First AMD Ryzen Mobile Laptop Tested Shows Strong Zen-Vega Performance (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: AMD Ryzen Mobile processors are arriving now in retail laptops from the likes of HP, Lenovo and Acer. With the first CPUs to hit the market, AMD took quad-core Ryzen and coupled it with 8 or 10-core Vega GPUs on a single piece of silicon in an effort to deliver a combination of strong Ryzen CPU performance along with significantly better integrated graphics performance over Intel's current 8th Gen Kaby Lake laptop chips. AMD Ryzen 7 2700U and Ryzen 5 2500U chips have 4MB of shared L3 cache each, but differ with respect to top-end CPU boost clock speeds, number of integrated Radeon Vega Compute Units (CUs), and the GPU's top-end clocks. Ryzen 7 2700U is more powerful with 10 Radeon Vega CUs, while Ryzen 5 2500U sports 8. Ryzen 7 2700U also boosts to 3.8GHz, while Ryzen 5 2500U tops out at 3.6GHz. In the benchmarks, Ryzen Mobile looks strong, competing well with Intel quad-core 8th Gen laptop CPUs, while offering north of 60 percent better performance in graphics and gaming. Battery life is still a question mark, however, as some of the very first models to hit the market from HP have inefficient displays and hard drives instead of SSDs. As more premium configurations hit the market in the next few weeks, hopefully we'll get a better picture of Ryzen Mobile battery life in more optimized laptop builds.

Comments

The Zen is strong in this one

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone please translate this shit into English?

The power hungry components are no accident.

[Gravis Zero]

The best way to predict future behavior is to look at past behavior. In the past when Intel was unable to compete with AMD they used anti-competitive practices to ensure their continued dominance. Such practices made them hundreds of billions of dollars and when they were exposed it cost them a few billion dollars to compensate AMD as they laughed their way to the bank. I'm certain that Intel is going to great lengths to ensure that power efficient AMD chips are only in power hungry systems with poor battery life to ensure they are less attractive. In the past they literally paid Dell billions of dollars to not sell systems with AMD chips so I'm sure they are going a similar route and paying to ensure no AMD laptops have better battery life than Intel laptops. I'm certain they pay all the big sellers to ensure their inferior product appears superior.

Intel has one game: don't compete, cheat.

Power utilization is key

[linuxguy]

I cannot speak for others, but for me, on a laptop, power utilization is extremely important. If AMD's product is not too power hungry compared to current Intel offerings, then they have a chance. Historically this is an area where they have not been competitive. But maybe things have changed and they have upped their game.

We would all benefit from good competition in the CPU and chipset market. And I want to support AMD by buying their products. However, they have to put out good, competitive products for me to buy.

So

[Hal_Porter]

The CPU performance of a Ryzen 5 2500U is better than a i7-7600U but worse than a i7-8550U or an i5-8250U

The GPU performance of an Ryzen 5 2500U/Vega 8 is worse than a i5-8250U/Geforce MX150 but it's faster than integrated Intel HD620 in an i7-8550U

The power consumption is clearly worse than a either an Intel IGP or even the GeForce MX150. E.g.

We noted that the Acer Swift 3 with a Core i7-8250U 8th Gen CPU and GeForce MX150 pulled about 9 Watts at idle and 13 - 16 Watts under the light duty load of our HD video loop test. The HP Envy x360 15z with Ryzen 5 Mobile pulled about the same 9 Watts at idle and with similar panel brightness, but under the load of video playback with VLC, pulled 20 Watts with peaks to 30 Watts in spots. We also quickly tested CPU utilization whether running VLC or the Windows 10 video player, and saw Ryzen 5 2500U CPU utilization oscillated at a low 4 - 12 percent. So, it appears at least with respect to VLC and video playback, that Ryzen Mobile with Vega 8 graphics is more power-hungry or perhaps has a bit more driver maturity to undergo to be fully optimized.

Generally PC laptops have two major customer groups

1) People who don't care about GPU performance but do care about battery life, price, power consumption etc

2) People who do care about GPU performance.

People from group 1) are going to get a machine with an Intel CPU and use the integrated GPU.

People from group 2) are going to get a machine with an Intel CPU and a discrete GPU. And not a GeForce MX150 either - more like a Geforce 1050 Ti.

In which case where does the Ryzen 2500U/Vega 8 combo fit in? It doesn't have enough GPU performance for groups 2). It's not low power enough for group 1).

If they'd managed to build something which had more performance than a MX150 they'd be fine. If they could beat Intel IGPs for power they'd be fine. But something with less performance than a MX150 and more power usage too isn't going to do well.

Now maybe some of this could be fixed with a driver update. Still based on current performance we're going to see these machines being sold a deep discount. And if they're not commercially successful, why would AMD spend time optimising drivers?

It's a shame really. AMD Ryzen CPUs on the desktop are actually pretty competitive with Intel. It's a shame the mobile stuff has failed to find the right market niche.