Has AMD given up on the performance notebook market?

Considering that $200 notebooks have been introduced, there ought to be room for a $400-$700 laptop that doesn't suck balls.

With Carrizo AMD will have a SoC, this gives the integrators a reduction in footprint and cost "for free".
Confronted with motherboard changes needed to switch from Trinity/Richland to Kaveri, the vendors must have yawned a lot (I remember reading that argument, here or somewhere). No significant CPU improvement, main thing is the Radeon changes from HD 6000 to HD 7000 series which is lost on the customer..

Also, Crossfire between the APU and a GPU is just a bad deal. But perhaps AMD will try it again with Carrizo + Iceland GPU, both GCN 1.2, HSA instead of not-quite-HSA. DX12 or Mantle games to make the dual GPU gaming work, maybe.

 

my laptop (intel cpu + amd GPU) 5 years ago was 700 dollar and if i remember correctly, there were no comparable alternative with AMD CPU.

and last month, i was recommending a laptop for my cousin for price around 500$ and the condition is the same. No comparable alternative with AMD CPU. Those with AMD CPU + GPU just slower and cheaper (lenovo have one for 400$).

 

There was no real CPU improvement between Richland and Kaveri on 95W~100W desktop chips, but for notebooks it was definitely there, albeit well short of what would have been necessary to really compete with Intel.

About quality, affordable laptops, I couldn't agree more. The Galaxy Tab S 10.5 comes with a 10.5", 2560×1600 Super AMOLED display and at least 16GB of flash storage for about €440. Surely, for some €200 more, OEMs should be able to build similar machines with an x86 chip, more storage, a keyboard and a bigger display, even if it's just 1920×1080 IPS. Instead we usually get mechanical drives and horrible 1366×768 TN panels.

 

About 2011 or so, I actually went specifically looking for a mid-end AMD APU-equipped laptop. I found an HP that was compelling, but the performance per dollar ended up being better with a Lenovo Y460. It was a core i5-620m along with a Radeon 5650M 1GB that I picked up for right around $700. I just can't imagine having equal pricetags available for integrated video versus standalone video, when the standalone is going to outperform it in nearly all cases that I care about.

 

You talking about the galaxy tab 3 10.5 inch ? That's $460 on amazon http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Galax...=1424102876&sr=8-1&keywords=galaxy+tab+s+10.4

In the states the surface pro 3 starts at $700 Which is just a $240 more. For $500 you can grab the dell venue 11 pro signature edition from the Microsoftstore.com its a 10.8 screen 1080p , atom z37770 1.46ghz with 2 gigs of ram, 64 gig storage with full windows 8.1 and a micro sd slot.

You want a full laptop ? The asus zenbook is $700 with a core m 8 gigs of ram and a 256 gig ssd with a 13.3 inch 1080p display. Its half an inch thick and 2.65 lbs. Its beautiful .

The options are there they just aren't from AMD . They don't really have anything to compete against core m at this point in time and core m is able to slot into $700 pc's so where is there for amd to go ?

On the ms store I only see the hp stream14 z010nr signature edition its $230 and comes with a 14inch 1366x768 screen with an a4 1ghz cpu with 2 gigs of ddr 3 and 32 gig storage. Intel is in the hp stream 13 at the same price which you get a 13.3 inch screen with the same res an intel Celeron n2840 with 2gb memory and 32gb storage .

 

Yes, that's the tablet I was talking about, I got the display a little wrong, sorry. It's even better than I thought.

That Zenbook is really nice but it's a bit of an outlier. AMD may not have anything to compete against Core M exactly, but they have decent low-power APUs that are probably much cheaper and that could go into similar, cheaper notebooks. I've not seen graphics benchmarks for Core M laptops, but I'm not sure they do better than, say, Mullins.

Sadly, such laptops with AMD APUs just don't exist. Sometimes I think AMD should pull an NVIDIA and just release its own laptops, as the latter did with Shield tablets/consoles.

 

they should. I think the problem is that graphics performance doesn't matter. Intel has the lion share of the market for tablets and that's what the simple window store games will require. While the higher end games wont run well on an apu vs a console . So amd is stuck between two places and I think a consumer will care more about battery life and size / heat of a laptop now than if it can play crisis at 720p

 

It certainly isn't easy to find a nice AMD equipped notebook.

I bought a like-new Dell Latitude 3540 recently. Lovely 15.6" 1080p matte, i5 4200U, Radeon 8850M GDDR5 for $500. New drivers call the Radeon a M265X. Automatic rebrand power for the Cape Verde! Great machine except that it had horrid inductor squeal when plugged in. Returned it and got another, this time for $450. This one was quiet until I loaded down the Radeon with a graphics demo. Squeal chirp chirp. lol. Returned.

I was also eyeing a HP Elitebook 725 G2 12.5" with the works powered by a Kaveri A10 19W. Sounds like it could be one sweet subnote right? Unfortunately it apparently throttles at a mere 55C and so has awful performance if you do anything demanding more than briefly. I saw some guys testing it on another forum and they had Beema being competitive in some cases. Sigh.

 

Throttling at 55ºC is ridiculous. My Ivybridge+GK107 starts throttling at ~80ºC and that's perfectly acceptable.
How come HP hasn't solved that within days through a simple update?

 

My guess is it is intentional. To keep the machine from becoming overly warm. I've been down the road of hot 12" notebooks before so I can understand it to a degree. Still, this should be something that they make user adjustable.

However, it seems like every AMD APU notebook I read about has throttling behavior when under long term heavy utilization. This makes them pretty useless for gaming because performance plummets. I suppose the problem is AMD tends to be in cheap notebooks where all the corners have been cut.

 

Plus, Kaveri's power management seems to be somewhat broken.

 

No more ridiculous than not understanding that different architectures are engineered around potentially different temperatures. Further in this case, BD derivates don't report an absolute temperature at all. Intel does, hence numbers aren't comparable as different things are measured.

 

Then please avoid any more ridiculousness with your all mighty knowledge and teach us which CPU architecture for consumer products enables throttling at 55º.
We're all urging to learn from you.

 

If you have a power/cooling limit, keeping temperatures low avoids runaway (rise in temperature causes rise in power consumption which causes rise in temperature).

 

Yes, I'm aware that past a certain temperature threshold, the silicon starts losing the capability to suppress current leakages.
I'm also well aware that for silicon, this threshold is well above 55ºC and it's a lot closer to 90º for modern implementations.

So I ask again: what modern CPU architecture for a consumer device is designed to start throttling at 55ºC?
Or even say, 60ºC since apparently "BD derivatives don't report an absolute temperature at all".
Because apparently not knowing that is ridiculous.

 

Why is the question regarding the throttling @ the specific value 55/60 relevant at all?

According to Core Temp, my Vishera based CPU idles at 15-25 ºC and completely shuts down at around 60-65ºC. And, for this case, the 'real temperature' might be in the range of 60-70ºC (BD temp sensors are completely off at low temps and start to get accurate at higher temperatures).

Intel's latest process OTOH resulted in CPUs that both operate and throttle at significantly higher temps. Compared to AMD but also to their Sandy Bridge silicon.

 

Perhaps you should start reading the posts you quote.

 

Here's where I read about the throttling behavior of the HP Elitebook 725 with A10 Kaveri if you guys want to read some more on that.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...k-755-g2-announced.753490/page-8#post-9923907

another discussion over here
https://semiaccurate.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7927&page=19

And yes Intel notebooks certainly are not free of throttling problems. But there are more higher-quality Intel notebooks to choose from that do have appropriate cooling capacity.

 

Lenovo Y gaming series laptop coming with a R9-M375:
http://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-m300...-lenovo-lists-products-r9-m375-r5-m330-chips/

 

Let's hope it's not just using a Cape Verde die again this time.