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AMD's Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile
- sm_1024 2y agoIMO, the most interesting thing about this line is the battery life---within an hour of MBP3 and within 2 hours of Asus's Qualcomm. Making it comparable to ARM architectures. Which is a little surprising because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86. [1] https://youtu.be/Z8WKR0VHfJw?si=A7zbFY2lsDa8iVQN&t=277 https://youtu.be/Z8WKR0VHfJw?si=A7zbFY2lsDa8iVQN&t=277
- jiggawatts 2y ago> because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86. Because most ARM processors were designed for mobile phones and optimised to death for power efficiency. The total power usage of the front end decoders is a single digit percentage of the total power draw. Even if ARM magically needed 0 watts for this, it couldn’t save more power than that. The rest of the processor design elements are essentially identical.
- halJordan 2y agoYeah if you make a worse core and then downclock it then you will increase power efficiency. AMD thankfully only downclocks the 5c, but Intel is shipping ivy lake equivalents in their flagship products just to get power efficiency up.
- arnaudsm 2y agoARM got a lot of hype since the release of the M1, but most users only compared it to the terrible Intel MBPs. Ryzen mobile has been consistently close to Apple silicon perf/watt for 5 years. But got little press coverage. Hype can be really decorrelated from real world performance.
- sm_1024 2y agoI have heard that part of the reason for little coverage of ryzen mobile CPUs is their limited availability as AMD was focussing on using the fab capacity for server chips.
- jsheard 2y agoAny efficiency comparison involving Apples chips also has to factor in that Tim Cook keeps showing up at TSMCs door with a freight container full of cash to buy out exclusive access to their bleeding edge silicon processes. ARM may be a factor but don't underestimate the power of having more money than God. Case in point, Strix Point is built on TSMC 4nm while Apple is already using TSMCs second generation 3nm process.
- acdha 2y agoProcess helps but have you seen benchmarks showing equivalent performance between the same process node? I think it’s less that ARM is amazing than the Apple Silicon team being very good and paired with aggressive optimization throughout the stack but everything I’ve seen suggests they are simply building better chips at their target levels (not server, high power, etc.).
- cubefox 2y ago> Our benchmark database shows the Dimensity 9300 scores 2,207 and 7,408 in Geekbench 6.2's single and multi-core tests. A 30% performance improvement implies the Dimensity 9400 would score around 2,869 and and 9,630. Its single-core performance is close to that of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 4 (2,884/8,840) and it understandably takes the lead in multi-core. Both are within spitting distance from the Apple A17 Pro, which scores 2,915 and 7,222 points in the benchmark. Then again, all three chips are said to be manufactured on TSMC's N3 class node, effectively leveling the playing field. https://www.notebookcheck.net/MediaTek-Dimensity-9400-rumoured-to-trade-blows-with-Apple-A17-Pro-thanks-to-remarkable-performance-uplift.873019.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/MediaTek-Dimensity-9400-rumour...
- sroussey 2y agoI guess getting close to the same single thread score is nice. Unfortunately, since only Apple is shipping it is hard to compare if the others burn the battery to get there. I suspect the others two, like Apple with the A18 shipping next month, will be using the second gen N3. Apple is expected to be around 3500 on that node. Needless to say, what will be very interesting is to see the perf/watt of all three on the same node and shipping in actual products where the benchmarks can be put to more useful tests.
- carstenhag 2y agoBut how is this the case? I never saw a single article mentioning that a non-Mac laptop was better. (Random article saying M3 pro is better than a Dell laptop https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m3-and-m3-max-battery-life-tested-heres-how-long-they-last https://www.tomsguide.com/news/macbook-pro-m3-and-m3-max-bat... )
- moonfern 2y agoYou're right, but... The idea comes from the desktop world. AMD's zen 4 desktop cpu's especially the gaming variants like the Ryzen 7 7800X3D almost matches the performance per watt of Apple's M3. Their laptop cpu's as some companies did release same model different cpu were less efficient than intel. But the Asus ProArt P16 (used in the article) did manage an extreme endurance score in the video test called Big Buck Bunny H.264 1080p which runs at 150 cd/m² with 21 hours. With it's higher resolution, oled and 10% less battery capacity that's better 40 minutes better than the macbook pro 16 m3 max. In the wifi test also run at 150 cd/m² the m3 run for 16 hours, the asus 8. ( https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ProArt-P16-laptop-review-AMD-Zen-5-meets-RTX-4070-laptop-and-4K-OLED.871739.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ProArt-P16-laptop-review-... ) For me noise matters, that Asus has a whisper mode which produces 42db as much as an M3 max under full load. Please be aware that if you're susceptible of PWM, that ASUS laptop has issues.
- Filligree 2y agoRyzen mobile is consistently close, yeah. But with the sole exception of the Steam deck, I've yet to see a Ryzen mobile-bearing laptop, Windows included, which is close to the overall performance of the Macbook.
- talldayo 2y ago> But with the sole exception of the Steam deck Uuh wut? The Steam Deck is like 3-generation-old hardware in mobile Ryzen terms. In a lot of ways it's similar to a pared-back 4800u with fewer (and older) cores, and a slightly bumped up GPU. To me it's kinda the opposite. Excluding the Steam Deck, I think most of AMD's Ultrabook APUs have been very close to the products Apple's made on the equivalent nodes. Even on 7nm the 4800u put up a competitive fight against M1, and the gap has gotten thinner with each passing year. According to the OpenCL benchmarks, the Radeon 680m on 6nm scores higher than the M1 on 5nm: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks Even back when Ryzen Mobile only shipped with Vega, it was pretty clear that Apple and AMD were a pretty close match in onboard GPU power.
- amlib 2y agoSteam Deck might be behind in terms of hardware but in terms of software it's way beyond your typical x86 linux system power efficiency, and dare I say it's doing better than windows machines with the typical shoddy bioses and drivers, specially when you consider all the extraneous services constantly sapping varying amounts of cpu time. All that contributes to make the SD punch well above its weight.
- sudosysgen 2y agoMy Alienware M15 Ryzen edition gets 7-8W power consumption by just running "sudo powertop --autotune". Basically all of the power efficiency stuff in the Steam Deck apply to other Ryzen systems and are in the mainline kernel.
- makeitdouble 2y ago"overall performance" does a lot of work here. On sheer benchmarks it's really comparable, with AMD being slightly better depending on what you look at. e.g. the M1 vs the 5700U (a similar class widely available mobile CPU): https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD%20Ryzen%207%205700U https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD%20Ryzen%207%205... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+3200+MHz https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+320... They're not profiled the same, and don't belong in the same ecosystem though, which makes a lot more difference than the CPU themselves. In particular the AMD doesn't get a dedicated compiler optimizing every applications of the system to its strength and weaknesses (the other side of it being the compatibility with the two vastest ecosystem we have now)
- rojroy 2y ago[flagged]
- sandywaffles 2y agoI think that's because all the press talks about actual battery life per laptop and the Apple Silicone laptops ship with literally double the size battery of any AMD based laptop without a discrete GPU. So while the efficiency may be close, actually perceived battery life of the Mac will he more than double when you also consider the priority Apple puts into their power control combined with a larger overall battery.
- HenryCase 2y ago[dead]
- wtallis 2y agoThe CPU core's instruction set has no influence on how well the chip as a whole manages power when not executing instructions.
- sm_1024 2y agoThat is fair, I was taught that decoders for x86 are less efficient and more power hungry than RISC ISAs because of their variable length instructions. I remember being told (and it might be wrong) that ARM can decode multiple instructions in parallel because the CPU knows where the next instruction starts, but for x86, you'd have to decode the instructions in order.
- pohuing 2y agoThat seems to not matter much nowadays. There's another great(according to my untrained eye) writeup of the lack of importance on chips and cheese. https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...
- dzaima 2y agoThe various mentioned power consumption amounts are 4-10% per-core, or 0.5-6% of package (with the caveat of running with micro-op cache off) for Zen 2, and 3-10% for Haswell. That's not massive, but is still far from what I'd consider insignificant; it could give leeway for an extra core or some improved ALUs; or, even, depending on the benchmark, is the difference between Zen 4 and Zen 5 (making the false assumption of a linear relation between power and performance, at least), which'd essentially be a "free" generational improvement. Of course the reality is gonna be more modest than that, but it's not nothing.
- Panzer04 2y agoYou missed the part where they mention ARM ends up implementing the same thing to go fast. The point is processors are either slow and efficient, or fast and inefficient. It's just a tradeoff along the curve.
- dagmx 2y agoBattery tests are important, but so is how it fairs on battery (what is the performance drop off to maintain that), what’s its performance is ant its peak and how it long before it throttles when pushed. The M series processors have succeeded in all four: battery life, performance parity between battery and plugged in, high performance and performance sustainability. So far, very few benchmarks have been comparing the latter three as part of the full package assessment.
- GrumpyYoungMan 2y agoThe display, RAM, and other peripherals are consuming power too. Short of running continuous high CPU loads, which most people don't do on laptops, changes in CPU efficiency have less apparent effect on battery life because it's only a fraction of overall power draw.
- Panzer04 2y ago>5hr Battery life in laptops is mostly a function of how well idle is managed, i think. The less work you can do while running the users core program, the better. I'm not sure how much impact CPU efficiency really has in that case. If you are running a remotely demanding program (say, a game) , your battery life will be bad no matter what (ie. <4hrs) unless you choose a very low TDP that performs badly always. A laptop at idle should be able to manage ~5w power consumption sumtpion regardless of AMD/intel/Apple processor, but it's largely on the OS to achieve that.
- 999900000999 2y agoI have a 365 AMD laptop. The battery is great if your doing very light stuff, Call of Duty takes it's battery down to 3 hours. Macs don't really support higher end games, so I can't directly compare to my M1 Air.
- sedatk 2y agoHow does “great” translate to hours?
- 999900000999 2y agoThis is really tricky. The OEMs will use ever trick possible and do something like open GMAIL to claim 10 hours, but given my typical use I average 5 to 6. I make music using a software called Maschine. It's a massive step up over my old( still working just very heavy) Lenovo Legion 2020, which would last about 2 hours given the same usage. This is all subjective at the end of the day. If none of your applications actually work since your on ARM Windows of course you'll have higher battery life.
- cubefox 2y agoUnlike AMD and Qualcomm, Apple uses an expensive TSMC 3nm process, so you would expect better battery life from the "MBP3". I assume they used the process improvements to increase performance instead.
- hajile 2y agoPerf per watt is higher for M1 on N5 vs Zen5 on N4P, so the problems go deeper than just process. X Elite also beats AMD/Intel in perf/watt while being on the same N4P node as HX370. https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-analysis-Ryzen-AI-9-HX-370-versus-Intel-Core-Ultra-Apple-M3-and-Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X-Elite.868641.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-anal...
- cubefox 2y agoPerformance per watt also depends on clock speed. Other things equal, higher clock speed means worse performance per watt.
- double0jimb0 2y agoI didn’t watch this link, but my Zenbook S 16 only gets remotely close to my M2 MBA battery life if the zenbook is in whatever is Windows 11 ‘efficiency’ mode, and then it benchmarks at 50% of the M2. I don’t think the two are remotely comparable in perf/watt.
- acchow 2y ago> within an hour of MBP3 Not a good way to measure. The Zenbook S16 has a larger 78Wh battery vs the MacBook Pro’s 69.6Wh. So that’s 11% less battery life despite 12% more battery capacity.
- moffkalast 2y ago[flagged]
- halJordan 2y ago[flagged]
- moffkalast 2y agoWhoever makes something cheap with lots of memory bandwidth and parallel compute gets my vote :) They somehow managed to put 16GB of HBM2 with a 4096 bit bus on the Radeon VII for $700, it's not like it's impossible. Or at least enough memory channels to rival Apples's M series in some meaningful way. Besides, what do you expect will the average person be able to run on these Coral tier NPUs? They won't be running Yolov9 all day and all these things can do in practice is accelerate really tiny convnets.
- Dylan16807 2y agoWhat's insane? The claim that recall is spyware isn't that bad of an exaggeration, and the claim that the NPU is hype is a reasonable opinion to have. If that 7% of the die goes unused it's not a huge waste but it's not very good either. If you're not using it enough to affect your battery then you might not get much benefit, because the GPU can do the same tasks about half as fast, it's just less efficient (and it would be a lot more than half if the NPU die space was converted into GPU compute blocks). And for serious tasks it's not very powerful. There's a range where it's good, but not as big a range as people might expect.
- imtringued 2y agoIf my speculation about block FP16 is correct, it might be possible to hit 24 to 48 teraflops on the NPU. This means it would be entirely memory bottlenecked even in prompt processing. There would basically be no application where you would run into the NPU being a limitation. What I fear though is that the NPU will be gimped with a single infinity fabric port, which would limit it to a relatively weak 62GB/s out of 120GB/s. For crazy people who want to use 128k token context, that might turn out to make it or break it, in the end.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nullc 2y agoSpeaking of Zen 5, are there any rumors on when 128 core turin-x will ship?
- apatheticonion 2y agoAre there any mini PCs with Zen 5?
- wmf 2y agoYou could probably put a 9700X in a MS-A1. Besides that it will take a few months.
- hajile 2y agoI think there's a lot of hope for a Strix Halo mini-PC. We currently have 7840HS+6650M with two massive heatsinks just barely coming in at what you would consider a large mini-PC rather than a SFFPC. Just one chip cuts the heatsink demand in half. The cores should be faster and it moves from 28CU up to 40CU and from RDNA2 to RDNA3.5. As long as the cross-core-complex latency isn't as bad as the HX370, I think it could be a real winner for a long time as it's basically an upgraded PS5 that runs Linux/Windows.
- moffkalast 2y agoHell I'd settle for a Z1 SBC or even mini PC. They can't seem to keep up with demand for these new chips to put them into any sort of products that don't have complete mass appeal. It's impossible to find one that's not in a handheld gaming console. I doubt they'll even make enough of the Halo to cover laptops.
- wmf 2y agoZ1 is basically the same as 8840U which you can find.
- sliken 2y ago"AMD Strix Point expected to debut in October, claims AOOSTAR" was a new headline I've seen. Seems about right that laptops (higher margin parts) land a few months before the SFFs. I'm excited about the strix halo that has more cores, double the GPU, and double the memory badwidth (to keep the GPU fed).
- 2y ago
- CyberDildonics 2y agoWhat does "strix point" mean?
- icegreentea2 2y agoIt's AMD's code/product name for their mobile CPUs with the Zen5 microarchitecture. The last AMD laptop code name was "Hawk Point" - strix is a mythological bird. Who knows if AMD will keep with this naming scheme.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- jml7c5 2y agoI sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI. People want the option to make their laptop silent or nearly silent. And when users do need the power, they generally prefer a slightly slower laptop at a reasonable volume rather than the roar of a jet engine. Laptop manufacturers want their devices to score high on benchmarks. The best way to do that is to add a fan that can become very loud. The incentives are not aligned. All laptops should be designed to operate passively 100% of the time, if the owner so chooses. I doubt manufacturers will go that route unless Microsoft nudges them towards it. It would have downstream effects on how review sites benchmark laptops (i.e., at various power draws/noise levels producing a curve rather than a single number), which would have downstream effects on what CPU designers optimize for. It'd be great for consumers.
- latchkey 2y agoI don't know anything about Windows, but at least on Mac, I've been using TGPro for years [0]. I'd assume there is something similar in the Windows world. In normal conditions my M1 mac can control its fans just fine, but when I travel to hot places like Vietnam... I just keep the fans on more often and my machine doesn't get nearly as hot. I end up having to open it up after a few months and clean out the fans, but that's fine. [0] https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/tgpro/ https://www.tunabellysoftware.com/tgpro/
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoStop demanding paper thin laptops. My work Dell rarely turns on its fan unless an AV scan is in progress and even then it's rather tolerable. It isn't a fashionable thickness so has plenty of internal volume for heat distribution.
- rafaelmn 2y agoMacBook Air is thin and fanless, so it can be done.
- 2y ago
- aurareturn 2y agoOne of these has to be true (or both true): 1. ARM is inherently more efficient than x86 CPUs in most tasks 2. Nuvia and Apple are better CPU designers than AMD and Intel Here are results from Notebookcheck: Cinebench R24 ST perf/watt * M3: 12.7 points/watt * X Elite: 9.3 points/watt * AMD HX 370: 3.74 points/watt * AMD 8845HS: 3.1 points/watt * Intel 155H: 3.1 points/watt In ST, Apple is 3.4x more efficient than Zen5. X Elite is 2.4x more efficient than Zen5. Cinebench R24 MT perf/watt * M3: 28.3 points/watt * X Elite: 22.6 points/watt * AMD HX 370: 19.7 points/watt * AMD 8845HS: 14.8 points/watt * Intel 155H: 14.5 points/watt In MT, Apple is 1.9x more efficient than Zen4 and 1.4x more efficient than HX 370. I expect M3 Pro/Max to increase the gap because generally, more cores means more efficiency for Cinebench MT. X Elite is also more efficient but the gap is closer. However, we should note that in a laptop, ST matters more for efficiency because of the burst behavior of usage. It's easier to gain in MT efficiency as long as you have many cores and run them at lower wattage. In this case, AMD's Zen5 12 core setup and 24 threads works well in Cinebench. Cinebench loves more threads. One thing that is intriguing is that X Elite does not have little cores which hurts its MT efficiency. It's likely a remnant of Nuvia designing a server CPU, which does not need big.Little but Qualcomm used it in a laptop SoC first. Sources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN2tC8DfJnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN2tC8DfJnc https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-analysis-Ryzen-AI-9-HX-370-versus-Intel-Core-Ultra-Apple-M3-and-Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X-Elite.868641.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-anal...
- trynumber9 2y agoThe Snapdragon X Elite is on the same node and when actually doing a lot of work (i.e. cores loaded) it is close enough to HX 370 while delivering similar throughput. Why wouldn't the inherent inefficiency of x64 be as noticeable in MT when all the inefficient cores are working? Because it is running at lower clocks? Then what allows it to match the SDXE in throughput? Does that need to lower its clock even more? I'm not seeing what makes it inherent.
- rafaelmn 2y agoFrom you link - Intel is topping the performance charts (alongside AMD in SC) - they probably tune power usage agressively to achieve these results. I would guess it's more to do with coming from desktop CPU design to mobile vs. phones to laptops.
- imtringued 2y ago>Read bandwidth from a single cluster caps out at just under 62 GB/s. The memory controller has a bit more bandwidth on tap, but you’ll need to load cores from both clusters to get it. Except for DRR5-7500 it isn't just "a bit more" it is actually double at 120GB/s. This might pose a challenge for LLM inference, which absolutely needs the full 120GB/s.
- mshockwave 2y agoSwitching from individual schedulers to unified one for integer execution makes sense to me, but I still don’t quite understand why FP execution units do the opposite, could somebody explain why?
- flostk 2y agoIn this interview Mike Clark from AMD explains that a little, search for "third scheduler": https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/07/15/a-video-interview-with-mike-clark-chief-architect-of-zen-at-amd/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/07/15/a-video-interview-with... The way I understand it, it's a combination of a unified scheduler for floating point being difficult to implement because many FP instructions need multiple cycles, and FP code being more regular in practice, so you don't need the scheduler to be as powerful.
- rojroy 2y ago[flagged]
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y agoDo all new processors include NPUs now? What if I don't need AI, should I still pay for the unneeded transistors? If only things could be made modular/reconfigurable.