4 ms·

AMD says its new laptop chips can beat Apple

30 points by belter 2y ago

iamgopal 2y ago
Hopefully they beat it in both performances and power consumption.
tanelpoder 2y ago
... beat Apple at running Windows
- tanelpoder 2y ago
  Didn't at all expect this to be downvoted, but point taken (pun intended)
MBCook 2y ago
Release how it’s done. “Faster than a MacBook Air” isn’t hard if you’re willing to burn electricity and produce more heat. Really it’s the same for the MBP comparison. Heck Intel can beat a MBP. The could when it was released. You can buy it right now. Just don’t expect similar battery life or a light laptop. Can you beat the performance at the same battery life with a similar sized battery? Can you match the performance and battery life while using a smaller battery? Just saying you’re faster is only part of the story. Without the qualifiers you used it’s not meaningful.
- s3p 2y ago
  I think the article gives a good read on AMD's ambitions, they are absolutely looking at performance per watt and they are working to make these more efficient. So they didn't just give a cpu a shit ton of power, they actually focused on efficiency. Or at least that's what they said in the article. No battery life stats out yet.
  - MBCook 2y ago
    That’s what they said, yeah. But it’s all talk without the numbers. I know they’re focusing on efficiency, and good for them. I hope their claims are accurate or at least close. But I’ve been on this ride way too many times. Some company claiming their thing is better than the other one and then it turns out it just flat out isn’t, or only is with some giant compromise. It’s the combination of speed, battery life, AND heat that have been magical for the Mac compared to the last Intel chips they shipped. I’m just expecting another case of faster but hotter or worse battery life. Pretty much all the quotes are about being faster. Then there’s this: > During the event, AMD would only say that battery life would last “all day,” which the company defines as “eight hours or more. I don’t know how that compares in the PC space but if the best you can do is 8 hours you’re WAY WAY off. An Air is rated at 18 hours, a 16” MBP at 22. That’s what I’m talking about. They are not matching Apple. They’re making big cuts somewhere. It may be a big improvement in the PC space, and good for them if it is, but don’t say you’re beating Apple if you’re getting 40% of the battery life at the same performance.
- jwells89 2y ago
  Additionally, can it match or best the MBA without a fan? What about when unplugged? The appeal of the M1 MBA even today isn't that it's fast, it's that it's fast enough while also delivering great battery life, not throttling when unplugged, and being dead silent and cool to the touch. It's everything that an everyday laptop should be.
  - anakaine 2y ago
    And it's exactly those things that keep it in my bag instead of something else. Sometimes I'll have both a recent i7 laptop plus the MBA, and 99% of the time.its the MBA I'm reaching for. Open lid, it's on, instantly. Close lid, its asleep without any nonsense phantom power draw (looking at you, dell.) On battery, it runs all day despite being 3 years old. There's no.moving parts, no fan throttling, etc. It doesnt warm up my lap or care if I block a fan port. Its also very, very light. I'll happily use whatever OS. But I adore that bit of hardware. The software is a bonus. I dont see a scenario where Microsoft puts in the same transformation effort that Apple did in pairing the OS to next gen hardware an optimising for power, compatibility, stability, etc.
    - transpute 2y ago
      As a bonus, Asahi Linux on MBA continues to improve steadily.
TrainedMonkey 2y ago
I am excited in continuous progress AMD had been able to sustain for a while now. However I am quite skeptical about claims of x86 beating ARM in perf or efficiency metrics all other things being comparable (die size, tech process, power budget, etc).
- transpute 2y ago
  > skeptical about claims of x86 beating ARM AMD already makes Arm SoCs for Xilinx markets. Nvidia and Mediatek are likely working on Arm laptop SoCs. AMD could follow.
tedunangst 2y ago
All these new competitors that can beat a MacBook Air. I wonder if Apple has plans to make something faster than the air.
- dmitrygr 2y ago
  > I wonder if Apple has plans to make something faster than the air. … like the Mac book pro?
  - crooked-v 2y ago
    That's the joke.
- re-thc 2y ago
  Air Pro Max
- wslh 2y ago
  I wonder when they will deliver. I started using Apple when the M1 was launched, the battery duration and the no moving parts (e.g. fan) in the Air plays in a different league. I continue to have a love "relationship" with my "old" XPSs but I can only use them plugged or buying a new battery every year... BTW the Thunderbolt support on the 2018 XPS continues to be superior to Apple now (e.g. more monitors) but the battery duration is a lifechanger.
- ksec 2y ago
  That is mixing the chip with the Product's target TDP. If AMD could beat M3/M4, it would scale up to a higher TDP range aka "faster than the air" product. Unfortunately AMD is still quite a bit off in terms IPC.
- PlunderBunny 2y ago
  Funny how in the tech press it's always a story that the thing that someone is about to deliver is going to beat something that a competitor has already shipped. An example of what they call 'grading on a curve'.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
There's reports the top of the line's 890M iGPU is on par with my desktop's RX580, which is stellar. Or about equal to a Nvidia 1070, or 15% behind the 1650 super. That's so wild. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/amd-latest-integrated-graphics-perform-like-an-eight-year-old-nvidia-midrange-gpu https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/amd-latest-i... I really really hope Strix Halo can deliver next year, with quad channel memory & a huge GPU. Hopefully it can hit both ends well: hopefully it can be TDP'ed down to be nicely power efficient, hopefully folks can build amazing cooling solutions so we can scale very compact systems up up up to absurd performance when when we have shore power. Oh, Strix Halo is alleged to be MCM (multi chip module). AMD has been tuning & improving their Infinity Fabric MCM after it being a beast, but it's hard to believe they'll take this dragon on mobile. Intel's EIMB seems to be doing much better? Good luck all!
acomjean 2y ago
I use amd notebooks. They’re fast and do last decently on battery life. They tend to drain a bit more than they should sleeping (but they can run lid closed without a power cord). This will be helpful for the portables that use and (steam decks and switches) I’m glad competition is driving everyone forward, It’s good to see. I had and 8th gen intel:nvidia laptop running linux. Battery life was frankly terrible. We’ve seen to have moved beyond that.
npunt 2y ago
Big if true
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
alsetmusic 2y ago
As a Mac user, I'm very interested in the success of the new Qualcomm chips, the new AMD chips, whatever Intel might come up with, and Asahi Linux. Competition benefits us all. I read with interest a Phoronix article today about the progress of getting the new Snapdragon chips on Lenovo laptops. The Linux community appears to be stronger than ever with timely hardware support. I've been in the market for a Linux laptop (casually browsing) for a while. I love the Framework mission. I periodically look at System76's offerings. Maybe Lenovo, hence the interest in Snapdragon. I'm not looking to replace my Macs, I just have a strong affinity for quality software and neat hardware. I recently added a bunch of new NUCs and mini-PCs to my renewed homelab after a multi-year hiatus. I can't imagine a better time to start investing in alternative (to me) hardware again. Bring it, AMD. I want you to slay.
transpute 2y ago
Do silicon vendors give internal teams room for innovation experiments, beyond competition for markets defined by Apple supply chains? Even if there's no innovation on use cases, how about extending some products sideways, e.g. x86+FPGA version of Zynq, https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc/zynq-7000.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc/... > AMD Zynq 7000 SoC family integrates the software programmability of an Arm-based processor with the hardware programmability of an FPGA, enabling key analytics and hardware acceleration while integrating CPU, DSP, ASSP, and mixed signal functionality on a single device. There are small manufacturers [1][2] bending AMD "mobile" SoCs into a plethora of form factors. Now that we have OSS FPGA toolchains (LiteX) and modular PC enclosures (Framework), AMD can offer flexible SoCs for experiments that unlock new markets that can grow in volume, instead of me-too chasing Apple/Qualcomm. [1] https://cwwk.net https://cwwk.net [2] https://aoostar.com https://aoostar.com
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  The fpga market is sad as hell man. There seems to be a gentleman's agreement to not let the field advance. Zynq is from 2011 and has barely been revved. The FPGA market has climbed ever more up-market, building only ever bigger better but at exponentially vaster stratospheric price points. There's a couple mid-tier Lattice parts that have emerged, and Gowin has some real disruption from below just starting, but big playerskke Xilinx/AMD and Altera/Intel (since re-spun off) have made FPGAs ever more unattractive & unaffordable year by year. It seems very unlikely that the FPGA people actually want their parts accessible useful or commoditied. There is a very strong demand for FPGAs that justifies their multi-thousand dollar price points for ever pretty modest sized chips (which can be scaled up to huge house-priced sizes too); nothing else gives you what fpgas do. There's no substitute. It would be too risky for these folks to actually allow reconfigurable computing to be in reach. Some of the SmartNIC offerings that hyperscalers and hyperscalers alone use have nice but kind of specialized FPGAs onboard. Marvell/Nvidias's Bluefield rocks. But again it's a $500+ network card with capabilities most folks won't be able to use well. It's especially damned a proposition because there's no solutions available for use & the necessary AMD Vivado software needed to program the fpga is thousands of dollars and that's the starting cost before you start signing contracts to get access to the dram controllers or to Ethernet phy. Every now and then there's something that seems like a ray of hope in the gloom - for ex AMD's nanotube ebpf -> fpga converter (https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-Nanotube-Compiler https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-Nanotube-Compiler) - but you need that expensive closed tool chain to start and the efforts usually seem quickly abandoned after a code drop or two, no real effort to make it happen. It's hellworld. It's so sad to see an industry so near to the rest of computing and the pax Romana of "PC compatible" interoperability & mutual growth, but so unable to cross the chasm & flourish, just in such a closed off isolated locked-in-its-head niche darkworld. I get it, there's no evidence the volume isn't there so chasing whales is what you have to do. FPGAs are such amazing & interesting systems, but it's been a terrible decade of them getting nowhere. Zynq is an ancient relic reminding us of hope lost. I feel like the best case possibility is that this NPU AI thing maybe breaths some life in; XDNA is supposedly a somewhat special small FPGA, and that maybe possibly over time could help bring FPGAs out of the dark & into the light of day. One could hope.
ochronus 2y ago
Well, define "beat" - For me, it'd be a similar performance AND power efficiency combo. Performance itself means nothing if the laptop needs to be charged every 3 hours. You can buy laptops with powerful CPUs now, but the battery life is usually poor.
zihotki 2y ago
AMD beating apple still won't solve vendor hell of drivers on other laptops. Just like it won't be able to fix sleep mode in Windows.
parsimo2010 2y ago
One thing to keep in mind with AMD claiming that their chip is faster than the M3 is that isn’t the latest generation design from Apple. AMD is making claims that their unreleased chip is faster than something Apple has been selling for a year. And, Apple already has their M4 chip on the street- granted that the M4 in the iPad is probably hard to do a comparison against, but my guess is that an M4 will be in a laptop before too long. I guess what I’m saying is that AMD has better be bringing something faster than the M3, that’s the bare minimum if you’re bragging about a new design.

30 points by belter 2y ago

iamgopal 2y ago

Hopefully they beat it in both performances and power consumption.

tanelpoder 2y ago

... beat Apple at running Windows

tanelpoder 2y ago
Didn't at all expect this to be downvoted, but point taken (pun intended)

MBCook 2y ago

Release how it’s done. “Faster than a MacBook Air” isn’t hard if you’re willing to burn electricity and produce more heat. Really it’s the same for the MBP comparison. Heck Intel can beat a MBP. The could when it was released. You can buy it right now. Just don’t expect similar battery life or a light laptop. Can you beat the performance at the same battery life with a similar sized battery? Can you match the performance and battery life while using a smaller battery? Just saying you’re faster is only part of the story. Without the qualifiers you used it’s not meaningful.

s3p 2y ago
I think the article gives a good read on AMD's ambitions, they are absolutely looking at performance per watt and they are working to make these more efficient. So they didn't just give a cpu a shit ton of power, they actually focused on efficiency. Or at least that's what they said in the article. No battery life stats out yet.
- MBCook 2y ago
  That’s what they said, yeah. But it’s all talk without the numbers. I know they’re focusing on efficiency, and good for them. I hope their claims are accurate or at least close. But I’ve been on this ride way too many times. Some company claiming their thing is better than the other one and then it turns out it just flat out isn’t, or only is with some giant compromise. It’s the combination of speed, battery life, AND heat that have been magical for the Mac compared to the last Intel chips they shipped. I’m just expecting another case of faster but hotter or worse battery life. Pretty much all the quotes are about being faster. Then there’s this: > During the event, AMD would only say that battery life would last “all day,” which the company defines as “eight hours or more. I don’t know how that compares in the PC space but if the best you can do is 8 hours you’re WAY WAY off. An Air is rated at 18 hours, a 16” MBP at 22. That’s what I’m talking about. They are not matching Apple. They’re making big cuts somewhere. It may be a big improvement in the PC space, and good for them if it is, but don’t say you’re beating Apple if you’re getting 40% of the battery life at the same performance.
jwells89 2y ago
Additionally, can it match or best the MBA without a fan? What about when unplugged? The appeal of the M1 MBA even today isn't that it's fast, it's that it's fast enough while also delivering great battery life, not throttling when unplugged, and being dead silent and cool to the touch. It's everything that an everyday laptop should be.
- anakaine 2y ago
  And it's exactly those things that keep it in my bag instead of something else. Sometimes I'll have both a recent i7 laptop plus the MBA, and 99% of the time.its the MBA I'm reaching for. Open lid, it's on, instantly. Close lid, its asleep without any nonsense phantom power draw (looking at you, dell.) On battery, it runs all day despite being 3 years old. There's no.moving parts, no fan throttling, etc. It doesnt warm up my lap or care if I block a fan port. Its also very, very light. I'll happily use whatever OS. But I adore that bit of hardware. The software is a bonus. I dont see a scenario where Microsoft puts in the same transformation effort that Apple did in pairing the OS to next gen hardware an optimising for power, compatibility, stability, etc.
  - transpute 2y ago
    As a bonus, Asahi Linux on MBA continues to improve steadily.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

I am excited in continuous progress AMD had been able to sustain for a while now. However I am quite skeptical about claims of x86 beating ARM in perf or efficiency metrics all other things being comparable (die size, tech process, power budget, etc).

transpute 2y ago
> skeptical about claims of x86 beating ARM AMD already makes Arm SoCs for Xilinx markets. Nvidia and Mediatek are likely working on Arm laptop SoCs. AMD could follow.

tedunangst 2y ago

All these new competitors that can beat a MacBook Air. I wonder if Apple has plans to make something faster than the air.

dmitrygr 2y ago
> I wonder if Apple has plans to make something faster than the air. … like the Mac book pro?
- crooked-v 2y ago
  That's the joke.
re-thc 2y ago
Air Pro Max
wslh 2y ago
I wonder when they will deliver. I started using Apple when the M1 was launched, the battery duration and the no moving parts (e.g. fan) in the Air plays in a different league. I continue to have a love "relationship" with my "old" XPSs but I can only use them plugged or buying a new battery every year... BTW the Thunderbolt support on the 2018 XPS continues to be superior to Apple now (e.g. more monitors) but the battery duration is a lifechanger.
ksec 2y ago
That is mixing the chip with the Product's target TDP. If AMD could beat M3/M4, it would scale up to a higher TDP range aka "faster than the air" product. Unfortunately AMD is still quite a bit off in terms IPC.
PlunderBunny 2y ago
Funny how in the tech press it's always a story that the thing that someone is about to deliver is going to beat something that a competitor has already shipped. An example of what they call 'grading on a curve'.

jauntywundrkind 2y ago

There's reports the top of the line's 890M iGPU is on par with my desktop's RX580, which is stellar. Or about equal to a Nvidia 1070, or 15% behind the 1650 super. That's so wild. https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/amd-latest-integrated-graphics-perform-like-an-eight-year-old-nvidia-midrange-gpu https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/amd-latest-i... I really really hope Strix Halo can deliver next year, with quad channel memory & a huge GPU. Hopefully it can hit both ends well: hopefully it can be TDP'ed down to be nicely power efficient, hopefully folks can build amazing cooling solutions so we can scale very compact systems up up up to absurd performance when when we have shore power. Oh, Strix Halo is alleged to be MCM (multi chip module). AMD has been tuning & improving their Infinity Fabric MCM after it being a beast, but it's hard to believe they'll take this dragon on mobile. Intel's EIMB seems to be doing much better? Good luck all!

acomjean 2y ago

I use amd notebooks. They’re fast and do last decently on battery life. They tend to drain a bit more than they should sleeping (but they can run lid closed without a power cord). This will be helpful for the portables that use and (steam decks and switches) I’m glad competition is driving everyone forward, It’s good to see. I had and 8th gen intel:nvidia laptop running linux. Battery life was frankly terrible. We’ve seen to have moved beyond that.

npunt 2y ago

Big if true

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

alsetmusic 2y ago

As a Mac user, I'm very interested in the success of the new Qualcomm chips, the new AMD chips, whatever Intel might come up with, and Asahi Linux. Competition benefits us all. I read with interest a Phoronix article today about the progress of getting the new Snapdragon chips on Lenovo laptops. The Linux community appears to be stronger than ever with timely hardware support. I've been in the market for a Linux laptop (casually browsing) for a while. I love the Framework mission. I periodically look at System76's offerings. Maybe Lenovo, hence the interest in Snapdragon. I'm not looking to replace my Macs, I just have a strong affinity for quality software and neat hardware. I recently added a bunch of new NUCs and mini-PCs to my renewed homelab after a multi-year hiatus. I can't imagine a better time to start investing in alternative (to me) hardware again. Bring it, AMD. I want you to slay.

transpute 2y ago

Do silicon vendors give internal teams room for innovation experiments, beyond competition for markets defined by Apple supply chains? Even if there's no innovation on use cases, how about extending some products sideways, e.g. x86+FPGA version of Zynq, https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc/zynq-7000.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/adaptive-socs-and-fpgas/soc/... > AMD Zynq 7000 SoC family integrates the software programmability of an Arm-based processor with the hardware programmability of an FPGA, enabling key analytics and hardware acceleration while integrating CPU, DSP, ASSP, and mixed signal functionality on a single device. There are small manufacturers [1][2] bending AMD "mobile" SoCs into a plethora of form factors. Now that we have OSS FPGA toolchains (LiteX) and modular PC enclosures (Framework), AMD can offer flexible SoCs for experiments that unlock new markets that can grow in volume, instead of me-too chasing Apple/Qualcomm. [1] https://cwwk.net https://cwwk.net [2] https://aoostar.com https://aoostar.com

jauntywundrkind 2y ago
The fpga market is sad as hell man. There seems to be a gentleman's agreement to not let the field advance. Zynq is from 2011 and has barely been revved. The FPGA market has climbed ever more up-market, building only ever bigger better but at exponentially vaster stratospheric price points. There's a couple mid-tier Lattice parts that have emerged, and Gowin has some real disruption from below just starting, but big playerskke Xilinx/AMD and Altera/Intel (since re-spun off) have made FPGAs ever more unattractive & unaffordable year by year. It seems very unlikely that the FPGA people actually want their parts accessible useful or commoditied. There is a very strong demand for FPGAs that justifies their multi-thousand dollar price points for ever pretty modest sized chips (which can be scaled up to huge house-priced sizes too); nothing else gives you what fpgas do. There's no substitute. It would be too risky for these folks to actually allow reconfigurable computing to be in reach. Some of the SmartNIC offerings that hyperscalers and hyperscalers alone use have nice but kind of specialized FPGAs onboard. Marvell/Nvidias's Bluefield rocks. But again it's a $500+ network card with capabilities most folks won't be able to use well. It's especially damned a proposition because there's no solutions available for use & the necessary AMD Vivado software needed to program the fpga is thousands of dollars and that's the starting cost before you start signing contracts to get access to the dram controllers or to Ethernet phy. Every now and then there's something that seems like a ray of hope in the gloom - for ex AMD's nanotube ebpf -> fpga converter (https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-Nanotube-Compiler https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-Xilinx-Nanotube-Compiler) - but you need that expensive closed tool chain to start and the efforts usually seem quickly abandoned after a code drop or two, no real effort to make it happen. It's hellworld. It's so sad to see an industry so near to the rest of computing and the pax Romana of "PC compatible" interoperability & mutual growth, but so unable to cross the chasm & flourish, just in such a closed off isolated locked-in-its-head niche darkworld. I get it, there's no evidence the volume isn't there so chasing whales is what you have to do. FPGAs are such amazing & interesting systems, but it's been a terrible decade of them getting nowhere. Zynq is an ancient relic reminding us of hope lost. I feel like the best case possibility is that this NPU AI thing maybe breaths some life in; XDNA is supposedly a somewhat special small FPGA, and that maybe possibly over time could help bring FPGAs out of the dark & into the light of day. One could hope.

ochronus 2y ago

Well, define "beat" - For me, it'd be a similar performance AND power efficiency combo. Performance itself means nothing if the laptop needs to be charged every 3 hours. You can buy laptops with powerful CPUs now, but the battery life is usually poor.

zihotki 2y ago

AMD beating apple still won't solve vendor hell of drivers on other laptops. Just like it won't be able to fix sleep mode in Windows.

parsimo2010 2y ago

One thing to keep in mind with AMD claiming that their chip is faster than the M3 is that isn’t the latest generation design from Apple. AMD is making claims that their unreleased chip is faster than something Apple has been selling for a year. And, Apple already has their M4 chip on the street- granted that the M4 in the iPad is probably hard to do a comparison against, but my guess is that an M4 will be in a laptop before too long. I guess what I’m saying is that AMD has better be bringing something faster than the M3, that’s the bare minimum if you’re bragging about a new design.