The Huawei MateBook 16 Review, Powered by AMD Ryzen 7 5800H: Ecosystem Plus
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 20, 2021 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- AMD
- Huawei
- Matebook
- Ryzen
- Zen 3
- MateBook 16
- Huawei Share
- Ryzen 7 5800H
System Performance: Balanced and Performance
The design of the MateBook 16 puts it in a smaller sub-section of the market. It’s a laptop designed to be big, but portable, so it has a strong 45 W CPU inside, albeit tuned down to 35 W, and no discrete GPU. That means we’re between a rock and a hard place – it has more performance and sustained performance than anything built with 15 W processors, such as the U-series, but compared to other laptops its size, which have big cooling and discrete graphics, it cannot sustain the high turbos that the others can. The upside is battery life in comparison.
So the MateBook has to play to its strengths, and those involve using the Zen 3 architecture up to 4.7 GHz for strong single-threaded performance, and then pushing all eight cores and sixteen threads when needed. Combine that with strong integrated graphics in Vega 8 (it’s still not RDNA 2 quite yet) and a fast SSD, and it should push through faster than a U-series without the bulk of a gaming laptop.
The Performance mode had little-to-no effect on any of our single thread metrics, however there was a good 4-9% gain in multi-threaded workloads. The longer the workload, the bigger the improvement. In comparison to other processors tested, it carves through the 15 W options, and against the 11th Gen Core-HK hardware it falls behind on general tests that can’t push the frequency or power, but for the traditional tests AMD does well on, it can beat what Intel has to offer.
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Samus - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
Every notebook I've ever had with a dGPU has been useless for portability. It isn't that they are bulky or heavy anymore, that issue has been overcome, even though they still run hot.But they get terrible battery life whether using the dGPU or not - the battery is physically tiny to make room for all the shit they cram into it.
My last two notebooks have been iGPU Intel's but now that we have companies considering additional headroom on the Ryzen GPU that would likely beat anything Intel has.
Prestissimo - Thursday, October 21, 2021 - link
Spend more money on laptops with 90-100WHr Battery + non-4K Screen + Ryzen 5000H/HS CPUs, and you'll find that they are lightweight, portable, cool on idle, and have excellent 7-8 hour battery life.You get what you pay for.
EasyListening - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
AMD's partnership with TSMC puts it at the head of the pack in electrical efficiency. TSMC's manufacturing technology is superior to Intel's and Samsung's. Intel is still struggling with 10nm, and Nvidia screwed itself by ticking TSMC off (tried to pressure them on pricing), leaving it no option but to go with Samsung and it's poor yields, and that much, everyone knows. What might not be obvious is that AMD put together a dream team to launch Lisa Su's tenure as CEO. Papermaster would have known Su at IBM (she was head of research). Jim Keller and Raja Koduri are both former AMD. The three of them were at Apple, making the iPhone 4. They probably trained the team that produced the M1. Koduri is now at Intel, and Papermaster is still at AMD. Keller is doing his thing, blowing minds wherever he goes. AMD is not inferior, it is just much smaller. With TSMC's help, AMD might look like a behemoth, but actually, it's more like a boutique chip design shop. And Su is a genius who should have won a Nobel Prize for her pioneering work on silicon doping (made it possible to use copper instead of aluminum traces in semiconductors). Her PhD from MIT is in semiconductor manufacturing. Intel may be bigger, but AMD punches way above it's weight class. It's simply an amazing company, and we can all expect nothing but the best from them going forward. The turnaround of AMD is the best tech story of this era.lemurbutton - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
Another laptop review without industry-leading Macbooks. Come on Anandtech.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
That's because it's a review, not a comparison, Captain Genius.hlovatt - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
But it does compare to other laptops in the performance tables. So why not include MBA and it’s M1 processor. It would be very interesting to see how they stack up.dontlistentome - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
It compares if you're running Chrome or a benchmark set. MS Excel models or a ton of other stuff? Not so much.philehidiot - Wednesday, October 20, 2021 - link
The price disparity means they're in different ballparks. I like my Mac and it's OS. But I'm not looking for a new one at the price their decent systems come in at.lemurbutton - Thursday, October 21, 2021 - link
M1 Macbook Air is $850 on sale frequently.fishingbait15 - Friday, October 22, 2021 - link
That $850-$1000 M1 MacBook Air has a 13' screen, 8 GB RAM, 256 GB storage, has 1/8 of its GPU cores disabled for no particular reason and only supports 1 external monitor. Even if you leave aside the massive amount of Windows-only and x86-only software AND its complete and total lack of upgradability - it doesn't even support an eGPU despite having a Thunderbolt 4 port - there are tons of reasons not to consider the M1 MacBook Air a relevant comparison. Yes, it runs slightly faster but it is an entry level device. This isn't. You would need to compare it to the 13' MacBook Pro ... which costs a couple hundred more yet still has many of the same downsides (all the GPU cores work on it at least).