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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

#151
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.

How does “great” translate to hours?

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

#152
post #56

I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI. People want the option to make their laptop silent or nearly silent. And when users do need the power, they generally prefer a slightly slower laptop at a reasonable volume rather than the roar of a jet engine. Laptop manufacturers want their d…

It might also be good to mandate 10+ hours of battery life when the laptop is in power saving mode. A number of laptops that'd otherwise have decent battery life are hampered by things like half-baked power management of discrete GPUs that doesn't completely cut power supply to those components. Manufacturers should be more heavily testing under this mode.

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

#153
post #56

I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI. People want the option to make their laptop silent or nearly silent. And when users do need the power, they generally prefer a slightly slower laptop at a reasonable volume rather than the roar of a jet engine. Laptop manufacturers want their d…

>I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI

Until then, there's https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases

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

#154
post #56

I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI. People want the option to make their laptop silent or nearly silent. And when users do need the power, they generally prefer a slightly slower laptop at a reasonable volume rather than the roar of a jet engine. Laptop manufacturers want their d…

>I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI Until then, there's https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases

A closed source application for controlling one's fan...umm no thank you.

I never will understand the reasoning behind why people are so afraid of releasing their source code. Looks like a weekend project; does he expect to make a living out of a weekend project?

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

#155
post #56

I sit firm in my belief that the best thing Microsoft could do for their laptop ecosystem is to add support for a "max fan speed" slider somewhere prominent in the Windows UI. People want the option to make their laptop silent or nearly silent. And when users do need the power, they generally prefer a slightly slower laptop at a reasonable volume rather than the roar of a jet engine. Laptop manufacturers want their d…

Some recent asus ROG/TUF 2022+ models have fine tuning available via "armoury crate" or "g-helper" (non-proprietary, fan/community supported, code on github).

Disabling a dGpu and reducing power can yeld some impressive results for battery life. Allows also defining fan speed curves depending on temperature.

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

#157
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.

[flagged]

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

#158

One of these has to be true (or both true): 1. ARM is inherently more efficient than x86 CPUs in most tasks 2. Nuvia and Apple are better CPU designers than AMD and Intel Here are results from Notebookcheck: Cinebench R24 ST perf/watt * M3: 12.7 points/watt * X Elite: 9.3 points/watt * AMD HX 370: 3.74 points/watt * AMD 8845HS: 3.1 points/watt * Intel 155H: 3.1 points/watt In ST, Apple is 3.4x more efficient than Zen…

Performance per watt is a bad metric. You want instead performance for a given power budget (eg, how much performance can I get at 15w? 30w? etc...)

Otherwise you can trivially win 100% of performance/watt comparisons by just setting clocks to the limit of the lowest usable voltage level.

For example compare the 7950X to the 7950X@65w using the officially supported eco mode option: https://www.anandtech.com/show/17585/amd-zen-4-ryzen-9-7950x...

Cinebench R23 MT:

7950X stock: 225 points/watt

7950X @ 65w eco mode: 482 points/watt

Over 2x perf/watt improvement on the exact same chip, and a power efficiency that tops the charts, beating every laptop chip in that notebookcheck test by a large amount as well. And yet how many 7950x owners are using the 65w eco mode option? Probably none. Because perf/watt isn't actually meaningful. Rather it's how much performance can I get for a given power budget.

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

#159
post #63
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the OC might have mis-read the power numbers, 110 W is well into desktop CPU power range. Here is a excerpt from Anand Tech: > In our peak power test, the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 ramped up and peaked at 33 W. https://www.anandtech.com/show/21485/the-amd-ryzen-ai-hx-370...

You can read the notebookcheck review for yourself. https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Zen-5-Strix-Point-CPU-anal...

Those 100W+ numbers are total system power. And that system has the CPU TDP set to 80W (far above AMD's official max of 54W). It also has a discrete 4070 GPU that can use over 100W on its own.

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

#160

One of these has to be true (or both true): 1. ARM is inherently more efficient than x86 CPUs in most tasks 2. Nuvia and Apple are better CPU designers than AMD and Intel Here are results from Notebookcheck: Cinebench R24 ST perf/watt * M3: 12.7 points/watt * X Elite: 9.3 points/watt * AMD HX 370: 3.74 points/watt * AMD 8845HS: 3.1 points/watt * Intel 155H: 3.1 points/watt In ST, Apple is 3.4x more efficient than Zen…

> 1. ARM is inherently more efficient than x86 CPUs in most tasks

I'm not sure how you're reaching the conclusion of "most tasks" when Cinebench R24 is the only test you used because R23, which doesn't agree, was rejected for hand-wavey nebulous reasons, and nothing else was tested.

R24 is hardly a representative workload of "most tasks" nor is it claiming/trying to be.

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