Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

Desktop 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-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-... 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).

Comparing power draw on full load on 2 different CPUs is not apple to apple comparison unless they are doing same thing. In benchmarks you have linked Ryzen CPUs are also more powerful.

For example - if I am compiling Linux Kernel and Ryzen takes more power but compilation is faster then my laptop can hit lower power state faster after it is done compiling. And 1500x for example is way faster than all CPUs in linked benchmark.

I do agree about Idle power draw though, but it seems very small difference.

I think in the end, we will have to wait for official benchmarks from reviewers before concluding anything. We can't draw our conclusions from AMD's marketing material.

Ryzen 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.

5% 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.

AMD's game is never about "winning" - that is not even considered as a possibility. Surviving and getting 10-20% marketshare is a home run for them.

The point is, this comparison is between a 4 core CPU (Ryzen) vs 2/4 cores CPUs (i3 and i5). Vs i5 the difference is less than 1%, vs i3 the difference is 5%.

> AMD GPUs have been at a disadvantage compared to NVIDIA's in the power management area for a while

Correct. And here's why: https://www.realworldtech.com/tile-based-rasterization-nvidi...

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