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What is interesting here is that multiple news outlets are calling this "AMD's revival". As far as I'm aware AMD has always been kind of "second rate" in the mo
by DCKing 7y ago
What is interesting here is that multiple news outlets are calling this "AMD's revival". As far as I'm aware AMD has always been kind of "second rate" in the mobile space - until now, apparently. There's nothing they're really reviving from - it's a first.
Even when AMD was previously whooping Intel - in the Athlon 64 vs Pentium 4 days - AMD was not particularly great in the mobile space. The Athlon 64 tech was downscaled for mobile uses fine, but AMD did not have a good answer to Intel's broad Centrino platform for mobile technologies. Moreover, Intel was quick to introduce the Pentium M on the mobile market, which was a much better and competitive product than the Pentium 4 (and the direct predecessor of the "Core" branded processors that marginalized AMD again later). AMD was competitive with Intel before the Athlon 64 too, but the mobile market was more niche before the early 2000s and the differences were smaller anyway. AMD was ahead of Intel multiple times in the past, but never in laptops.
This seems to be the first instance where AMD is not only "sort of competitive, but meh" in mobile products - it's the first instance where they're in the lead technology wise. The first time you could be better off buying an AMD laptop.
- mcv 7y agoI agree. I'm quite happy to see AMD compete effectively. More competition is ultimately good for all of us. Unless it drives them to cut corners resulting in security issues, like with the recent spate of Intel issues, but then it's good to have an alternative. I just bought a laptop for my son, and felt this was a good opportunity to try out a Thinkpad with a Ryzen processor.
- Plasmoid2000ad 7y agoAgreed. I remember you were more likely to spot a VIA processor in a laptop then spot an AMD processor before the Athlon 64 mobile processors arrived as Turion. This is new. Intel really did accelerate into the laptop mobile space with Centrino. It seemed like no one could match them on a combination of performance, aggressive power saving and battery life, consistently good WiFi and good GPU solutions (Nvidia optimus integration) It looked up until now like Intel had some secret sauce in it's drivers or elsewhere as well, to get such (relatively) good battery life out of the pig that Windows running non-UWP apps can be. I wonder how much is AMD getting better at software/drivers and optimization, and how much is AMD just getting such a lead in power usage and performance that they can compensate their software.
- littlestymaar 7y ago> to get such (relatively) good battery life out of the pig that Windows running non-UWP apps can be. What does UWP change regarding battery consumption ?
- Plasmoid2000ad 7y agoUWP apps use different APIs to interact with windows than Win32. So at least in theory, the OS can actively manage them similar to Android or iOS apps. I've noticed that Zen 2 on desktop can easily suffer from re-occurring spikes in temperature, caused by background Win32 running on a 10-30 second timer, doing small amount of work that causes the cpu to Boost to it's maximum clock, then drop back down. I could see that mitigated a lot of that with drivers or CPU code that is much slower to ramp up in response to load, but it would be better still if the OS wasn't running any Apps that behaved like that, especially while User isn't actively interacting.
- serf 7y agoshared resources and the ability for the OS to dictate background activity on a per-(UWP)app basis. probably more. i'm not that uwp-hep.
- wink 7y agoA revival from "nonexistent" to "on the market again at all"?
- masklinn 7y agoThat's not a revival, that's a birth. AMD has never found any success on the mobile market before. Even the APU didn't find much success.
- bluedino 7y agoAMD offered mobile versions of their K6-2 and K6-III chips, they weren't too far behind (in speed or power) at the time.