[jsheard]

Yeah but they had pretty meagre memory bandwidth until now, aside from the parts they made exclusively for Xbox and Playstation. AMD didn't seem to be interested in bringing fast unified memory to real computers until Apple did it. Now they need to double up the bus again to make an M4 Max-alike...

[unusualmonkey]

In part because it's an odd compromise. With the exception of LLM's which are a decent development... there wasn't a lot of need to high memory, but moderate GPU compute parts. You'd either have a lot of memory and a CPU, or a lot of memory and a beefy GPU.

[babypuncher]

It isn't what the market wanted, and by market I mean OEMs, because I'm sure consumers would have loved it.

The OEMs buying APUs to use in laptops and SFF desktops were more interested in cutting costs than boosting graphics performance. Users who want better 3D performance can buy a higher end laptop with a discrete GPU and juicier profit margin.

[sliken]

True, but apple's the benchmark in this space and have managed thin laptops with good battery life and decent (but not class leading) GPU performance.

Doubling the memory width (and tripling the bandwidth) helped Apple's GPU performance substantially and should do the same for AMD. Which means that a larger fraction of the laptop market should consider it "good enough" and still have a reasonable TDP to avoid the 2" think laptop that last for less than an hour on battery while sounding like a hair dryer.

[BeefWellington]

It's possible they were restricted by agreements with Microsoft or Sony not to release anything before this year.

[kmeisthax]

Those agreements would be >15 years old at this point, I doubt AMD would agree to sandbag their entire APU lineup going forward just to make the base model PS4 and Xbone look good, and I especially doubt that they would do that again with the PS5 and Xbox Series when they actually had money and room to negotiate. Likewise, it doesn't make sense as a restriction Microsoft or Sony would impose: the console business is one of convenience, not power. They aren't trying to beat PCs and they don't care if PCs are a better deal. They care if they can get you to buy a box that locks you into their DRM scheme.

Furthermore, during the chip shortages of the last few years, AMD was actually selling broken PS5 silicon for use as a normal Windows PC[0]. If there were restrictions on selling APUs above a certain performance level, then this PC wouldn't exist.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h08cMFwqRc

[hedgehog]

Historically PC OEMs cared about price more than graphics performance so that's what they got. If you look at mobile SoCs or the eDRAM-equipped SKUs Intel made for Apple you see more emphasis on memory & graphics performance similar to consoles.