13 ms·
AMD takes on Intel with new Ryzen processors for laptops
- FBISurveillance 9y agoI really hope that those will be as good as their new CPUs and Apple would consider them if they don't have ARM in the works. It would be nice to have an octa-core in a laptop. Also would be really nice to have Vega as well — current Radeons aren't very good compared to 10-series nVidia chips.
- ksec 9y agoMac Mini! But for some reason I dont think Apple cares anymore. They will continue to have HDD as standard and crappy Intel iGPU.
- baldfat 9y agoThey are 200% faster. Says so in the article. Think when Apple finally moved to Intel and th speed increase. EVEN though Apple claimed they were the as fast if no faster before the switch. AMD had horrible performance on laptops and they are finally able to say they doubled the speed AKA they had a horrible product before. "For its own part, AMD claims that the new Ryzen chips will offer dramatically improved performance over its own last generation of laptop chips, with up to 200 percent more CPU performance (for multicore use) and up to 128 percent better GPU performance, although AMD’s last generation of chips weren’t exactly computational powerhouses to start." https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/26/16552208/amd-ryzen-5-2500u-7-2700u-laptop-processors-intel-core-i5-i7-chips-cores https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/26/16552208/...
- firethief 9y agoThat's triple the speed.
- baldfat 9y agoDouble speed 200% = 2.00 2000 mhz * 2 is 4000 mhz Tripple would be 300%
- robhu 9y agoYes and it's "200 percent more", the more being the key bit. More being 100% + (200%), i.e. 300%, i.e. triple.
- lyk 9y agoIs 100% faster equal to 1.00x?
- seanp2k2 9y ago200% faster means “on top of the 100% of the current speed”. Think about when a toilet roll says “25% more free” and the “normal” roll is 100 sheets. I’d expect the “more” roll to have 125, or expect to have a bonus 5th roll of 100 in a 4-pack.
- mtgx 9y agoYes, I think if the 8-core APU isn't happening this generation (obviously with 45+ W TDP), then it should definitely happen whenever AMD switches to the 7nm process.
- Tuna-Fish 9y agoI believe that they will actually go to 6-core APU, not 8. The reason for this belief is that currently the basic building block of Zen line is the CCX, which is 4 cores. Raven ridge is 1 CCX and GPU, Ryzen chips are 2 CCX, EPYC CPUs are made of 4x ryzen, for a total of 32 cores. But, when AMD advertised their server platform, the promised that in the next generation there will be 48-core chips that will be drop-in compatible with current server boards. Because the memory channels/PCIE lanes need to remain positioned for 4 chips, they can't just put 6 chips in. This implies that they will go from 8-core Ryzen to 12-core Ryzen 2, and the smallest change to make that happen is probably a 6-core CCX. And if they drop that same CCX into their 2nd generation Zen APU, that would make it a 6-core chip.
- Roritharr 9y agoThanks, thats the analysis depth i'm usually looking for but never find anywhere!
- MrRadar 9y agoIt's pretty crazy to think that in just a year or two 192 threads will likely be available on commodity dual-socket x86 server hardware...
- subwayclub 9y agoIt's the race for core counts that we've been expecting since the mid 2000s - just a lot later than anyone expected since we detoured into GPU and mobile computing. Our software still isn't really ready for it, but I guess that's to be expected.
- jorvi 9y ago
- mkroman 9y agoApple is unlikely to move away from Intel because of the dependency on Thunderbolt. Intel has announced that Thunderbolt 3 will become royalty-free in 2018[1], but it's gonna be a long while before ever getting to market. [1] http://www.techradar.com/news/intel-has-a-grand-plan-to-bring-thunderbolt-3-ports-to-every-laptop http://www.techradar.com/news/intel-has-a-grand-plan-to-brin...
- nik736 9y agoThe integrated graphics unit of those is apparently 2-3x as good as the Intel equivalent in some benchmarks[0]. Sounds very promising overall. [0]: https://heise.cloudimg.io/bound/2300x1400/tjpeg.q90.webp-lossy-90.foil1/_www-heise-de_/imgs/71/2/3/0/6/6/9/8/000-ryz24-06b0d915a6a4c80f.png https://heise.cloudimg.io/bound/2300x1400/tjpeg.q90.webp-los...
- agumonkey 9y agozen core + strong gpu would make a brilliant laptop chip
- jagger27 9y agoIs the 15W TDP number for the whole package or just the CPU?
- ucha 9y agoThe whole package. The chip CPU + GPU is a single die.
- NaliSauce 9y agoTDP can apparently be configured to be higher or lower (12-25W). See https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-2700u https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-2700u
- masklinn 9y agoThat's similar to what Intel does (and somewhat less flexible, Intel's cTDP on 15W parts is 7.5~25)
- userbinator 9y agoNot surprising. After all, AMD bought ATI.
- CoolGuySteve 9y agoHow are the Linux Radeon drivers these days. Last time I tried (8 years ago) they were awful compared to the NVidia equivalent. But now that I might be able to get a 3 pound ultrabook with decent graphics, I'm willing to put up with a lot more inconvenience .
- Improvotter 9y agoThe AMD drivers have gotten a complete overhaul. The open source drivers are amazing. The Nvidia drivers suck in comparison. Have you seen the post from the Sway developer that was basically "fuck you Nvidia"?
- lower 9y agoFor reference: http://sircmpwn.github.io/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html http://sircmpwn.github.io/2017/10/26/Fuck-you-nvidia.html
- mikenew 9y ago> Nvidia users are shitty consumers and I don’t even want them in my userbase. Good Lord. I get that the EGLStream vs GBM thing is controversial, but this is childish. How are you supposed to discuss anything with someone who thinks like this.
- paulmd 9y agoThe CUDA ecosystem is the dominant one within the GPU compute world, and it's only supported by NVIDIA hardware. And up until very recently AMD's Linux drivers were total dogshit. So there is a dominant share of NVIDIA products in this market, and it will continue to be necessary to use NVIDIA products for the foreseeable future. That's just how it is. To be honest I've never heard of this guy nor his project before, and I'm certainly not interested in trying it after his tantrum. There will be other tiling window managers out there (and I just use a normal window manager anyway). It's NVIDIA, they have a >80% share of the discrete GPU market. Someone will fill the gap. /shrugs Hint: Linus Torvalds' tantrums are not a positive character trait worthy of emulation. Maybe they are a necessary evil when herding a dozen teams of a dozen dozen cats each, but I'm guessing that's not the situation with this guy. It looks a lot like a fanboy ranting.
- fit2rule 9y agoIF someone comes out with a unibody laptop with a Ryzen in it, I'm fully in. It'll easily replace my current macBook fleet.. (nb: eyes the GPD Pocket and its revisions..)
- mromanuk 9y agoI’ve bought a Ryzen 5 for a home server, but sadly is awfully unstable. Apparently there is a bug in the Ryzen family. I’m using it with Freenas 11 (FreeBSD) and the system is having horrible random freezes with black screen. There are some threads talking about same issues, this make me lose faith in AMD, and going back to Intel.
- terminalcommand 9y agoHave you tried disabling SMT? And have you tried installing the latest microcode update? AMD has been having problems for a while, but I think they ought to have been fixed by now. I, myself was thinking to acquire a Ryzen 5 1600 for a high performance programming desktop. I was thinking of running FreeBSD, it's sad to hear that it's glitchy.
- quickben 9y agoWould it be possible it's a motherboard issue? I went through two mbs until I got a stable one. 1700x here.
- loeg 9y ago
- chx 9y agoDear Lenovo: we would like this chip with a seven row keyboard very, very much. A485 perhaps?
- pmoriarty 9y agoAre these just as buggy as the desktop ones?
- sddfd 9y agoWhat are you referring to? Provide some links!
- pmoriarty 9y ago"50+ Segmentation Faults per Hour: Continuing to Stress Ryzen" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14936468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14936468 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-segv-continues http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ryzen-seg...
- mkl 9y agoThis seems to be resolved: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=new-ryzen-fixed&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=new-ryze...
- mrchicity 9y agoThis is a known issue that only affects early revisions of Ryzen CPUs under specific workloads, so it's unlikely to appear in new ones like the mobile Ryzen. If you're affected, AMD will RMA your chip for free. And AMD isn't the only manufacturer to have such issues. Intel had a bug in Skylake where it would crash under heavy load with Hyperthreading enabled. Modern CPUs are complicated beasts.
- unwind 9y agoHow do you RMA the CPU in a laptop though, I would expect it to be soldered in? I guess through the manufacturer who gets to rework the main board ... gah how annoying that must be. I can easily imagine such a process taking weeks. I hope you're right. :)
- Likeable 9y agoBring on the competition! I can already see some movement from Intel after years of dragging their feet.
- turblety 9y agoUnfortunately anyone who takes their security or privacy seriously will be totally unable to use this. Every AMD chip contains a likely backdoored system called AMD Secure Processor (formerly “Platform Security Processor” or “PSP”) [1]. This separate processor contains closed source, proprietary binaries that have complete and unrestricted access to the host. Despite a large petition for AMD to opensource this, they refused in the end. [2][3] Anyone running AMD chipsets have a completely separate and unaccessible operating system running on their computer that they can not control nor know exactly what it's doing. [4] Intel has the same sort of system with it's Intel Management Engine (known as Intel ME) that even the NSA didn't want to have running on their own computers. [5] [1] http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/security http://www.amd.com/en-us/innovations/software-technologies/s... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5z4phx/petition_for_amd_to_opensource_the_psp_backdoor/ https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/5z4phx/petition_fo... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6msujx/what_happened_to_the_open_source_the_security/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/6msujx/what_happened_t... [4] https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd [5] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/29/intel_management_engine_can_be_disabled/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/29/intel_management_en...
- sgift 9y agoLooking at [4] tells me that no modern, relevant CPU supports what libreboot needs/requires, so while not a good point it doesn't help deciding between AMD or Intel - and those are, for better or worse, the only relevant CPUs for laptops/desktops.
- flukus 9y agoThe intel one can can finally be disabled: https://puri.sm/posts/purism-librem-laptops-completely-disable-intel-management-engine/ https://puri.sm/posts/purism-librem-laptops-completely-disab...
- rnhmjoj 9y agoNo psp_cleaner yet?
- 9y ago
- qzio 9y agoI really hope lenvo makes a x1 with a ryzen option and good linux support. Would be perfect as a developer laptop.
- Simulacra 9y agoI've always had a soft spot for AMD, the rebel, the chief rival to the behemoth Intel. I'm glad for this move, and I hope they create meaningful competition.
- solomatov 9y agoI love that we finally can have a 4 cores on ultrathin laptop.
- seabrookmx 9y agoWe already could. Intel released quad-core "U-series" parts a month or two ago.
- shmerl 9y agoThis should make life easier for Linux users who want something better than integrated Intel GPU. No more Optimus horrors and lack of proper PRIME support.
- c2h5oh 9y agoNot yet - there is no display support for that GPU in current Linux kernel, nor in 4.14 that is going to be released in 1-2 weeks. Users will have to wait for 4.15 - until mid-late January.
- shmerl 9y agoYou can use staging kernel from AMD meanwhile. Upstreamed one will be more polished, but it's basically the same thing.
- lightedman 9y agoYou need a new kernel to support a GPU? What ass-backwards garbage is this? With Windows, it's install a new driver; not update the core of the OS and possibly introduce horrible bugs.
- shmerl 9y agoRead this: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/73xutn/why_cant_amdgpu_be_built_as_an_external_kernel/dnvpwj2/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/73xutn/why_ca...
- lightedman 9y agoYep, utterly backwards. That kind of thing should be purely in driver space where it belongs, hooked on a driver model and not a kernel upstream model. It's funny that Microsoft learned this problem and fixed it back in 2007-ish. Well, in another 30 years Linux will catch up. Maybe.
- 9y ago
- kevingadd 9y agoDesktop Ryzen still suffers with thermal/power efficiency issues compared to desktop Intel cores, so I wonder if they've managed to address that issue for these mobile cores. If not, I wonder how customers will feel about paying a battery life tax for better performance... Incidentally, AMD GPUs have been at a disadvantage compared to NVIDIA's in the power management area for a while, as well. Which is unfortunate because they're very good cores with (arguably) a better feature set for compute/rasterization than NVIDIA's. Intel seems to have the market for low-power GPUs on PC sewn up as well. If AMD manages to make improvements here they could put out a very compelling product, if only because you wouldn't need GPU-switching in your laptop (with all the hassle that entails) and it'd be easier to substitute a laptop for your desktop when you do compute-heavy work. For example, https://www.anandtech.com/show/11658/the-amd-ryzen-3-1300x-ryzen-3-1200-cpu-review/16 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11658/the-amd-ryzen-3-1300x-r... shows worse idle power draw and worse load power draw for Ryzen. In desktop cases this gap doesn't matter as long as you have a good heatsink+fan but it will map to worse battery life and worse noise/thermals in a laptop. (An extra thirty watts in total system draw under load can add up on your utility bill, though.) Power draw on AMD's GPUs is not great either, unfortunately: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11717/the-amd-radeon-rx-vega-64-and-56-review/19 https://www.anandtech.com/show/11717/the-amd-radeon-rx-vega-... And past GPUs they've released also had issues with drawing more power over the PCIe slot than it was rated for (and exceeding their TDP in general, I believe).
- saas_co_de 9y agoRyzen 3 1200, 4 core 3.1/3.4Ghz vs. i5-7400 3.0/3.5Ghz the Ryzen uses .12 watts more at idle and 2.19 watts more at all cores full load. That is a pretty small (<5%) gap.
- mrchicity 9y ago5% is a lot these days, and that Intel CPU will beat Ryzen clock-for-clock as well. Laptop manufacturers are fighting over every percentage point of gains these days, not trying to move backwards. People want to see all day battery life with reasonably good performance. I like AMD and want more competition for Intel. If you have a use that scales across many cores, AMD is a great value for workstations. Their new server lineup is pretty compelling too. But if they want to win in mobile they need to be better on power and thermals even for normal users who won't use the iGPU's capabilities heavily.
- ryzenmac 9y agoIt doesn't seem like it supports LPDDR4, so I don't think they are competitive for the "macbook pro" market.
- wmf 9y agoYep, AMD lacks the "courage" to limit customers to 16 GB of RAM.
- ryzenmac 9y agoLPDDR4 supports more than 16GB of RAM.
- desireco42 9y agoThat is what he is saying
- dm319 9y agoHopefully the next generation Thinkpad ?A485 will have these chips - would be the ideal linux coders laptop.
- throw2016 9y agoFinally laptops gets freed from 2 anemic cores. Intel will now 'suddenly be in a position' to rush reasonably priced 4 cores to the laptop market. AMD needs to be competitive for the health of the industry and consumers. There is little doubt now Intel was holding the market back. We have seen similar stagnation on desktops with any slight step magnified by the tech press desperate for content. And fortunately AMD have an efficient architecture with Ryzen.
- seabrookmx 9y agoI mentioned this above: Intel already can. They released quad-core "U-series" parts a month or two ago.
- dingo_bat 9y agoWhich proves what OP said about Intel holding back innovation.
- unabridged 9y agoDear AMD, please turn on SR-IOV for your GPUs on these laptops. I want to be able to use it in multiple VMs. This is a huge selling point for some people, I will go with Intel because they have GVT-g enabled on all their chips.
- mcny 9y agoI have a Lenovo Ideapad y510p [newegg] with a i7 4700MQ [ark]. Cost me $999 when I bought it too (got $50 back after price match with Amazon bringing cost down to $950). Anyways, I play with VirtualBox a lot as well and would love to know more about compatibility with Linux. I am on Fedora 26 for my base os (that I am typing this on) now and nVidia proprietary drivers have been nothing but trouble so I just stick with whatever the distro comes with. I would like to know about the progress with SR_IOV as well. I've never had an AMD processor but would definitely welcome some competition. AMD, if you're reading having graphics drivers "mainline" in the Linux kernel would be a huge plus. Thank you! [newegg] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834313584 https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1683431... https://archive.fo/iFkUO https://archive.fo/iFkUO [ark] https://ark.intel.com/products/75117/Intel-Core-i7-4700MQ-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_40-GHz https://ark.intel.com/products/75117/Intel-Core-i7-4700MQ-Pr... https://archive.fo/5SpgX https://archive.fo/5SpgX
- darklajid 9y agoI really want a laptop with one of these, but all announced models so far seem to be flawed (as in, just short of perfect). Envy x360 seems the most promising, but doesn't seem to come with the Ryzen 7 2700U. So probably not. Ideapad 720S has memory limitations (no dual channel support) and is straight out. Swift 3 seems to be the closest to what I want - but .. limited to 8GB :-/ Given that I'm currently, right now, in the market for a laptop, I guess I've got to skip AMD for now.