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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

#21

Post by acdha »

jsheard wrote: post #10
arnaudsm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 proces…

Process helps but have you seen benchmarks showing equivalent performance between the same process node? I think it’s less that ARM is amazing than the Apple Silicon team being very good and paired with aggressive optimization throughout the stack but everything I’ve seen suggests they are simply building better chips at their target levels (not server, high power, etc.).

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

#22

Post by dagmx »

sm_1024 wrote: 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

Battery tests are important, but so is how it fairs on battery (what is the performance drop off to maintain that), what’s its performance is ant its peak and how it long before it throttles when pushed.

The M series processors have succeeded in all four: battery life, performance parity between battery and plugged in, high performance and performance sustainability.

So far, very few benchmarks have been comparing the latter three as part of the full package assessment.

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

#24

Post by talldayo »

Filligree wrote: post #18
arnaudsm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ryzen mobile is consistently close, yeah. But with the sole exception of the Steam deck, I've yet to see a Ryzen mobile-bearing laptop, Windows included, which is close to the overall performance of the Macbook.

> But with the sole exception of the Steam deck

Uuh wut? The Steam Deck is like 3-generation-old hardware in mobile Ryzen terms. In a lot of ways it's similar to a pared-back 4800u with fewer (and older) cores, and a slightly bumped up GPU.

To me it's kinda the opposite. Excluding the Steam Deck, I think most of AMD's Ultrabook APUs have been very close to the products Apple's made on the equivalent nodes. Even on 7nm the 4800u put up a competitive fight against M1, and the gap has gotten thinner with each passing year. According to the OpenCL benchmarks, the Radeon 680m on 6nm scores higher than the M1 on 5nm: https://browser.geekbench.com/opencl-benchmarks

Even back when Ryzen Mobile only shipped with Vega, it was pretty clear that Apple and AMD were a pretty close match in onboard GPU power.

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

#25

Post by Dylan16807 »

halJordan wrote: post #6
moffkalast wrote: post #3

[flagged]

[flagged]

What's insane? The claim that recall is spyware isn't that bad of an exaggeration, and the claim that the NPU is hype is a reasonable opinion to have.

If that 7% of the die goes unused it's not a huge waste but it's not very good either. If you're not using it enough to affect your battery then you might not get much benefit, because the GPU can do the same tasks about half as fast, it's just less efficient (and it would be a lot more than half if the NPU die space was converted into GPU compute blocks). And for serious tasks it's not very powerful. There's a range where it's good, but not as big a range as people might expect.

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

#26

Post by GrumpyYoungMan »

sm_1024 wrote: 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 display, RAM, and other peripherals are consuming power too. Short of running continuous high CPU loads, which most people don't do on laptops, changes in CPU efficiency have less apparent effect on battery life because it's only a fraction of overall power draw.

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

#27

Post by Panzer04 »

dzaima wrote: post #19
pohuing wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to not matter much nowadays. There's another great(according to my untrained eye) writeup of the lack of importance on chips and cheese. https://chipsandcheese.com/2021/07/13/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-...

The various mentioned power consumption amounts are 4-10% per-core, or 0.5-6% of package (with the caveat of running with micro-op cache off) for Zen 2, and 3-10% for Haswell. That's not massive, but is still far from what I'd consider insignificant; it could give leeway for an extra core or some improved ALUs; or, even, depending on the benchmark, is the difference between Zen 4 and Zen 5 (making the false assumptio…

You missed the part where they mention ARM ends up implementing the same thing to go fast.

The point is processors are either slow and efficient, or fast and inefficient. It's just a tradeoff along the curve.

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

#28

Post by Panzer04 »

sm_1024 wrote: 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

>5hr Battery life in laptops is mostly a function of how well idle is managed, i think. The less work you can do while running the users core program, the better. I'm not sure how much impact CPU efficiency really has in that case.

If you are running a remotely demanding program (say, a game) , your battery life will be bad no matter what (ie. A laptop at idle should be able to manage ~5w power consumption sumtpion regardless of AMD/intel/Apple processor, but it's largely on the OS to achieve that.

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

#30

Post by 999900000999 »

sm_1024 wrote: 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

I have a 365 AMD laptop.

The battery is great if your doing very light stuff, Call of Duty takes it's battery down to 3 hours.

Macs don't really support higher end games, so I can't directly compare to my M1 Air.

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