AMD Claims New Laptop Chip Is 30% Faster Than M1 Pro, Up to 30 Hours on Battery | Hacker News Reader

AMD Claims New Laptop Chip Is 30% Faster Than M1 Pro, Up to 30 Hours on Battery

macrumors.com

80 pointsCharlesW41 comments

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That’s great and all but they need a vendor that can put it to work in a device that isn’t awful and/or ugly as hell.

And won't pair an atrocious 200 nit 55% sRGB display with it

Lenovo and Asus G14 have gotten really good looking in the last couple of years.

I got a Ryzen Lenovo Slim something (can't remember the exact model name/number) and it's amazing.

> a device that isn’t awful and/or ugly as hell

I don't find laptops beautifull, on the contrary.

> AMD claims the new AMD Ryzen 7040 series will offer 30+ hours of video playback in ultrathin notebooks

So those 30 hours from the title are just for video playback, with no mention of the battery size and screen resolution and brightness of the laptop from this benchmark.

Still, as a owner of a Ryzen 5000 laptop, I'm really looking forward to an upgrade. Bring it on!

And they didn‘t say how big such a notebook will be, how much it weights and how often you hear fans screaming when you try to use its power.

This isn't Intel.

AMD and Apple are basically in the ~same TSMC silicon boat.

They claim the Ryzen 9 7940HS has ~40W TDP, which is a little more than a M1 Pro, so it shouldn't be too bad.

Also presumably this is not Chrome on Linux, since Chrome on Linux does not support hardware accelerated video decode.

At least Debian claims it compiles Chromium such that it will. Brave here also does, no config needed.

"Google Chrome 88 (and newer) has made hardware accelerated video decoding available on Linux, but it's not enabled by default. "

https://www.linuxuprising.com/2021/01/how-to-enable-hardware...

Still doesn't support DRM for Netflix tho (so you're stuck with a low bitrate netflix)

Use Firefox

Can't wait for the actual benchmarks

It is unfortunate no one seems to be talking about the most interesting part of the SoC.

4nm ( Or N4 if you want to be specific ) design, this is new for both CPU and GPU.

And XDNA from Xilinx.

And AFAIK this is the first time AMD put out their latest CPU and GPU uArch in the same chip. On the absolute leading edge node. Just cant wait for benchmarks. It has been a while anything exciting has happened in the x86 world.

I guess this headline is easier to get the upvote. But in 99.99999% of cases macrumors should not be used as source for hardware specific information.

I want to believe… I’d buy such a laptop. But I’ll wait to see real reviews from real use cases.

The thing that irks me on these "xx% faster" articles is that they always achieve this by adding more cores. Nice, very impressive. Now, let me see those single core benchmarks.

>they always achieve this by adding more cores

It's the exact same amount of cores as last gen. The improvements mostly come from the switch to 4nm and Zern4 arch.

Remove the on-crystal DRM, PSP and other backdoors and you get even more energy savings! :)

Claim chowder

99wh / 30h = 3.3w not enough to keep ddr5 memory stick and pch running not counting screen and cpu itself. AMD marketing is lying as usual.

Laptops use lpddr, which uses much less power than a desktop dimm. That said they’re also saying in standby which represents and massive power reduction as clocks are dropped to minimum and the OS can shutdown unused banks.

So available battery/desktop dimm power usage is not the right maths to be using here.

I’m not saying they aren’t exaggerating or anything, but in general marketing information is always technically correct, even if you would not get that perf in real life so outright falsehood should indicate your base assumptions can be wrong

You can get a million hours of playback with enough battery. Thin and light laptops with typical sub-50w/hr batteries are going to have a very hard time going over 20-25 hours.

I'm also super-skeptical of AMD's claim because their chipsets have a very long history of sucking a lot of power.

Unless there is something changed, AMD don't use chiplet design on mobile currently.

He's talking about the chipset/motherboard/battery management logic/etc, which isn't in the CPU. Even then, you need the OS to properly utilize the logic, and Linux so often has worse power management than windows for laptops.

This really is a case where the CPU vendor (AMD) needs to get involved with the hardware partners to get good drivers made FOR LINUX to showcase their hardware, and not just windows.

The real reason devs love having Apple laptops isn't OSX. It isn't Apple the brand. It is somewhat the quality of hardware... but the real reason is that it is IT-supported Linux.

Looking ahead to the seemingly inevitable, AMD and Intel when pushing ARM (or RISC-V?) CPUs, will need to formally adopt good linux support for the hardware.

An instruction set changeover cannot succeed through non-technical consumers in Windows. It won't in games. The only beachhead for AMD/Intel in non-x86 will be a good Linux laptop. Otherwise Apple will have the advantage.

chipset != chiplet

>You can get a million hours of playback with enough battery.

That is why the OP specify 99Whr, it is the maximum battery size in laptop limited by Airline regulations.

It seems pretty reasonable considering my 4-year old laptop with a "power hungry" 4K screen uses 4 watts in very light usage. For a start, they are probably using LPDDR5, just like phones.

They are breaking the laws of thermodynamics. Truly revolutionary.

Even if the claims are valid it is still Windows/Linux only and ignores the cost of getting M1 customers to leave macOS which is like trying to get a linux user to switch to Windows .... not bloody likely. Maybe they are trying to get a design win at Apple against Apple's own silicon also not bloody likely.

If Framework decided to put these new chips in their laptops (and assuming these claims are true), that might entice a number of Mac users. I've been a bit surprised at the number of Mac users around here saying they were excited to purchase a Framework Laptop.

If Framework ended up making a main board with this I’d probably finally pull the trigger on one. It’s been in my cart for a while but I never really could justify buying one.

If this is true and if framework would and if it would run Linux well, I would move. Until then I am a happy m1 user.

Framework needs to step up and offer at least one Linux distro.

Both ubuntu and fedora work well out of the box. Several other distros work well too. Are you suggesting they ship a linux distro by default?

I read about a lot of issues with Intel 12th generation. Yes, I am suggesting to officially support a linux distro.

12th gen has had issues on all machines. Linux has added a lot of improvements and things generally work fine now, but it's not as out-of-the-box as 11th.

Take a look at https://frame.work/linux

This is probably as close to officially supporting linux as I can think of. I do agree that shipping with linux would be a good addition.

I think you underestimate the number of developer type people who buy Apple laptops because of the great hardware (M1, screen, battery life, touchpad etc) and are comfortable with MacOS, but they are not Mac developers and would also be comfortable using Linux or Windows if every part of the laptop works well with it.

Especially Linux, because they already use Linux on their servers and CI/CD, and some dev tools like Docker or anything filesystem-heavy run faster on Linux than MacOS even on the same hardware.

I think the bigger intended effect of this choice of marketing is to try and stop Windows users moving to Mac for the excitement of the M1 chip.

If you bothered to read beyond the headline, they compare performance against Intel as well

I think you’re misunderstanding the comment. This headline was explicitly comparing to M1s, and the commenter is saying that many people with M1s aren’t using it solely for performance reasons, they’re using it for macOS. In that case it doesn’t matter the perf AMD gets as they’re still not running macOS.

I don't understand your comment.

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