Who Controls the User Experience? AMD’s Carrizo Thoroughly Tested
by Ian Cutress on February 4, 2016 8:00 AM ESTNo Room at the Win
The interesting thing about laptop design is that for the most part we are dealing with a number of devices with the same level of power consumption. This means that given sufficient standards, the same laptop shell - be it plastic, aluminium or something a bit more exotic - should be able to house different components that operate at a similar TDP, all with similar battery capacities. Thus if a company gets a ‘win’ with a laptop design, then an equivalent TDP processor from the competition (again, there are other factors involved such as controllers and z-height) should be able to work well in that same device.
But one key differentiator between Intel and AMD however is the consistent level of halo devices available with each manufacturer's hardware. It doesn't take long to find the evolutions of Intel's Ultrabook line that focus on high performance, and other premium devices designed to hit a certain combination of thickness and battery life, such as ASUS' Zenbook line or the Apple Macbook Air. In the tablet space, Intel has had design wins with the Microsoft Surface line as well as others, especially premium devices. These are all high volume, highly advertised product lines available in almost every market and not hard to find. In the case of the three mentioned above, some are household names and all of them are well known in the technical media zeitgeist.
HP Elitebook, one of the more premium designs with AMD inside
However, if AMD is mentioned in a similar vein, it is difficult to draw a single conclusion or the name of a premium or otherwise well-known laptop model from memory unless you happen to either work directly with AMD marketing or you are the product manager at a parner OEM. There have been no design wins or public contracts with AMDs mobile processors, and no big halo products that champion both performance and industrial design in a single device. As a result there has to be an element of questioning here. Are OEMs unwilling to use AMD? Do AMD products have a bad reputation? Is there something inherent with the name or product that makes OEMs reluctant, or users to withhold their purchases? Or is there something fundamentally wrong with the processor? As is often the case, the predicted answer to this question is a mixed bag.
Carrizo over Kaveri
As mentioned previously, Carrizo is the name for the family of APUs that use AMDs fourth iteration of the Bulldozer architecture, Excavator. Carrizo is built on GlobalFoundries' 28nm process node and comes inline with AMDs recent renegotiation of contracts regarding the scale and scope of the APU product line. Carrizo APUs will be available in 15W variants, which reflects the focus of the architecture update as well as the change in metal stack arrangement incorporated for this family to optimize transistor density. Meanwhile the higher-end models will have an available TDP-Up mode of 35W in order to increase performance, although this is at the discretion of the OEM. AMD for their part has already stated that their primary use case for Carrizo is at 15W, as 35W is the point where the Carrizo's power optimizations aren't quite as efficient and the performance of previous generation APUs will intersect with Carrizo (when talking raw CPU, rather than other benefits Carrizo has).
In launching Carrizo, AMD was clear on the target market for this APU - laptops in the $400-$700 range. It has been pointed out by media and analysts that this market segment represents an opportunity for AMD to fit between Intel's low power/high performance/high cost Core-M line of processors, the low power/low performance/low cost Atom line and the higher power/medium cost Core i3. According to AMD, this segment represents 40% of all laptop sales, covering users who want more than a budget device but something below the high costs of a premium device.
Meanwhile AMDs secondary aim with Carrizo is to offer premium level performance in certain applications at a lower price point by using Carrizo's stance as the first CPU architecture to be ratified against the heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) standards. As a result, AMD had been working with software developers in order to leverage HSA benefits in specific code bases and subsequently improve in performance, particularly with software of widespread importance, such as Adobe and LibreOffice.
Carrizo is a true system-on-chip (SoC), integrating the CPU, the GPU, and the input/output hub all on one piece of silicon (and thus one package). This leads to several direct benefits - reducing the power consumption of the I/O hub by bringing it down to the same process node as the main processor, allowing different areas of the SoC to be power gated under a single control system rather than recreating power delivery networks around the system, and ease of use when it comes to HSA requiring less data to travel around external buses.
AMDs main competitor in the mobile processor space, disregarding tablets for the moment and devices like Surface RT/Chromebook Pixel, is Intel. Intel, like AMD, leverages an x86 CPU design with integrated graphics on the same die. Thanks to a combination of many years of experience with graphics and designs intentionally favoring high performance integrated GPUs, AMDs main positive point of performance in recent generations has been the integrated graphics arena, where they win out typically in terms of graphics performance/cost and graphics performance/power metrics. Thus a number of improvements to Carrizo over previous architectures relate to graphics use - either using it more with HSA or offloading certain workloads to dedicated IP to keep more of the SoC at an idle state.
Carrizo’s design allows AMD to add two more graphics compute units (+33%) at 15W compared to Kaveri at a similar frequency, which combined with IPC increases in the processor has led to some interesting claims for performance. These claims have been picked up by casual readers and OEMs alike.
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ncsaephanh - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
Can you guys do a podcast on this article? Would love to hear you guys discuss it and also answer questions/comments on the article.ET - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
Nice to see a Carrizo article finally, although it's rather disappointing, for example because only single channel was tested.You talked about solutions, here's how I see what AMD and publications like Anandtech need to do (I'm using Carrizo as an example, but it's a lesson for the future):
AMD: When Carrizo is available in a laptop, send one to Anandtech. Immediately. If you have a prototype before that, send that. We want to learn about the chip as quickly as possible, not have to wait months looking for nuggets of information on the web.
Anandtech: Benchmark the hell out of the laptop. If there's single channel with a dual channel option, show a comparative benchmark, but concentrate on dual. We're enthusiasts, we'll install a second DIMM to get better performance. For benchmarks, basic system performance and a plethora of games, and comparison to Intel, plus battery life. Deep dives are nice, but I'd rather have a quick overview of what the system is suitable for, and what kind of gaming it can achieve.
AMD: Desktop first! I know that laptops are where the money is, but desktop is where the enthusiasts are, and if your chip is worth anything, fans and publications like Anandtech will pair it with the fastest memory, configure it with the best TDP, and see what it's really capable of. OEM limitations will not get in the way.
AMD: Fans first! That's pretty much a repeat of the previous point, but AMD, you still have fans, and they are your best customers, not the OEM's or the clueless general public. If you make something that you think is good and you let your fans learn of it and get hold of it, they will tell you what they think and they will tell others. If you leave them in the dark, they will end up losing their enthusiasm.
Anandtech: Follow up on AMD stuff. It may be hard to get the latest AMD chips if AMD isn't helping, but at least let us know you're on it. An occasional news item telling us that you've tried to get some laptops for testing or whatnot will tell us that you're on it, and hopefully shame AMD and the OEM's enough to get a move on.
Personally, I would likely have bought a Carrizo system if there was one of similar size to my old Thinkpad X120e (which I still use, even if I'm not that happy with its speed). I might have bought a Carrizo for my HTPC if I could and I knew it provided decent enough performance.
sofocle10000 - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
I just signed in to state that Asus had nice business/multimedia notebooks (I used N60DP/N56DP and I actually use an N551ZU - all based on AMD), and although my actual N551ZU is only based on the top of the line Kaveri, it is an exceptional machine for normal use/light gaming...Customers play a big part in the AMD problem, but if there were more incentives (take my current N551ZU, which is a great notebook for ~750-850 $, and if configured with an SSD, you could hardly tell it apart most of the time from the Intel i5H/i7QH + GTX 950M variants), not only a great price, but a better build quality, display, sound system the the market average, some of them would actually pay more attention to the AMD.
The OEM's should have a more defined bottom line for the AMD notebooks - were dual channel memory and a better display, a hybrid SSHD or a SSD are a must, especially for the models in the upper part of the price range 400-700 $...
dragosmp - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
@Ian - great article, really a good example of investigative journalism. I'm happy this kind of articles are being revived, but being a reader of Tom's I see where this may be coming from.As the "guy that says what laptop/phone to buy" to my family and friends I have to say your findings and conclusions speak to me very clearly - AMD has a system-problem, not so much a CPU-problem (though some may argue differently). AMD chips are fed into cheap looking/feeling PCs with far too many corners cut, but this is how under 700$ market looks like. Could AMD's OEMs sell a 600$ 13" PC to compete with the CoreM UX305? I think not, simply because AMD's CPUs (who consume more) need thicker chassis with stronger cooling and a beefier battery and that costs money - so there's less available for the UX; even if the OEM accepted lower margins on the AMD PC, or AMD to sell the CPU at bargain prices, that design compared to the UX305 would be thicker and likely noisier.
If Zen is good, I could see it in a Mac as Apple has a history of doing good software. Or AMD should build their own surface line and set an example of what can be done.
Gunbuster - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
People buy the cheapest $300 laptop they can get or something premium. Who are they targeting with these mid-rangers?farmergann - Tuesday, February 9, 2016 - link
Wife uses her Y700 for school and a few hours of photo editing every week. Exactly what she wanted. This article did a worthless job of representing the actual Y700 w/fx8800p you can pick up at Best Buy for $665-830. Everything is fantastic about it save for the TB HDD which I immediately replaced with a Samsung 850 Pro I had laying around.Somehow, this "investigative" nonsense missed the fact the U.S. Y700 has a superb little IPS screen with Freesync to go along with a surprisingly (truly) good sound system and -despite the author's claim- dual channel ram. Just for grins I've played BF3 and a few other games - none of which had issues. Great low/mid-range laptop with plenty of chops.
every1hasaids - Tuesday, February 9, 2016 - link
Nope, the US model is absolute garbage. They skimped on the VRMs and the laptop subsequently throttles in moderately intensive CPU tasks. Example, try running Cities: Skylines with a decent sized city and tell me that it doesn't stutter after about 20 seconds of play and every 5 seconds or so after that. The stutters which coincide with the CPU being utilized near 100% and the frequency dropping per resource monitor and Afterburner all the way down to 1.6ghz... Also I don't know what you're talking about with the Freesync capability, I could not get it to work after reading elsewhere that it may be possible.The main issue with a product like the Y700 is that the intel variant is only a couple hundred bucks more and you get a genuine quad core with HT, dual channel DDR4-2133 and comparable discreet graphics. Oh, and it has no trouble with voltage supply. Not to mention that the m.2 interface is PCI-E as opposed to SATA on the AMD model. It just doesn't make sense to purchase a far inferior product for only $200 less at the price point these models occupy.
farmergann - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
Cities: Skylines? LOL, that's about as rich as whining about Starcraft 2 performance on an FX Octacore - what were you expecting exactly? For people not looking to shove a laughably CPU bound title down a 35W laptop's throat, the FX8800p with user installed SSD is a far better choice, sorry guy.Peichen - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
Wow, that's wasting a lot of time and words reviewing a product no one will buy. AMD needs to exist to keep the cheap Intel stuff dirt cheap but I don't feel anyone should waste time reviewing AMD CPU products. 10 years of marketing hype and under-delivery means AMD is actually slower than ever compares with Intel.I bought 2 AMD CPU over the last 6/7 years and frankly I wish I spend more buying Intel because I wouldn't have to spend time and money as often upgrading the CPU.
Danvelopment - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
The way I see it, AMD needs to stop comparing themselves with themselves and needs to compare themselves with the competition. People don't understand the improvements if they aren't involved with the predecessor.They produce a reasonable product that performs at 60-80% of the competition at 50% of the price.
Good designs are produced for the competition, that could fundamentally have their parts, and they're losing on the design front.
And strangely, for similar products the AMD machines are the same cost, even though the difference is the chip (at halfish the price).
Can they not work to develop an easier transition method for OEM's to produce this-or-that designs that allow end users to pick AMD or Intel during the selection process. Tier them like Dell does for the various Intel processors but have them consistently show up as the cheapest option $100 off a $500 laptop is a decent drop and if the chip and PCB is $150 cheaper to produce the OEM still wins).
Differentiating the product creates too many variables people don't understand, and creates the issue above, CPU brand aversion on entire product stacks with no common ground.
I'd say take a long, hard look at current machines, and develop a method of getting their chips into them as an option, without OEMs designing a product from the ground up.
I'd certainly consider AMD if I could just select it as an option that knocks $100 off on the low cost tier laptop in my workplace.