AMD's Ryzen 9 6900HS Rembrandt Benchmarked: Zen3+ Power and Performance Scaling | Hacker News Reader

AMD's Ryzen 9 6900HS Rembrandt Benchmarked: Zen3+ Power and Performance Scaling

anandtech.com

10 pointsneogodless3 comments

So yet another generation where AMD lags at CPU, chipset, overall system efficiency, battery life, and ports/feature support.

I get that a lot of this is that Intel has flexed its monopoly power to lock out AMD, and that OEM for laptops is a lot more centralized, but won't having shitty laptop competitiveness basically signal that your server offerings will also have shortfalls?

On AWS the AMD instances are slightly cheaper, but the networking is substantially worse.

This seems like an odd comment on a CPU review that doesn't dig into the chipset, battery life, or ports/features much.

Lets look into those.

[0] shows it's competing well on efficiency.

> The 35W class where the Ryzen 9 6900HS sits by default is the sweet spot, with efficiency very similar to the Core i7-12700H and even Apple’s M1 Pro, despite both of these products having fundamental advantages, like Intel’s newer architecture, and Apple’s use of a superior process node.

[1] They're using DDR5, PCIe 4.0, etc. and integrated graphics are well ahead of the competition. Battery life is also competitive.

> PCIe 4.0, USB 4, DDR5 memory, Wi-Fi 6e, and Bluetooth Low Energy 5.2

This is also a bit of a weird comment given that the previous generation was well ahead of Intel on CPU performance, efficiency and battery life. This mid-cycle improvement loses the outright performance crown to Intel, but still competes well at lower power levels, and greatly improves the chipset features.

What does AWS have to do with a laptop APU?

[0] https://www.techspot.com/review/2419-amd-ryzen-9-6900hs/

[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/615591/tested-5-key-things-t...

Let me qualify this that I am generally very negative towards Intel. I think they are an embarrassingly horribly run company. But even incompetence will wane when defending their cash cows, and if AMD wants to come at Intel, they need to do a better job.

1) Intel appears on most graphs to be edging out AMD on performance and efficiency. With a worse process technology. That's not good.

2) integrated graphics ... well, ok yes, but "gaming laptops" are very much a niche thing. Laptops are fundamentally about business applications.

3) Does it have USB-C in the supplied laptops? An HDMI 2.0+ port? Will the CPU and chipsets actually be used by major suppliers who have some investment in better form factors? This has historically been a "no", and unfortunately, the CPU results show that there really isn't any reason for the major centralized OEMs and suppliers to throw a lot at AMD, except as a minor thorn in Intel's side.

The AWS networking comment is a side-example of AMD's lack of focus on chipsets and total system integration.

I am concerned that AMD will repeat the Netburst-era mistake and rest on their laurels.

In your second article, there is a very interesting thing: a laptop used in the graphics just has "AMD" on it. That tells me it isn't an actually available laptop. Like so many AMD mobile offerings, they drop benchmarks that basically say "hey, we are here! don't forget about us in mobile" but the OEMs largely ignore them.

The video HDMI ports are among the most frustrating in AMD-powered actual hardware. You have AMD chips with top sophistication in the video hardware, and the video port standards are still lagging behind desktop by years. Maybe the handled this, but it was dumbfounding last time I looked for an AMD laptop based on their hype.

It was clear that no matter the CPU AMD had, a great deal was lost in translation once the motherboard designs were made. Just wasted potential.

There isn't anything in this article that makes me think "wow there will be a significantly competitive and attractive laptop that features these chips".

I honestly hope I'm wrong. I'll be buying a new laptop soon...

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