Comment by pmjordan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmjordan | Hacker News Reader

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How long from release does it usually take to start seeing released chips in new laptops?

I seem to remember reading about a January launch (i.e. CES as you say) with shipping laptops expected towards the end of Q1 2020.

Vega vs Navi: IS there any solid information on which of the two it will use?

I don't think there's any solid information; watchers seemed to interpret recently added device IDs in Windows and Linux drivers as belonging to Vega-based APUs with new video engines backported from Navi. Whether that's Renoir or another APU line remains to be seen. There's also rumours that the next batch of APUs might just be a Zen+ die shrink to 7nm rather than a full upgrade to Zen 2.

Given that mobile CPUs and SFF business desktop systems with integrated graphics are where the volume markets are these days, it seems a little odd that AMD lags their APUs behind the standalone desktop and server CPUs so much. The next desktop APUs are only expected mid 2020. I can only assume they are still battling idle power draw issues (especially if Zen 2's PCIe 4.0 is hard to swap out for more the power efficient PCIe 3.0) or that the integration of CPU and GPU via Infinity Fabric is difficult to pull off in practice.

Thanks for the clarifications. You seem to be much more familiar with hardware than I am. I've been thinking about getting a new laptop for a while since I built my desktop back in 2012 and my current laptop is a bulky 17" Toshiba that's even older. The hardware landscape seems to have changed so much since I was last in the market for a computer or parts. If you were in the market for a new mobile machine, would you be going Intel or AMD?

I'm currently eyeing Dell's Precision workstations due to their extensibility, but the XPS 13 Developer Edition also looks quite nice and more portable. And they both offer Ubuntu, which is nice. I think at this point almost anything I get will be better than what I already have.

If you were in the market for a new mobile machine, would you be going Intel or AMD?

I'd be basing my decision primarily around which models fulfil my needs - be that in terms of portability, battery life, display quality, performance (CPU and GPU), ergonomics, etc. Right now, there is much less choice of AMD-based laptops, and they currently tend to be on the low end of the scale in terms of everything but performance. After years of integrating and tuning systems with only Intel CPUs, the laptop makers have yet to get the hang of making high-quality AMD-based laptops. I suspect this will change over time (Microsoft's aforementioned Surface Laptop 3 is a good sign in this regard).

If you're keen to support the underdog and can wait a few months, you can certainly wait for Renoir to be launched. I suspect AMD are itching to get a piece of that giant laptop revenue pie, so even if it ends up being Zen+ with Vega, AMD might have spent that time instead fine tuning idle power draw and thermals. Performance of their APUs is already decent, so such fine-tuning might be enough to get some high quality AMD-based thin & light laptops to market.

If you need a powerful (discrete) GPU and would prefer to go with AMD over NVIDIA for that, the upcoming Navi-based Radeon RX 5500M is one to watch, be it paired with an Intel or AMD CPU.

Disclosure: I skew towards AMD for both GPUs (in preference to nVidia) and CPUs (in preference to Intel) when it makes sense. I've got a Ryzen-based desktop system, but there are more Intel-CPU-based systems in my office, to a large extent because I do Mac-based development professionally - I think I bought my last AMD-based laptop in 2005.

Those are all great point, regarding portability, battery life, etc. It's easy to get caught up in the technical specs on paper and ignore the tangible differences. The Radeon RX 5500M is definitely on my watch list in addition to the next AMD mobile CPU lineup. I'm thinking, at the very least, it will be best to wait till Q1 2020 just to see what kind of improvements AMD have achieved, and if there will (hopefully) be more AMD options in the laptop market. I agree that the Surface Laptop 3 is a good sign for the future.

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