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AMD's Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile

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Re: AMD's Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile

#2
IMO, the most interesting thing about this line is the battery life---within an hour of MBP3 and within 2 hours of Asus's Qualcomm. Making it comparable to ARM architectures.

Which is a little surprising because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86.

[1] https://youtu.be/Z8WKR0VHfJw?si=A7zbFY2lsDa8iVQN&t=277

Re: AMD's Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile

#4
post #2

IMO, the most interesting thing about this line is the battery life---within an hour of MBP3 and within 2 hours of Asus's Qualcomm. Making it comparable to ARM architectures. Which is a little surprising because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86. [1] https://youtu.be/Z8WKR0VHfJw?si=A7zbFY2lsDa8iVQN&t=277

> because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86.

Because most ARM processors were designed for mobile phones and optimised to death for power efficiency.

The total power usage of the front end decoders is a single digit percentage of the total power draw. Even if ARM magically needed 0 watts for this, it couldn’t save more power than that. The rest of the processor design elements are essentially identical.

Re: AMD's Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile

#5
post #2

IMO, the most interesting thing about this line is the battery life---within an hour of MBP3 and within 2 hours of Asus's Qualcomm. Making it comparable to ARM architectures. Which is a little surprising because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86. [1] https://youtu.be/Z8WKR0VHfJw?si=A7zbFY2lsDa8iVQN&t=277

Yeah if you make a worse core and then downclock it then you will increase power efficiency. AMD thankfully only downclocks the 5c, but Intel is shipping ivy lake equivalents in their flagship products just to get power efficiency up.

Re: AMD's Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile

#7
post #2

IMO, the most interesting thing about this line is the battery life---within an hour of MBP3 and within 2 hours of Asus's Qualcomm. Making it comparable to ARM architectures. Which is a little surprising because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86. [1] https://youtu.be/Z8WKR0VHfJw?si=A7zbFY2lsDa8iVQN&t=277

ARM got a lot of hype since the release of the M1, but most users only compared it to the terrible Intel MBPs. Ryzen mobile has been consistently close to Apple silicon perf/watt for 5 years. But got little press coverage.

Hype can be really decorrelated from real world performance.

Re: AMD's Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile

#8
post #2

IMO, the most interesting thing about this line is the battery life---within an hour of MBP3 and within 2 hours of Asus's Qualcomm. Making it comparable to ARM architectures. Which is a little surprising because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86. [1] https://youtu.be/Z8WKR0VHfJw?si=A7zbFY2lsDa8iVQN&t=277

The CPU core's instruction set has no influence on how well the chip as a whole manages power when not executing instructions.

Re: AMD's Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile

#9
post #7
post #2

IMO, the most interesting thing about this line is the battery life---within an hour of MBP3 and within 2 hours of Asus's Qualcomm. Making it comparable to ARM architectures. Which is a little surprising because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86. [1] https://youtu.be/Z8WKR0VHfJw?si=A7zbFY2lsDa8iVQN&t=277

ARM got a lot of hype since the release of the M1, but most users only compared it to the terrible Intel MBPs. Ryzen mobile has been consistently close to Apple silicon perf/watt for 5 years. But got little press coverage. Hype can be really decorrelated from real world performance.

I have heard that part of the reason for little coverage of ryzen mobile CPUs is their limited availability as AMD was focussing on using the fab capacity for server chips.

Re: AMD's Strix Point: Zen 5 Hits Mobile

#10
post #7
post #2

IMO, the most interesting thing about this line is the battery life---within an hour of MBP3 and within 2 hours of Asus's Qualcomm. Making it comparable to ARM architectures. Which is a little surprising because ARM is commonly believed to be much more power efficient than x86. [1] https://youtu.be/Z8WKR0VHfJw?si=A7zbFY2lsDa8iVQN&t=277

ARM got a lot of hype since the release of the M1, but most users only compared it to the terrible Intel MBPs. Ryzen mobile has been consistently close to Apple silicon perf/watt for 5 years. But got little press coverage. Hype can be really decorrelated from real world performance.

Any efficiency comparison involving Apples chips also has to factor in that Tim Cook keeps showing up at TSMCs door with a freight container full of cash to buy out exclusive access to their bleeding edge silicon processes. ARM may be a factor but don't underestimate the power of having more money than God.

Case in point, Strix Point is built on TSMC 4nm while Apple is already using TSMCs second generation 3nm process.

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