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First AMD Ryzen Mobile Laptop Tested Shows Strong Zen-Vega Performance (hothardware.com) 85

MojoKid writes: AMD Ryzen Mobile processors are arriving now in retail laptops from the likes of HP, Lenovo and Acer. With the first CPUs to hit the market, AMD took quad-core Ryzen and coupled it with 8 or 10-core Vega GPUs on a single piece of silicon in an effort to deliver a combination of strong Ryzen CPU performance along with significantly better integrated graphics performance over Intel's current 8th Gen Kaby Lake laptop chips. AMD Ryzen 7 2700U and Ryzen 5 2500U chips have 4MB of shared L3 cache each, but differ with respect to top-end CPU boost clock speeds, number of integrated Radeon Vega Compute Units (CUs), and the GPU's top-end clocks. Ryzen 7 2700U is more powerful with 10 Radeon Vega CUs, while Ryzen 5 2500U sports 8. Ryzen 7 2700U also boosts to 3.8GHz, while Ryzen 5 2500U tops out at 3.6GHz. In the benchmarks, Ryzen Mobile looks strong, competing well with Intel quad-core 8th Gen laptop CPUs, while offering north of 60 percent better performance in graphics and gaming. Battery life is still a question mark, however, as some of the very first models to hit the market from HP have inefficient displays and hard drives instead of SSDs. As more premium configurations hit the market in the next few weeks, hopefully we'll get a better picture of Ryzen Mobile battery life in more optimized laptop builds.
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First AMD Ryzen Mobile Laptop Tested Shows Strong Zen-Vega Performance

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Can someone please translate this shit into English?

    • by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @03:27AM (#55619041) Journal

      Can someone please translate this shit into English?

      Yes. The new AMD chip will have great performance, but only if you're on the planets Xen or Vega.

      If you're on Earth, it's real-world performance is sort of meh, but it gives off so much heat you can use it as a high-tech George Foreman grill.

      You can hear my entire review of the new AMD chips, including the flagship Ryzen Pantyripper, but you have to go subscribe to my YouTube channel and enter the promotion code, "SatanicHexen666Manbaby".

      You will also like my viral videos, Why Soya Can Give You Bitch Tits, Why Women Don't Deserve Me, and, Why Roy Moore Is Basically Jesus In A Cowboy Hat.

      Be sure to stop at my Patreon page and give me money, because I tell you what the Lamestream Media won't.

      • by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @06:35AM (#55619387) Homepage

        Damn, where'd that Soy stuff come from? Pure projection, out of nowhere. I guess it really is true what they say about living rent-free in your head.

        By the way, to anyone else reading this, eating too much soy really does decrease your testosterone levels and does make you less of a man. Sad but true, hence the new "soy boy" label of weak men.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Hal_Porter ( 817932 )

        Don't worry he got his channel pulled

        https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]

        If you look at his latest video he said 'PopeRatzo's brilliant satire of me on Slashdot, various liberal elitists calling me deplorable and YouTube pulling my channel have caused me to rethink. I will now devote my life to promoting Social Justice, making videos defending Bill Clinton, Robert Menendez, Harvey Weinstein and Al Franken from unproven allegations. I've decided to become vegan come out and live as a gay man, like Kevin Spacey

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by PopeRatzo ( 965947 )

          Don't worry he got his channel pulled

          No, his channel is still there.

          https://www.youtube.com/user/S... [youtube.com]

          It was just another right-wing YouTube freak pretending to be persecuted by the SJWs, like the guy who sprayed himself in the face with Axe body spray, pretending it was Antifa attacking him with bear spray and then laid down on the ground pouring milk on his face and crying like a wee bitch.

          https://www.dailydot.com/uncli... [dailydot.com]

          • Your original post parodying him was actually pretty funny.

            This is less good

            It was just another right-wing YouTube freak pretending to be persecuted by the SJWs, like the guy who sprayed himself in the face with Axe body spray, pretending it was Antifa attacking him with bear spray and then laid down on the ground pouring milk on his face and crying like a wee bitch.

            So because some dude lied about being maced, that means that AntiFa violence is not a problem? I've seen loads of videos of AntiFa macing people, or hitting them over the head with a bike lock. Not all of them are fake.

            And look at Styx. He started off, as far as I know, an apolitical gamer. GamerGate politicised him, but GamerGate was just a bunch of people who play video games getting in a fight with tech journalists. I don't have

            • Pushing people like Styx out of polite society is pushing them to the support the far right

              First, he was never pushed out of polite society. He made up a ban on YouTube to drive more views to his videos. How is lying about having your YouTube channel banned any different from pretending you got maced by ANTIFA?

              Second, I can't believe you accept the "SJWs turned me into a nazi" argument at face value.

              There's AntiFa commies on the left and Alt Right fascists on the right.

              The main difference is that alt-ri

  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @03:29AM (#55619047)

    The best way to predict future behavior is to look at past behavior. In the past when Intel was unable to compete with AMD they used anti-competitive practices to ensure their continued dominance. Such practices made them hundreds of billions of dollars and when they were exposed it cost them a few billion dollars to compensate AMD as they laughed their way to the bank. I'm certain that Intel is going to great lengths to ensure that power efficient AMD chips are only in power hungry systems with poor battery life to ensure they are less attractive. In the past they literally paid Dell billions of dollars to not sell systems with AMD chips so I'm sure they are going a similar route and paying to ensure no AMD laptops have better battery life than Intel laptops. I'm certain they pay all the big sellers to ensure their inferior product appears superior.

    Intel has one game: don't compete, cheat.

    • by swb ( 14022 )

      Why don't they make a "reference" AMD laptop that shows how well it can do instead of relying on lame OEMs to make crippled versions?

      Back in the day, I used to use Intel motherboards because they were well documented and worked more reliably than OEM motherboards with the same chipset. Google has made their own Android phone to avoid vendor crapware. Hell, even Microsoft feels compelled to make laptops.

      And who still puts spinning rust in laptops, anyway? I can't imagine a better way to cripple laptop pe

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Why don't they make a "reference" AMD laptop that shows how well it can do instead of relying on lame OEMs to make crippled versions?

        Because sourcing everything, making a good design, getting a good ODM to do it, get it sold in retail and e-tail is a lot of time and effort and takes experience AMD doesn't currently have? I mean it would be nice, but they'd need the resources to invest and even with their great Q3 they still haven't broken even for the year (-$11m). If they would have to end up half-assing it with putting an AMD sticker on some premium components in a near-stock design it's better not to do it at all.

  • by linuxguy ( 98493 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @03:32AM (#55619055) Homepage

    I cannot speak for others, but for me, on a laptop, power utilization is extremely important. If AMD's product is not too power hungry compared to current Intel offerings, then they have a chance. Historically this is an area where they have not been competitive. But maybe things have changed and they have upped their game.

    We would all benefit from good competition in the CPU and chipset market. And I want to support AMD by buying their products. However, they have to put out good, competitive products for me to buy.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      You love having convenient excuses to fall back on when AMD catches up and makes your 2x cost Intel ME backdoored pile of shit, doncha? Too bad that isn't one anymore, the power consumption is comparable because Intel requires discrete VGA to come close to what AMD is doing on-die. Enjoy your backdoor though. You paid for it.

    • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @04:43AM (#55619199)

      We would all benefit from good competition in the CPU and chipset market. And I want to support AMD by buying their products. However, they have to put out good, competitive products for me to buy.

      AMD is putting out a good competitive product. The problem here is that you are NOT the buyer of their product because this laptop is an HP product, not an AMD product. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if it's uncovered that Intel has begun paying off every OEM to ensure no laptops with AMD chips have a longer battery life than their Intel counterpart. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if HP already had the AMD laptop fully designed and they swapped out their regular offerings for these power inefficient components to meet their contractual obligations with Intel.

      When Intel cannot compete they simply cheat. They have been doing it for over 30 years so why would they change now?

    • The video probably wasn't being hardware decoded, because of a driver / VLC issue with Raven ridge.
      If the reviewer had done some more work, like testing power consumption on other tasks like web browsing, or gaming he would have realised this.

    • I don't generally buy laptops because they're too anemic unless you spend way too much money. And most places I use a laptop a power plug is only a few feet away so I will happily trade lower battery life for more power per dollar.

      On the desktop side I can absolutely attest that the Ryzen desktop processors' power/price point is very competitive, as I am typing this very comment from a new build Ryzen machine I put together to replace my old 2500K machine and so far I am very pleased with what I see.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Why are low end laptops even shipping with hard drives? It ought to be a crime. A 128 GB SSD costs the same as a 1 TB HDD that ships with these. The increase in performance an SSD gives you over a HDD makes it a lot better value to have an SSD than an HDD. A computer with a HDD instead of an SSD is a ball of frustration.

    • Re:hard drives (Score:4, Informative)

      by guruevi ( 827432 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @10:03AM (#55619893)

      Nobody wants a 128GB SSD anymore though, I don't think you could even fit Windows 10 on 128GB anymore, last I tried you need at least 40G for a blank Windows 7 install. You need at least 256 if not 512GB SSD in a low-end laptop or people will have problems. A 1TB HDD costs $30 in bulk, a 128GB SSD still costs ~$10-20 more than that.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Why not two harddrives? SSD for boot and HDD for storage. Thatâ(TM)s the poor mans answer

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Windows 10 Pro (build 1703) with office 2016 takes up 16.4 GB of space. Your space requirements may vary +/- 0.6GB for drivers changes etc but if you think Win 10 cant fit on a 128GB SSD when most WinBooks ship with win10 and a 32GB SSD then you have severe maths problems....

        • by guruevi ( 827432 )

          Windows 7 started out with ~10GB requirements as well. Last I tried, once I installed all the updates, service packs and drivers the 32GB VHD I had was full and I had only the 'basics' (not even Office) installed.

          According to Microsoft, for Windows 7, downloading SP1 from the Microsoft website x64-based (64-bit): 7400 MB.

          Windows 10 64-bit takes up 20GB as a base install. If you install a Pro/Enterprise with a localization pack and don't uninstall the "standard bloatware" you're looking at ~60GB. Obviously y

          • Windows 10 64-bit takes up 20GB as a base install. If you install a Pro/Enterprise with a localization pack and don't uninstall the "standard bloatware" you're looking at ~60GB.

            You're looking at nothing of the sort. I have Windows 10 pro with all the standard bloatware, plus a bit extra, and Ubuntu running on it in the LSW, and it's sitting at a cool 18GB. Plus 4GB for Office.

            I don't know why you count hybernation files, they aren't needed for a system, even for a laptop. Paging files, who even uses those. RAM is cheap, load it up. But more importantly you're talking about Windows 7 growing in bloat as if this is an on-going problem. That has well and truly changed since Windows 1

      • I run windows 10 on an 8" laptop with 1gb of ram and 16 gb of storage.....
      • Why the f*ck not? I'm running Win10 (only used for gaming) on a _64GB_ mSATA SSD.
      • > I don't think you could even fit Windows 10 on 128GB anymore

        You can, but you probably shouldn't unless you have great discipline on installing most everything afterward elsewhere or keeping things trimmed down. I just installed W10 on my new build Ryzen on a 256GB SSD and from what I see the Windows install and some basic programs - Office, Chrome, and a few others I wanted to run from the SSD - consume a collective 46GB right now. So a 128 GB SSD is doable but over time will get eaten a lot sooner

      • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        You can squeeze Windows 10 onto a 16 GB SSD, although it will basically require "wipe and start over" with each major update because there won't be enough room to download, unpack, and patch. It's a maintenance nightmare, but it can be done. 32 GB works fine, even when provisioning for a page file. Beyond that, storage needs to match what you intend to install and store. It's not Windows taking it all.

        Don't believe me? You don't have to. [reddit.com]

      • Nobody wants a 128GB SSD anymore though, I don't think you could even fit Windows 10 on 128GB anymore, last I tried you need at least 40G for a blank Windows 7 install. You need at least 256 if not 512GB SSD in a low-end laptop or people will have problems. A 1TB HDD costs $30 in bulk, a 128GB SSD still costs ~$10-20 more than that.

        I personally have no problem with a 128GB SSD running Windows 7 (desktop) or Windows 10 (laptop). It all depends on what you do with it. On my desktop I don't have any games on the SSD, and it's sitting at around 50GB free with all other apps installed and photos videos etc on spinning glass and off in the clouds. On my laptop, I don't have a shitload of stuff installed. Yeah Windows 10 eats up a chunk of the drive, but for the most part most of my stuff is accessed over networks, USB drives, or (when I'm t

  • So (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Hal_Porter ( 817932 )

    The CPU performance of a Ryzen 5 2500U is better than a i7-7600U but worse than a i7-8550U or an i5-8250U

    The GPU performance of an Ryzen 5 2500U/Vega 8 is worse than a i5-8250U/Geforce MX150 but it's faster than integrated Intel HD620 in an i7-8550U

    The power consumption is clearly worse than a either an Intel IGP or even the GeForce MX150. E.g.

    We noted that the Acer Swift 3 with a Core i7-8250U 8th Gen CPU and GeForce MX150 pulled about 9 Watts at idle and 13 - 16 Watts under the light duty load of our HD video loop test. The HP Envy x360 15z with Ryzen 5 Mobile pulled about the same 9 Watts at idle and with similar panel brightness, but under the load of video playback with VLC, pulled 20 Watts with peaks to 30 Watts in spots. We also quickly tested CPU utilization whether running VLC or the Windows 10 video player, and saw Ryzen 5 2500U CPU utilization oscillated at a low 4 - 12 percent. So, it appears at least with respect to VLC and video playback, that Ryzen Mobile with Vega 8 graphics is more power-hungry or perhaps has a bit more driver maturity to undergo to be fully optimized.

    Generally PC laptops have two major customer groups

    1) People who don't care about GPU performance but do care about battery life, price, power consumption etc

    2) Peop

    • Re:So (Score:5, Informative)

      by samoanbiscuit ( 1273176 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @07:56AM (#55619521)

      The laptop reviewed (HP Envy x360) is a 15-inch laptop being compared to 13-inch laptops. The screen of the review laptop is turned up 100%, while many of the compared laptops were not. Also, there was no hardware acceleration on the video application used in the Ryzen laptop test. Pretty confident that with a more competent OEM they'd fix the screen issues (screen take up a huge chunk of most mobile devices power), put in a bigger battery and an upcoming update from AMD should make hardware acceleration work on more applications. With that solved this should be easily competitive with Intel mobile CPUs.

      I await Acer and Dell's efforts before I'd write Ryzen Mobile off.

      • I'd definitely like to see more reviews, but I can't really see what market segment this is aimed at.

        If they can get the power consumption down below Intel IGP but deliver better performance at a lower price they might be onto something though.

        • The power consumption (of the CPU) is already comparable. 2-3Ghz is Ryzen's sweet spot. It's getting the rest of the laptop right that remains to be seen. OEMs have a long history of treating AMD like the redheaded stepchild. AMD also has less power to dictate terms than Intel, but like I said, we should wait for other laptops before we decide Ryzen Mobile is a bust.

          • OEMs have a long history of treating AMD like the redheaded stepchild.

            Back when I used to care about gaming and GPU performance I got mostly Intel/NVidia systems. When Athlons came out and they were competitive and ATI had a similarly decent generation I decided on a AMD/ATI build. Got all the parts mail order in the UK. Put it together and it was unstable. I swapped some parts - luckily the vendor I used was very understanding. Eventually it turned out the SDRAM I was using couldn't support the FSB it claimed. I ordered an Athlon with a slightly faster FSB (333 MT/s) than th

            • Re: So (Score:4, Informative)

              by samoanbiscuit ( 1273176 ) on Saturday November 25, 2017 @04:38PM (#55621423)

              Plus of course Intel probably do everything they can legally to keep OEMs from using anything but Intel CPUs.

              They've done lots of illegal things as well. They paid Michael Dell (amongst other OEMs) millions to reduce AMD volumes during the Athlon 64 years, when AMD CPUs beat out Intel CPUs on almost everything that wasn't compiled using the ICC (Intel's compiler). They were found guilty and ordered to pay a ~1.25 billion USD fine [cnet.com]. A fine they still haven't paid. This did massive damage to AMD at a time when they were expecting increased revenues as the fruit of their investment in R&D.

              So I'd like to AMD to be competitive. Right now it seems like AMD is competitive for desktop machines, not so much on mobile. Which is a shame.

              It seems to be competitive enough [notebookcheck.net], it just needs a better laptop surrounding it, and the Vega iGPU needs better drivers. The problems seem fixable in few months time.

    • 1) People who don't care about GPU performance but do care about battery life, price, power consumption etc
      2) People who do care about GPU performance.

      3) People who care about both, at different times, and benefit from the OS dynamically switching between a low-power (usually Intel) IGP and a discrete (NV/AMD) GPU based on the current power source and GPU load. This has been the standard setup for professional-grade laptops for many years.

      In order to satisfy those people with a single IGP, AMD has to build a GPU that's competitive in both domains. That's a challenge, to say the least.

      • In order to satisfy those people with a single IGP, AMD has to build a GPU that's competitive in both domains. That's a challenge, to say the least.

        I remember back in the Windows 2000 days reading that you could get by with a linear framebuffer. Adding acceleration had diminishing returns - much of the benefit came from a hardware cursor, line drawing and BitBlts. This was just to get the GUI running without lagging across the PCI bus. I know some systems which had a secondary monitor displaying data from an embedded system and allowed Windows to layer GUI elements on top of that and they were pretty much pure 8 bit greyscale frame buffers.

        Of course mo

        • Yeah, even Linux has moved on :-)

          The issue with a big.LITTLE design for AMD is that it consumes much more die space. GF is already behind Intel on process and so can't afford the expense.

          FWIW, Optimus (and the AMD equivalent) have both been working flawlessly for me for some time. I don't see any reduction on battery life on unless I accidentally leave something GPU intensive open.

  • They make equal or better parts for cheaper. Intel and Nvidiaâ(TM)s only option has been to lower their prices by hundreds to compete. This shows you how much those companies have been trying to screw you. It will be interesting to see if AMD can keep pushing the pace.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Intel and Nvidia use what is know as PAID REPUTATION MANAGEMENT companies- which means legions of individuals who troll forums like this one whenever the subject of AMD arises.

    The shills don't usually sound like 'little lord fountalroy'. The industry has discovered shill posts that sound like illiterate knuckle-dragging fanboys work better so long as they back up other pseudo-intellectual 'analysis' comments.

    AMD's Ryzen has BETTER IPC than Intel's best- a fact Intel hates. The better AMD per clock performan

  • Just saying.

    North doesn't mean up or higher. It mean north.

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