU, which is called AMD 4700S, a nomenclature that surprises for two reasons. The first doesn’t have the term Ryzen in the name and the second is because it derives from the APU or SoC used in the Xbox Series. Specifically, the Xbox Series X, which AMD decided to sell as an AMD 4700 desktop kit in order to take advantage of the SoCs discarded in Microsoft’s console manufacturing.
But, is the processor the same as the Microsoft console or has it suffered any cuts? Rather the latter, so don’t expect to be able to build an Xbox Series X with this processor.
AMD 4700S, Xbox Series X APU becomes CPU PC
AMD gave an outlet for the Xbox Series X APUs or SoCs, so they were sold on a card with all the parts integrated in the form of the AMD 4700S Desktop Kit. This means that AMD sells the CPU 4700S, the board on which it is mounted and the RAM in the same package. That is 16 GB of GDDR6 memory, which indicates that we are facing the Xbox Series X APU. All of this is soldered to the board, so it is a fully integrated system that we cannot update.
But why do we call the AMD 4700S processor? Well, for the fact that Xbox Series X’s powerful RDNA 2-based integrated GPU has been disabled, Thus we are dealing with a CPU and not an APU because the GPU is missing. Disabling the integrated GPU allowed the 8-core Zen 2 processor can reach 4 GHz.
The other difference compared to the console is the chipset or Southbridge to which the AMD 4700S is connected, obviously it is not that of the Xbox, but the AMD A77E Fusion Controller Hub, eThis gives the AMD 4700S 16 PCI Express lanes required to connect a graphics card, 2 SATA ports and interfaces 1 Gbps Ethernet. We also cannot forget the USB controller integrated into the internal IO hub of processors based on AMD’s Zen architectures.
Certainly a curious way for AMD to capitalize on the Xbox Series X APUs that Microsoft cannot take advantage of for its console.
