AMD's New 12nm Ryzen Laptop Chips Look To Put the Pressure on Intel (theverge.com)

AMD has been pushing its Ryzen lineup of processors for a few years now, with the company looking to put pressure on Intel's seemingly unbeatable hold on the chip landscape. From a report: At CES 2019, AMD unveiled its second generation of Ryzen laptop chips, which look to jump ahead of Intel's 14nm roadblock to offer some of the first 12nm processors on the market. To that end, AMD is launching a new lineup of Ryzen 3, Ryzen 5, and Ryzen 7 chips across both the 15W U-series and 35W H-series lineups, almost all of which are built off of the company's new 12nm Zen+ architecture. For the more powerful H-series, there are a pair of new chips: the Ryzen 7 3750H, offering four cores / eight threads, a base clock speed of 2.3 GHz (which can boost to 4.0 GHz), and the Ryzen 5 3550H, also a four core / eight thread processor, but with a 2.1 GHz base speed (which can boost to 3.7 GHz), and only eight GPU cores to the Ryzen 7 3750H's ten. Further reading: AMD Gets Serious About Chromebooks at CES 2019.

Comments

Meltdown, Spectre, etc

[Red_Forman]

Are CPUs with the same number of cores/threads immune from some of those security holes?
(ex: The new entry-level 2018 Mac mini has an i3 with 4 cores/4 threads)

Re:Meltdown, Spectre, etc

[laffer1]

Meltdown was never a problem on any AMD CPU. That's Intel.

Spectre affects Intel, AMD, Power, and even some ARM designs. It's unclear what mitigations AMD may have added but since these are based on Zen+ rather than Zen 2, it's likely the same as the more recent desktop chips (Ryzen 7 2700 and so on )

Zen 1.0

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

Mind that these mobile CPUs are first generation Zen (which is kinda confusing because people expected 3XXX to belong to Zen 2.0).

Re:Zen 1.0

[Tough Love]

No, the 3000 series APUs are Zen+, the second generation, same as Ryzen 2700 etc. Zen 2, the 3000 series non-APUs are third generation Zen. I know, it's confusing. Just remember, the new APUs are 12nm, with modest IPC and clock speed improvements vs first generation Zen.

Re:Intel should not worry too much...

[mlyle]

Back in the early 2000's AMD had a clear and convincing lead in both absolute performance and price-performance for 2.5-3 years. Intel successfully kept them out of mass-market OEM products and cash-starved AMD was not able to keep up with Intel's research budget-- eventually paying a $1.25B settlement to AMD but this was not sufficient to make AMD whole.

Following that, we've had an extended period of stagnation on Intel's side until this point where AMD is again neck and neck with them.

The processor market is a whole lot better for everyone when this competition exists.

Re:ECC Support?!

[drinkypoo]

Unless you use your laptop often on commercial jets, ECC isn't getting you much extra protection closer to sea level.

The best thing about ECC isn't protection from cosmic ray bit-flips, it's protection from memory cell failure. I haven't had full ECC since I was a Sun guy since I'd rather have fast RAM, but it's pretty great when the machine corrects for a memory failure and lets you know about it so that you can order replacement parts without any interruption of service.

Try selling CPUs without built in back doors.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Intel has Management Engine - a total-control backdoor that's already been broken.

AMD has ASP/PSP. It's claimed to be less of an issue. But as long as it's closed we can't audit it and thus must assume that it IS an issue.

A plague on both their houses.