And laptop manufacturers will now proceed to stuffing these into bargain bin laptops with shitty 1080 displays. To this day desktop/workstation Ryzen CPUs are not treated as a premium product in spite of their superior performance.
I wish Apple would adopt this at least for some products. It'd give AMD more credibility, and Apple would be able to negotiate pricing more easily with Intel.
Well, Dell, Lenovo and Asus are onboard, and at least Asus seems to be gearing up for some premium offerings. So far, these laptop chips were mid-level performers with mediocre battery life. At least in their marketing slides, they are potentially addressing both issues. Zen 2 on 7nm is allowing for high core count, higher clocks and low TDP. In theory they've also improved the idle states to reduce power usage under more conditions.
Both the above theoretical improvements and availability in desirable laptop chassis's will remain to be seen, but at least we can be optimistic, given the desktop wins we've seen this year.
(Disclaimer, I submitted the linked HN post and wrote the linked blog post.)
I talk about this explicitly here [0]. I think it's important that this be called-out widely and given attention. As I said in the first comment there, it's hard to vote with your wallet when the option you want doesn't exist.
Ryzen 3000 aka Zen+ mobile wasn't a premium product. GPU was certainly better than Intel, but CPU wasn't the perf/watt simply wasn't there.
I hope they'll stuff these into bargain bin laptops with 1080p displays though. I'm in the market, and don't care to pay more to use more resources for higher dpi that I can barely see the difference with and just causes software headaches. :P
Look at Asus's new line of premium laptops. All AMD Ryzen 4th gen. Ryzen 9 CPU's have been out of stock for months as enthusiasts and professionals are jumping at the value of getting 16 cores for ~750$. I think the tide of the market is shifting significantly, especially in consumers minds.
What's wrong with a 1080p display on a laptop? My current laptop has a 2560×1440 screen and I can almost guarantee that my next one will be 1080p matte if I can help it. There is just no point in me wasting compute on pixels that I'll never see.
But I'm sure there will be many other offerings and possible Apple may well. But who knows, Apple may just license the core and launch a hybrid x86/ARM system. Fun times though.
Prelude: I am a HiDPI junkie: I had a IBM T221 200 ppi monitor more than 12 years ago. I currently have a Dell XPS 13 9350 with 3200x1800 at 13.3" (276ppi).
However my next ultrabook (with a 14" or smaller display) will probably feature what you call "a shitty 1080 display". 1080 at 13.3" is 170ppi which is just fine for a laptop because you're not as close to the display as on a smartphone or a watch.
"And laptop manufacturers will now proceed to stuffing these into bargain bin laptops with shitty 1080 displays"
Which is good as we would have some serious processing power without having to second mortgage a house. At 15" 1080 display is anything but shitty (assuming it has decent gamut and dynamic range). Higher resolutions are much better served by standalone monitors. 40" 4K works just fine for me while on 15" screen 4K either makes fonts too small or if I increase the scale then there is no real difference with 1080
Lenovo makes a T450 (or something, I forget) that's a really good workstation laptop. They also have an AMD SKU of this laptop with everything except the upgraded screens.
Part of the reason the X1 Carbon is great is because 14" screen @ 1440p. Now give me an AMD version and I would be all over it.
I think it takes a little more time.
The avergae customers that doesn't follow the news have to get used to AMD being not the cheap stuff.
But it think it is slowly changeing with AMD being now competitive in notebook, desktop and server market.
I think Dell/Alienware just presented there new flagship gaming desktop with an AMD CPU.
On a typical laptop sized screen (13-17") I don't find > 1080p displays to be that much better, the pixels are already tiny. If it provides significant cost savings it seems like a good decision to me. Of course also offering higher res options for those who want to pay for them would be nice.
I was recently looking at various Ryzen 3xxxu series laptops to help a family member trying to get something on a budget. One thing I noticed while researching them is a lot of people think Ryzen systems are cheap builds because they require two RAM channels for the iGPU to be any good. So, on a Dell system with 8GB RAM instead of getting one 8GB DIMM and one free slot, you end up with two 4GB DIMMs and no free slots. A lot of people think this Dell cutting corners on builds by shoving in cheaper parts and subsequently making it harder to upgrade the laptop. I think there's a market education component here that isn't going to be easy to tackle.
I think it will be different this time. And the reason is that Intel has really dropped the ball. Even if Intel’s chips are better, they have had massive shortages over the past few years. If you aren’t buying 100s or laptops a week, there were periods where Dell would not sell you a modern business laptop at any price because they didn’t have Intel chips.
I’m hoping the system integrators have learned their lesson and go out of their way to support and promote AMD for their own sakes.
>I wish Apple would adopt this at least for some products. It'd give AMD more credibility, and Apple would be able to negotiate pricing more easily with Intel.
May I am reading too much into a small thing. But this is the first time I remember any vendors has Apple's product Image and Logo in their presentation. Normally for other brands using their logos and image are simply a request away. Not Apple. Apple has historically distant itself from any vendors using their logo as some sort of endorsement. Since winning the Apple contract is a quality label in itself.
In almost all other cases you can mention, speak, or use the text "Apple" with regards to Apple itself using your component. But I dont ever record product image and Logo being used.
I think the Ryzen 4000s fits MacBook Pro 14" or MacBook Air Retina perfectly. Or even the MacBook Pro 16". Instead of using a Gaming Focused Navi / RDNA GPU, it is bundled with a GPGPU focused Vega, which Apple has already been Optimising for their Metal Compute.
Just waiting until USB 4 / Thunderbolt 3 is fully opened with non-Intel solution I guess Apple will be good to go then.
How's the power usage of these Ryzen chips vs Intel vs Apple's home-brew ones? The consumer cares a lot more about battery life than they do about getting the last 10% of performance out of a chip these days.
> And laptop manufacturers will now proceed to stuffing these into bargain bin laptops with shitty 1080 displays. To this day desktop/workstation Ryzen CPUs are not treated as a premium product in spite of their superior performance.
Seems like all, or nearly all, of ASUS's laptops this quarter, from premium to value, are Ryzen; shipping with 120Hz+ displays, some of them IPS.
One would think 1080p displays aren’t even profitable to make these days compared to the cost of a HiDPI, just like we don’t see 800x600 or 1024x768 displays anymore. Eventually, whatever money is being saved by a power res display will be too marginal to make it reasonable to place in new products (ie when 2X DPI becomes the new 1X).
Can't blame just the manufacturers. AMD seems to do no QA with its BIOS before handing it to OEMS. Most of the previous generation's AMD laptops had issues with linux. AMD bios updates are still not supported under linux. If AMD doesn't care about the core enthusiast crowd, why should people care ?
I think that this will depend on the actual performance of the CPU.
While apple is a huge manufacturer, MS did choose to use them in their surface laptops. And as much as I wanted the previous mobile ryzen cpus to take off, most of the reviews were against them in the battery life tests while the performance tests weren't enough to make up for it. The same was true for any amd powered laptop, not only for surfaces.
I doubt Apple cares that much about x64’s future on the sort of manufacturing timescales (2-4 years) they work on.
I bet they already have an approximate release date for the MacBook Air that ships with an 64 bit ARM AnX CPU. It’s been brewing for at least 3 years now.
"Shitty 1080p displays"? Back in the day, 1024px was the highest accessible resolution even on desktop hardware, never mind laptops. And now we're even getting that vertical resolution on a wide-screen display.
Well, I hope this works out for AMD - currently they apparently can't compete for power efficiency.. At least judging by one of the more interesting reviews from 2019:
"The Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Showdown: AMD's Ryzen Picasso vs. Intel's Ice Lake"
Not that I want to apologize for poor performance, but I remember feeling let down by that review because some obvious differences between the platforms were not highlighted that should feed into the conclusions, not the least of which was the drastically different memory used between the two platforms.
The article was billed as "let's see the difference between AMD and Intel" but there were significant platform differences that made it not quite apples-to-apples.
Picasso is a nearly two year old design on 12nm being compared to Intel's latest Sunny Cove design on their (profusely) bleeding-edge process. It was a valid comparison, as that what Microsoft was selling. But I expect a better showing with process parity.
The article on The Verge quoted AMD as doubling the power efficiency from Zen+ (with 7nm Zen 2). Very interested to see real world battery life before making any judgements.
ASRock did the DeskMini A300 last year which was quite popular. I'm hoping they will refresh it with an updated motherboard for the new APUs coming this year.
I got the previous 3000 Ryzen edition on my new cheap Lenovo, and it kills all my big Intel machines in all benchmarks. It cannot use it for benchmarking, as it drops frequencies from 4.3 to 1.5 as it likes (or does temp. freezes) but for testing and dev the AMD works wonders.
These APU's wont fix todays problems in Laptops. Idle power consumption is largely due to all components together. bigger batteries are only more expensive. I'm still waiting for more efficient SSD's. There's no point in an efficient SOC if you still need a large hard drive and a bright display.
And of note; an 1800 base freq is on the low end of the performance/watt curve we've seen from their other products. Maybe AMD expects most workloads to not use all 8 cores properly and let the boost algo max the cores out?
also, where's PCIE 4? My guess is they are waiting a cycle on purpose due to power constraints.
> And of note; an 1800 base freq is on the low end of the performance/watt curve we've seen from their other products. Maybe AMD expects most workloads to not use all 8 cores properly and let the boost algo max the cores out?
The 1.8ghz base freq is just to hit the desired 15W TDP. The approach is pick a TDP, say 15W, then adjust base freq for the core count to hit that. That's why the 8C ends up at 1.8ghz base while the lower-end 4C has 2.9ghz base freq. Then let turbo be the thing that everyone actually uses on a daily basis, because base frequency is irrelevant. It's not actually an input into anything the CPU does for either AMD or Intel. The CPU is monitoring its power draw to stay in a power budget and a temperature budget. What speed it ends up running at is then not just dependent on how many cores are used but also what type of instructions they are running. It's a fully-dynamic system these days, making single-number specs useless.
SSD efficiency would be the thing that's nearly irrelevant. What even stresses the disk at all in a typical ultrabook workload?
Under load though mobile CPUs hitting north of 40W makes them, along with the GPU, the most power-hungry component by a lot though. Display power is like 5-10W at "normal" brightness levels.
[+] [-] m0zg|6 years ago|reply
I wish Apple would adopt this at least for some products. It'd give AMD more credibility, and Apple would be able to negotiate pricing more easily with Intel.
[+] [-] neogodless|6 years ago|reply
Both the above theoretical improvements and availability in desirable laptop chassis's will remain to be seen, but at least we can be optimistic, given the desktop wins we've seen this year.
[+] [-] basilgohar|6 years ago|reply
I talk about this explicitly here [0]. I think it's important that this be called-out widely and given attention. As I said in the first comment there, it's hard to vote with your wallet when the option you want doesn't exist.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21975877
[+] [-] toast0|6 years ago|reply
I hope they'll stuff these into bargain bin laptops with 1080p displays though. I'm in the market, and don't care to pay more to use more resources for higher dpi that I can barely see the difference with and just causes software headaches. :P
[+] [-] sb057|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gtm1260|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thekyle|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Zenst|6 years ago|reply
Screen: 14 inch, FHD 1920 x 1080 px resolution, IPS-Level, 60 Hz, matte, 100% sRGB, Pantone Validated 14 inch, FHD 1920 x 1080 px resolution, IPS-Level, 120 Hz, matte, 100% sRGB, Pantone Validated 14 inch, WQHD 2560 x 1440 px resolution, IPS-Level, 60 Hz, matte, 100% sRGB, Pantone Validated
But I'm sure there will be many other offerings and possible Apple may well. But who knows, Apple may just license the core and launch a hybrid x86/ARM system. Fun times though.
[+] [-] Tepix|6 years ago|reply
However my next ultrabook (with a 14" or smaller display) will probably feature what you call "a shitty 1080 display". 1080 at 13.3" is 170ppi which is just fine for a laptop because you're not as close to the display as on a smartphone or a watch.
[+] [-] FpUser|6 years ago|reply
Which is good as we would have some serious processing power without having to second mortgage a house. At 15" 1080 display is anything but shitty (assuming it has decent gamut and dynamic range). Higher resolutions are much better served by standalone monitors. 40" 4K works just fine for me while on 15" screen 4K either makes fonts too small or if I increase the scale then there is no real difference with 1080
[+] [-] lykr0n|6 years ago|reply
Part of the reason the X1 Carbon is great is because 14" screen @ 1440p. Now give me an AMD version and I would be all over it.
[+] [-] lhoff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p1necone|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nirvdrum|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thawaway1837|6 years ago|reply
I’m hoping the system integrators have learned their lesson and go out of their way to support and promote AMD for their own sakes.
[+] [-] ksec|6 years ago|reply
May I am reading too much into a small thing. But this is the first time I remember any vendors has Apple's product Image and Logo in their presentation. Normally for other brands using their logos and image are simply a request away. Not Apple. Apple has historically distant itself from any vendors using their logo as some sort of endorsement. Since winning the Apple contract is a quality label in itself.
In almost all other cases you can mention, speak, or use the text "Apple" with regards to Apple itself using your component. But I dont ever record product image and Logo being used.
I think the Ryzen 4000s fits MacBook Pro 14" or MacBook Air Retina perfectly. Or even the MacBook Pro 16". Instead of using a Gaming Focused Navi / RDNA GPU, it is bundled with a GPGPU focused Vega, which Apple has already been Optimising for their Metal Compute.
Just waiting until USB 4 / Thunderbolt 3 is fully opened with non-Intel solution I guess Apple will be good to go then.
[+] [-] Nullabillity|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] me551ah|6 years ago|reply
People buy a high resolution laptop and turn the scaling on 200%, effectively nullifying the benefits of a high resolution display.
[+] [-] henryfjordan|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] microcolonel|6 years ago|reply
Seems like all, or nearly all, of ASUS's laptops this quarter, from premium to value, are Ryzen; shipping with 120Hz+ displays, some of them IPS.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bubblethink|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nspattak|6 years ago|reply
While apple is a huge manufacturer, MS did choose to use them in their surface laptops. And as much as I wanted the previous mobile ryzen cpus to take off, most of the reviews were against them in the battery life tests while the performance tests weren't enough to make up for it. The same was true for any amd powered laptop, not only for surfaces.
[+] [-] k_sze|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneak|6 years ago|reply
I bet they already have an approximate release date for the MacBook Air that ships with an 64 bit ARM AnX CPU. It’s been brewing for at least 3 years now.
2021, perhaps?
[+] [-] zozbot234|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] e12e|6 years ago|reply
"The Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Showdown: AMD's Ryzen Picasso vs. Intel's Ice Lake"
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15213/the-microsoft-surface-l...
Ed: looks like we'll see more intel/amd head-to-head designs, eg: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15305/acer-swift-3-either-wit...
[+] [-] basilgohar|6 years ago|reply
The article was billed as "let's see the difference between AMD and Intel" but there were significant platform differences that made it not quite apples-to-apples.
[+] [-] trynumber9|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neogodless|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MikusR|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] therealmarv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beatgammit|6 years ago|reply
- [1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-minipc-solutions
[+] [-] qilo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Naac|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3r8riacz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nelson69|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darksaints|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Out_of_Characte|6 years ago|reply
And of note; an 1800 base freq is on the low end of the performance/watt curve we've seen from their other products. Maybe AMD expects most workloads to not use all 8 cores properly and let the boost algo max the cores out?
also, where's PCIE 4? My guess is they are waiting a cycle on purpose due to power constraints.
[+] [-] kllrnohj|6 years ago|reply
The 1.8ghz base freq is just to hit the desired 15W TDP. The approach is pick a TDP, say 15W, then adjust base freq for the core count to hit that. That's why the 8C ends up at 1.8ghz base while the lower-end 4C has 2.9ghz base freq. Then let turbo be the thing that everyone actually uses on a daily basis, because base frequency is irrelevant. It's not actually an input into anything the CPU does for either AMD or Intel. The CPU is monitoring its power draw to stay in a power budget and a temperature budget. What speed it ends up running at is then not just dependent on how many cores are used but also what type of instructions they are running. It's a fully-dynamic system these days, making single-number specs useless.
[+] [-] kllrnohj|6 years ago|reply
SSD efficiency would be the thing that's nearly irrelevant. What even stresses the disk at all in a typical ultrabook workload?
Under load though mobile CPUs hitting north of 40W makes them, along with the GPU, the most power-hungry component by a lot though. Display power is like 5-10W at "normal" brightness levels.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
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