[Joxster]

Originally Posted by babhishek

I would still go with intel for a long term hasle free experience. I have seen a few AMDs and on laptops they heat up a bit and the fan is always whirring....

You must be thinking of non-Ryzen AMD chips. The Ryzen 4000 series laptop CPUs actually run cooler (in the exact same laptop design) than their 10th gen Intel counterparts due to being much more efficient, and the batteries even last longer

AMD Ryzen 4000 vs Intel 10th gen comparison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6x8SAAk_J4c

Laptop OEMs should use the same chassis and provide the same cooling for the CPUs of both companies, and then the difference actually shows. However, some laptop makers are messing up the cooling with AMD laptops, and then the blame is landing on AMD, which makes no sense. Just as an analogy, this would be akin to people blaming Jeep for the diesel engine in the Harrier overheating due to Tata's design flaw, when it doesn't happen in the Compass

Example of bad design:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRDUR-rPGsM

It's true that Intel has tighter quality control with the laptop OEMs, and that's something I'm sure AMD is working on. AMD was not serious competition for Intel in the laptop market until Ryzen 4000 laptops came along, and that's probably one of the reasons that laptop OEMs didn't take the designs too seriously.

Cheers

[poloman]

Guys, leave the fixation AMD vs Intel when you are buying a laptop. You are buying a system not a processor. I had made these remarks in an earlier post. I work in one of these companies and previously worked in the other, but never recommend one over the other. If you are an average daily user these benchmarks hardly matter. It is another matter if you are an enthusiast and is building a system from scratch.

But the system configuration, chassis design, thermal design, ports, display etc can have a major impact on the user experience. In system design Intel is still much ahead of the curve. You will get lot of options as well.


You will find very few AMD laptops in thin and light premium segment. Things may be changing though..

[Joxster]

Originally Posted by poloman

Guys, leave the fixation AMD vs Intel when you are buying a laptop. You are buying a system not a processor.

Let's make another analogy - you're buying a car, not an engine. Therefore, engine specifications shouldn't be compared or considered against competition? Feel free to apply that logic to your own purchases, but I think some people over here would like to make these comparisons. I definitely want a more powerful, more efficient and cheaper CPU in my PC or laptop - it doesn't matter which brand offers this.

Originally Posted by poloman

I work in one of these companies and previously worked in the other, but never recommend one over the other. If you are an average daily user these benchmarks hardly matter. It is another matter if you are an enthusiast and is building a system from scratch.

I think it's clear which company you work for currently by the statements you've made

Quoting the new Intel CEO Bob Swan from Computex 2020:

"We should see this moment as an opportunity to shift our focus as an industry from benchmarks to the benefits and impacts of the technology that we create."

Very interesting statement to make when the very way that Intel made it to the top is by constantly projecting benchmarks where they were winning

Originally Posted by poloman

But the system configuration, chassis design, thermal design, ports, display etc can have a major impact on the user experience. In system design Intel is still much ahead of the curve. You will get lot of options as well.

Sure, these things play a big role, which is exactly the point I made by sharing the video posted above with laptop OEMs messing up the design of AMD laptops. Laptops need to be reviewed individually, just like any other product. No brand can just be blindly trusted to be good.
And no, Intel is not ahead of the curve. They were caught sleeping by AMD, who have managed not only to catch up, but also overtake them in most areas. The complete org restructure as a result of Intel's recent failures is proof enough.

Intel News Release

Originally Posted by poloman

You will find very few AMD laptops in thin and light premium segment. Things may be changing though..

Premium = what? 1-2 lakh market segment? That's the minority of laptop buyers. The majority is the under 1 lakh segment, and there are sufficient AMD thin and light laptops available offering better performance than their Intel 10th gen counterparts globally. The performance gap might change with the release of Tigerlake, but that's yet to be seen.
The biggest gap right now is the gaming laptop sector. Nothing more than an NVIDIA GTX 2060 is being paired with an AMD CPU. Hopefully that changes really soon, and laptop gamers are given the option to have a high end AMD CPU + high end NVIDIA GPU. I'm sure many would opt for it.

Originally Posted by firstdrive

Any idea how are thinkpad for such usage? I don’t play any games and usually keep my laptops for 6-8 years.

The Lenovo Thinkpad series are good and reliable laptops. As long as you get one with good specifications, there shouldn't be any issues using it for 6-8 years, or even longer.

Cheers

[poloman]

Originally Posted by Joxster

Let's make another analogy - you're buying a car, not an engine. Therefore, engine specifications shouldn't be compared or considered against competition? Feel free to apply that logic to your own purchases, but I think some people over here would like to make these comparisons. I definitely want a more powerful, more efficient and cheaper CPU in my PC or laptop - it doesn't matter which brand offers this.

The analogy may apply to you but not millions of others. Maruti holding 50% market in India would not have happened had people looked only at engine specs.

I think it's clear which company you work for currently by the statements you've made

Let this be open to speculation. I have not recommended any product. I already made it clear I have worked for both the companies.

Quoting the new Intel CEO Bob Swan from Computex 2020:


Very interesting statement to make when the very way that Intel made it to the top is by constantly projecting benchmarks where they were winning

Agree that Intel is behind in few benchmarks and process technologies. But AMD had divested from chip manufacturing almost a decade ago. In fact this is one of the reasons why AMD is in the strong position it is today.Who ever using TSMC and Samsung fabs automatically got the benefits of their technological advances.

Sure, these things play a big role, which is exactly the point I made by sharing the video posted above with laptop OEMs messing up the design of AMD laptops. Laptops need to be reviewed individually, just like any other product. No brand can just be blindly trusted to be good.
And no, Intel is not ahead of the curve. They were caught sleeping by AMD, who have managed not only to catch up, but also overtake them in most areas. The complete org restructure as a result of Intel's recent failures is proof enough.

Intel News Release



Premium = what? 1-2 lakh market segment? That's the minority of laptop buyers. The majority is the under 1 lakh segment, and there are sufficient AMD thin and light laptops available offering better performance than their Intel 10th gen counterparts globally. The performance gap might change with the release of Tigerlake, but that's yet to be seen.

This is totally wrong statement. Intel has huge lead in Thin and light segment. You may see as 80:20 split in the designs currently. Premium segment is defined as some thing more than $800. Nothing much will change on performance front till Intel catches up in the process game. In a duopoly market competition is always good.



In the underdog v/s topdog battle people always side with the under dog So be it.

[Sebring]

Can you tell us why Apple moved away from Intel?

Originally Posted by poloman

Agree that Intel is behind in few benchmarks and process technologies.

Intel has huge lead in Thin and light segment.

[joslicx]

Originally Posted by Sebring

Can you tell us why Apple moved away from Intel?

It was always in the works.

Apple is highly vertically integrated company. They like to design everything themselves as it gives them very tight control on their products and schedules (else you are dependent on vendor schedules) and most importantly, they have the money and resources to pull this off. They are already very good in processor design as evidenced by their Axx processors in their mobile devices. They can optimise their processor for their Mac system as only they use it. General purpose processor companies like AMD/Intel are bit handicapped there as they have to support lot of legacy systems which impacts their optimisations.

[poloman]

Originally Posted by Sebring

Can you tell us why Apple moved away from Intel?

Mostly margins and better HW integration with other Apple products. Reasons that I am aware of. The macs are expected to get cheaper after this move or Apple will swallow the margins, only time will tell.

They can optimise their processor for their Mac system as only they use it.

Not sure how successful they are going to be in this? Lot of corporate are now using Macs for SW development. x86 vs ARM, how that is going to be played out is to be seen..

Also will Intel allow premium features like Thunderbolt in the new line ups is of anyone's guess

[GTO]

Might be a great discussion! Moving the AMD vs Intel posts to a new thread.

[reignofchaos]

Here's the analysis of laptop chips based on most articles:

In a similar power envelope,

a) AMD has 70-80% multicore performance which is helpful in rendering, video editing, compilation and similar workloads due to (i) IPC advantage (ii) Process advantage

b) Battery life is way better under load in AMD but idle power optimizations are better on Intel due to which idle battery life is better. But the moment you start doing something processor heavy, it stops being efficient and eats through battery

c) Performance on single core workloads at similar TDP are mostly even but single core performance doesn't mean much these days

d) Latency sensitive applications such as games are faster on Intel than AMD due to the ring bus architecture

e) In low power (sub 25W chips), AMD currently demolishes the Intel Ice lake chips in both GPU and CPU performance. They offer 8 core chips for the price of 4 core ice lake intel chips which have higher clocks and IPC. Things might change with tiger lake that is around the corner but again Tiger lake is launching as 4 core chips for now.

As for desktop chips:

a) Intel is 5-10% faster in games

That is the end of it. In every other metric, AMD wins. Intel chips consume twice the power at load on an average and are a nightmare to cool.

Workstation chips:

AMD has basically killed off the entire Intel workstation range of 12+ core CPUs. Intel's top chip (18 core 10980XE) is slower than AMD's 16 core 3950x desktop chip. AMD's own workstation chips start at 24 cores and are in a completely different performance and price category.


The performance of both the companies can simply be seen by their stock prices. From historical lows of 2$ a few years ago, now AMD is trading at 90+. Intel on the other hand is languishing in the 50$ range due to multitude of process issues and lack of competitive options.

[sandeepmohan]

I would approach a new cpu/cpu architecture with caution. While AMD has the upper hand right now, when it comes to running anything that is mission critical, I feel safer with Intel and its proven parts bin. That said, Intel is in the dumps right now. They are not in a position to move to 7nm or lower and have to depend on TSMC (same place where AMD and several others gets their cpu fabrication done).

This article should explain the above;
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...acturing-chips

For the consumer, I find it quite annoying that most AMD based laptops come equipped with horrendous Realtek network controllers. When you're trying to win the market, you need to offer the best there is. Not some sub par chip.

I am coordinating efforts for the evaluation of new AMD chips where I work. We are running benchmarks with our own Dell Intel Xeon 6130 and a Dell AMD Epyc 7302. This is your average joe part and nothing super high end. Performance numbers are a bit all over the place. For simulation there were no major gains noticed. In some cases the AMD was faster, some slower. Where we did see consistent performance gains was a process called Light Transport (also known as rendering) which is heavily threaded and another process called creature bakes. Not a massive gain in speed but up to 7% faster with the Epyc. What was most interesting is power consumption. While the AMD part is rated at a higher TDP (That is thermal watts so not a true measure of power) than the Intel, we found the Epyc consistently cheaper to run. 20% (minimum) lower power consumption was recorded for the exact same tasks we ran on both nodes. This is no small amount if you operate a massive data center. We've wrapped these tests up for now and are waiting for a Epyc 7F52 part from AMD.

We have ordered Lenovo P620 workstations equipped with AMD Thread Ripper Pro 3975WX 32 core cpu's. This purchase was not backed with tests so I am a bit nervous. We bought them based feedback from the most sought after game engine developer out there so the hope is that they run reliably.

If you are an organisation that is primarily an Intel shoppe, you must take your time and evaluate a new part before you adopt or introduce into your IT infrastructure. It should never be a blind switch. Regardless of what the Interweb and all those You Tube videos say, you need to put a new part through all the usual work loads and evaluate performance. For now, AMD seems to be winning pretty much anything you throw at it. However; it takes very little for the tables to turn back in Intels favor, as we have seen in the past, with the launch of the Core-i series. It took over a decade for AMD to strike
back.

Originally Posted by Joxster

Example of bad design:

I have that laptop. Not only did they botch the cpu cooler, even the power brick in not capable of feeding enough power to the cpu under sustained loads. I realized this when I was running https://foldingathome.org/

[deathwalkr]

Don't ask me why, but i have always been buying AMD Phenom, FX and now Ryzen 5

[joslicx]

Originally Posted by poloman

Not sure how successful they are going to be in this? Lot of corporate are now using Macs for SW development. x86 vs ARM, how that is going to be played out is to be seen..

My guess is, they will handily beat both Intel and AMD for performance. They don't have the baggage that esp Intel is suffering from. There is a lot of very very old code out there, even 20 year old code. Intel has to design it's processors that can support all that old code and instructions. So the CPUs are inherently suboptimal. AMD also suffers from same but to lesser extent, as AMD is not as prevalent. Actually, the upcoming Intel GPUs will not suffer from this baggage so it would be interesting to see how they fare.

Apple is lucky as the 3rd party fab, TSMC is presently the leader in process technology and will probably remain leader for foreseeable future. So they can take advantage of their highly optimised design and TSMC's most advanced tech and that is a killer combo.

[motorpsycho]

Originally Posted by deathwalkr

Don't ask me why, but i have always been buying AMD Phenom, FX and now Ryzen 5

Maybe because people always root for the underdog, I too had purchased an AMD processor laptop in 2008, it is still running. However my gaming laptop is Intel i7.

In the gaming scene, mostly what I read on BuildaPC or PCMaster race, most are using AMD's now, this is quite shift from 2 years ago, wherein AMD was not even in contention.

[Aney Kadam]

you said and i quote "even the power brick in not capable of feeding enough power to the cpu under sustained loads." i have been experiencing similer kind of problem when i am playing a heavy game for example GTA5 the charger disconnects and reconnect automatically(this happens in 5 to 10 secs interval) this results in FPS drops. I have a 1 and half year old dell G3 i5 8th gen which i use for gaming and i am a complete noob when it comes to computers.
I have complained about it many times to dell tech support, they are very cooperative they changed my laptop's motherboard under warrenty but still this problem still presists. as of today they are still figuring out whats wrong with my laptop.

[amol4184]

Originally Posted by motorpsycho

Maybe because people always root for the underdog, I too had purchased an AMD processor laptop in 2008, it is still running. However my gaming laptop is Intel i7.

In the gaming scene, mostly what I read on BuildaPC or PCMaster race, most are using AMD's now, this is quite shift from 2 years ago, wherein AMD was not even in contention.

Last 3 years have been swashbuckling for AMD. I was building a mini ITX system based on Ryzen 1700x back in '18. Price to performance ratio of AMD back then was amazing compared to similarly spec-ed Intel and it is even more impressive in 2020. A friend suggested leave my fascination with Intel and check AMD - and I did.

Best decision ever! All in all I saved close to $300 going with AMD. OC-ing is super easy and effective with Ryzen Master app. The machine still runs excellent, cool and fast as it was in 2017-18. I don't even have any fancy cooler, just running 2 Noctua fans.

With that goodwill in mind, early this year I got Thinkpad T495 with Ryzen 5 pro and couldn't be more happy. Just now I started building a budget desktop for father and every recommendation was for Ryzen 3400G or 3200G.
I went with 3200G, again great performance for the price. Let's see how it performs for light gaming at 720p although chances of father doing any gaming are zero