I think this article provides a pretty delicate and nuanced treatment of chorizo and its place in the market (both potential & actual). There's no doubt that the circumstances demanded it. This was not business as usual and I'm glad Anandtech recognized the need for that additional effort.
We're fooling ourselves if we pretend that any journalistic entity puts the sane amount of effort into every project. We're talking about living, breathing humans, not robots.
I found the language convoluted, verbose, and difficult to read, compared to, say, Anand's straightforward and logical writing:
"Nonetheless, Intel’s product line is a sequence of parts that intersect each other, with low end models equipped with dual core Pentiums and Celerons, stretching into some i3 and i5 territory while still south of $1000. In this mix is Core M, Intel’s 4.5W premium dual core parts found in devices north of $600."
"south of/north of"... can't you just put in "below/above"? And all that "intersecting of parts", can't you just say from the Atom to Pentiums, Celerons, i3's, and i5's....
The whole thing reads like they're paying you to score a high word count. Lots of information to extract here, but it can be 3 pages shorter and take half as long to read.
That is why Anandtech has video adds on their main page - designed for people like you. Who simply lack reading comprehension past 8th grade and find it hard to understand. Just watch watch the video on how to loose weight that auto-plays on the side.
Or... try Tom's Hardware - they cater to your demographic.
There's no question that Anand had a powerful way of writing that was uniquely simple yet educated you nevertheless. And for a layman that reads this sort of stuff to learn new information, that's very attractive and I kinda miss it (along with Klug).
However, I give Ian a pass because he at least attempted to use other brand of conveying his ideas. In certain sections he used special table-like fitting to separate "parallel" sections/stances so that the rader would be more apt to compare them. So there's at least some effort, though he surely could do better.
fmcjw does have a point, but in all fairness it is much harder to explain techical stuff in layman terms than it is to be long-wordy. Carl Sagan was the master of it on TV, and Anand was excellent at it on paper.
I didn't find anything wrong with the language Ian used, as this is piece is still on a technical level, but can be understood by the layman that knows a bit more than just what the stickers on the outside tell.
To me, the phrase "parts that intersect each other" lays out that there is a myriad of options where configurations overlap, where as saying "from the Atom to Pentiums, Celerons, i3s and i5s" indicates that there is a pricing structure that is related to general CPU performance, which there really isn't when it comes to low-end machines.
yeah, colorful language is nice. Dumbing down adjectives or descriptions can often construe the true message IMO. This way, it paints a more descriptive/colorful picture.
When I saw the sub-page title "AMD's Industry Problem" I though it is the conclusion, after reading that page I found out I am just at half of the whole article. Well done Ian, well done...
I know, right? I'm one of those weirdos that reads the pages backwards (mostly), so I was immediately surprised at the list of pages before the conclusion. I honestly haven't finished even half of the article, but it's already evident that some tlc went into it.
Unfortunately, this often happens when you work for some ecommerce shop selling various goods, the boss of the shop may not want such kind of articles about the products he or she sells. They want it now and fast, just to fill the site with irrelevant content. The problem is that you want to make something better than a stupid re-write. But who cares? So, I am happy for those guys who write for AnandTech and other similar websites. They can learn something new while doing their job.
This article certainly proves one thing: When it comes to price lists on Intel Mobile parts, the numbers you see on ARK have absolutely nothing to do with the actual price that OEMs pay in real life.
Observe the supposedly major $200 price premium for Intel chips when you read a price list in a vacuum, but then see that the real-life Intel system [with an honest-to-God *quad core* chip!] is basically selling for the exact same price as a much less capable Chorrizo part.
I personally got a Costco-Special notebook for the wife last year at $500.. it has an I5-5200U, and I assure you that the OEM most certainly didn't sell that notebook at that price after spending $300 on the CPU.
When I said quad core I was referring to the Core i5-6300HQ (45W) in the price comparison that Anand posted. It is a 4 physical core part in a notebook that only costs $8 more than a "4 core" Carrizo using AMD's "cores".
I am aware that the 5200U is a dual-core hyperthreaded part too. Like I said, the entire price of the notebook including the 5200U was only $500 (it has 8 GB of RAM too).
Except you didn't put in consideration that what you bought was called "Special" for a reason and it wasn't the release price of the product that was most likely $200+ more.
AMD still has a long way to go before its considered a valid choice. The 4.5W intel beats it in the tasks its gonna be used in. Even in graphics, the supposed strong side of amd's APU.
Yes, and while Zen is going to be much more power efficient, the first models are for servers and desktops. It won't be until well into 2017 until we see a mobile part from AMD based on Zen.
I agree. I'm not saying that Zen will beat whatever Intel is selling in 2017. I'm just saying that it would be hard for mobile Zen parts not to be more power efficient than these last-gasp Carrizo's when mobile Zen finally launches.
Obviously, a new mobile chip every year around June: Llano in 2011, Trinity in 2012, Richland in 2013, Kaveri in 2014, Carrizo in 2015, Bristol Ridge (same as Carrizo) in 2016, Raven Ridge (Zen, 14nm) in 2017.
Carrizo with single-channel DDR3 1600 is pointless, especially for games. Did I miss the results when you put the second DIMM in?
I've said it before, AMD needs to create its own laptop designs, like it designs its own GPUs, and then sell them via its own OEM channels that it uses for Graphics Cards.
Obviously, it needs to shift its APUs to 14nm first, because 28nm has been pushed as far as possible with Carrizo, but there's a massive gap in power consumption and performance still.
It will be nice to finally see Carrizo get a proper shake. Limiting it to 15W and single-channel seems like a terrible shame, especially in the category of laptop it is being sold in. Nearly everyone that I interact with never actually counts the hours or minutes of battery life they get. Instead, they just keep their laptops plugged in any time they are near an outlet.
Desktop Carrizo excites me mostly just because I want to build a UHD-proof HTPC out of it.
The 845 doesn't have an iGPU. You threw away the chance to directly compare the color compression advantage of Carrizo's GPU in a very limited bandwidth scenario like this one by either removing one dimm from the Kaveri laptop or adding another one in one of the Carrizo laptops. I wouldn't ask why. Thanks for the article.
Thank you for this extensive article. Many people seem to dismiss AMD CPUs today without actual data. I commend your efforts to examine all aspects of real systems. I'll be waiting for the data from 845 (which sound like a decent upgrade for a NAS...).
This is something I've been interested in since AMD released the 845 (wasn't there a Phenom II-based Athlon 845? I know there was a Phenom II 845...). Shame that they chose not to release an A12/FX Carrizo APU, those 512 shaders could be nice...
I agree with that, it's _really_ missing results with dual channel. I understand why single-dimm configurations were tested, but at least two of the notebooks had the option to use dual channel, and even if it might be difficult to get preconfigured options with dual-channel, it's easily upgradeable - I'm also interested in what Carrizo can do as a chip, not only what it can do if sufficiently crippled by the OEM. (Not that I expect wonders with dual channel though, at least not at 15W where the graphics doesn't run with more than half the max clock anyway, but still...)
On the chip side, we'll do a full breakdown of perf and IPC when we get our hands on the desktop version in Athlon X4 845. I'm hoping to get some R-Series too, and we can do DDR3 vs DDR4 on AMD as well. That might provide a better pure comparison which I know some users want to see. I do too :)
Excellent, excellent article. Lucid questions asked and answers pursued - we need more of this kind of journalism. I can't praise this enough.
It would have been really interesting to see the results had you filled the second SODIMM on the laptops that supported dual channel? I assumed time constraints prevented you from doing so. Also any chance of going to the OEMs directly and asking them why they make the decisions they make?
I second that. A proper 13 inch design with a 35 watt 8800p, none of this hybrid graphics stuff, and good battery life, would be an insta-buy. Or 14 or 15 inch. I just want something like my old lenovo e535, but smaller. It cant be THAT hard, can it?
Agreed. This article was basically a long-winded way of saying "all current AMD laptops suck, and we aren't even sure how good they could be because *all* the OEMs half-assed their designs"
I, for one, would be very interested in an AMD designed laptop.
Apparently AMD wants to push 28 nm even farther with Bristol Ridge, maybe better binned chips and hopefully DDR4 support will provide a much needed boost.
Were you able to test 18Gbps HDMI? The ability to drive an external display with 2160p 4:2:2 @ 60Hz? I guess the lack of a 10bit accelerated video decoder almost makes the point moot for future 2160p content though....
Last time I shopped for a laptop (which was recently), I was considering an A10-based HP with a 1080p screen. The problem I saw was in reviews the battery life was really poor. It looked like HP put a small battery in it, making the thing only worthy as a DTR. I ended up going with a Lenovo with an i3. I guess part of the problem is that there are so many variants of laptops that finding a review of a specific model is impossible, and all you have to go on are things like Amazon or Best Buy ussr reviews, which can be extremely painful to read.
That was a wonderful article that I thoroughly enjoyed reading to start my Friday. Long story short, you perfectly define my laptop buying rationale with "SSD, dual channel memory, 8 hours+ light battery, under 2kg, Full HD IPS panel".
That's why I bought an i5 UX305. I wanted an AMD machine because I plain like the company and would like them to succeed to bring more competition to Intel, but I found NOTHING even close to the specs you mentioned. The UX305 fit the description perfectly and cost me $750. It was an immediate purchase for me. If AMD managed the OEM relationship to create such a machine, it would be an insta-buy for me. Also, Zenbooks with Zen APUs oculd be a great marketing strategy :)
AMD is a company that shoots itself in the foot at every opportunity. I am truly perplexed. Their cat cores shouldnt even exist. But not only do those crippled parts exist, they crippled their premium parts by combining the two platforms! WHY? How could they not see that every notebook would be single channel? They wasted the entirety of their ATI purchase, as you can see with the Rocket League results vs Intel. This is a disgrace.
AMD needs to realize that it IS AMD who controls the User experience. Look at the Mackbook Air. Look at the Surface Pro. Look at the Playstation 4 and Xbox One. All of these platforms have a set minimum level of performance. Sure they might be more expensive than a $300 atom clunker, but at least the user will not throw the thing out the window after pulling their hair out.
AMD needs to put a floor under their products. 4 cores. 8GB of unified HBM. 512 cores GPU. This is the SoC that they need. Sure they can fuse off a core or whatever to harvest bad dies, but this is the minimum die they should be making. Ideally within 2 years they will move to a 4 core, 16GB HBM, and they will replace one stack of HBM with 128GB of HBF. They need to control the memory bandwidth of their SoC. Take away the ability of the OEMs to cripple performance. Use HBF to take away the ability for OEMs to cripple storage performance also. Do this, and every AMD system will be fast. And it will get design wins.
The cat cores exist to compete with Atom-level SOCs. Intel takes the Atom design from phones and tablets all the way up to Celeron and Pentium laptops. It makes some business sense due to low cost chips, but if the OEM puts them in a design and asks too much of the SOC, then there you have a bad experience. Such SOCs should not be found in anything bigger than a $300 11" notebook. For 13" and up, the bigger cores should be employed.
The cat cores can't compete with Atom level SoC because they don't operate at low enough power levels (ie, 2W to 6W). The cat cores may have been designed to compete with Atom performance and Atom priced parts, but they were poorly suited for mobile designs at launch.
AMD hasn't updated the cat cores in over three years! It is a dead channel to them. They had a bit of a problem competing in the tablet market against a competitor that was willing to dump over $4 billion pushing inferior bay trail chips. Take a plane to China and you can still find a lot of those Bay Trail chips sitting in warehouses as once users had the misfortune of using tablets being run by them the reviews destroyed any chance that those tablets ever had at being sales successes.
AMD was forced to stop funding R&D on cat cores as they were in no position to be selling them at negative $5.
In the time that AMD has stopped development on the cat cores Intel has improved their low end offerings, but still not enough to compete with ARM offerings that have improved as well. And now tablets are dropping at similar rates to laptops so it is actually a good thing for AMD that they suspended research on the cat cores. Sorta dodged a bullet.
At least they still get decent volume out of them through Sony and Microsoft gaming platforms.
YoY Q4 earnings showed a 42% decline in revenue for computing and graphics with less than 2bn in revenue for full-year 2015 and $502m operating loss. You couldn't be more correct. The console wins aren't just keeping the company afloat, they practically define it entirely.
Since you are talking about use experience, AMD is not the only company with a bad user experience. I purchased an Alienware 15" R2 laptop on cyber Monday and it is horrible, and support is horrible. I compare my user experience to a Commodore 64 using a Cassette drive - its that bad (I suspect you are old enough to appreciate cassette drives). It arrived in a non-bootable configuration. It cannot stream Netflix to my 2005 Sony over an HDMI cable unless I use Chrome - took Netflix help to solve that (I took a cell-phone pic of a single Edge browser straddling the two monitors - the native monitor half streaming video and the Sony half dark after passing over the hdmi cable. It only occurs with Netflix). On 50% of bootups it gives me a memory change error despite even the battery being screwed in. On 10% of bootups it fails to recognize the HDD. Once it refused to shutdown and required holding the power button for 10 secs. Lately it claims the power brick is incompatible on about 10% of bootups. Yes, I downloaded all latest drives, bios, chipset, etc. Customer Service has hanged up on me once, deleted my review once, and repeatedly asked for my service tag after I already gave it to them. Some of the Netflix issue is probably Micorsoft's issue - certainly MS App was an epic fail, but much of even that must be Dell's issue. I realize it is probably difficult to spot many of these things given the timeframe of the testing you do, and the Netflix issue in particular is bizarre. I am starting to think a Lenovo might not be so bad.
Ian, What specific model of the Elitebook 745 G3 did you test? You listed the QHD screen (2560 x 1440 IPS) but you also wrote that it came in at just under $700. Is this correct? The one that you received for $700 included the QHD screen? Thanks
I remember being told it was 700, though I may have misheard and perhaps they were speaking GBP. But AB is right, the larger screen is 1080p and more expensive.
The HP website is surprising though - the UX on the website is crazy to find a product that isn't the latest and greatest. It is very difficult to find anything and you seem to pay a premium for speccing out a custom Elitebook. Trying to spec out the one I was given came to $1900 from a $1620 base, which clearly isn't right because the high end 'buy now' model was about $1120 with similar specifications.
GBP certainly makes a lot more sense. The base USD$750 model on HP's site has an A8-8600B, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB HDD. If you want to find a Carrizo system with an "awful user experience" there it is.
Custom-building an HP business system from their site is also expensive for no reason other than "because we said so." They really want you to buy the mass-manufactured SmartBuy models, although you may have better luck with a custom unit (read: "reasonable pricing") if you buy from a 3rd-party reseller.
I would like to see some GPU benchmarks with a second stick of RAM added to the 745 G3 though. Single-channel memory gives integrated graphics the Tonya Harding treatment.
Another review of Carrizo in the HP 745 G3 showed a 30% improvement in gaming when the second stick of RAM was installed. It went from woefully behind Intel to just ahead of them after sufficient RAM was provided.
It is remarkable that any OEM would damage their own reputation by putting out crap that is obviously intended to funnel sales to Intel.
Imagine an OEM putting out a model, let's call it HP100, and offering it with identical specs with the only difference being a Carrizo CPU vs. an I5 from Intel. Few if any, would notice a difference in performance in the real world, not talking benchmarks.
The OEM would have a $100 savings on the Carrizo version if not more. If they were to sell it for $50 less than the Intel version they would sell more and that extra $50 profit on the AMD machine would more than offset the "rebates" they are getting from Intel. So they could have a higher profit margin at a lower price point. Afterall, with all the Intel marketing you'd still have plenty of people opting for the Intel version with it's lower profit margin. Just not as many and overtime you could approach Intel and point out that you make more money off AMD machines and who knows, maybe for the first time in recent history the OEM would control how their company is run and Intel would say "I guess we can cut our price by $25" and then you would be making the same profit on both Intel and AMD machines since, of course, the OEM wouldn't pass that $25 to the customer.
They could still offer junk machines at lower price points. Fill em up with Celerons or whatever they wanted attached to HDDs, 4GB of RAM, and crap screens.
Surely, no OEM is still following the old Intel rebate plan that allowed Intel to determine the market share that the OEM is allowed to give AMD. Or, are they?
I hate HP store with all my might, back in the day I got better experience donwloading from japanese p2p's not knowing japanese and just using a simple guide.
Please, just dont let Toshiba make laptops, just DON'T. Sorry for the word, but Toshiba is a shit brand that deserves to die. All their laptops have cooling solutions that are badly designed from the start, and the they cut all the corners and go for paper thin 4mm heatpipes on top of deformed and pitted 1.5mm cooper plates that make poor contact with the dies, the fans are thin, the thermal paste is worse than toothpaste, just stop allowing them to disgrace AMD name. HP is also guilty of this, after the disgrace that where the dv6 models almost no one in Portugal and a lot other countries ever want a laptop with AMD cpu or gpu, because DV6's are just know for being litteral toasters that crash and burned, yes part of that was due to lack of maintenance, but still, it left a very sour taste regard AMD/ATI equiped laptops.
Today only people with low monetary margins will go for an AMD laptop, because they are the cheapest ones, and even then HP and Toshibas just manage to make toasters out of 7 and 15Watts TDP, its like they actually spend time engineering them to became so hot with so little TDP's...
Nice article. And I get the point of the article about OEM's and AMD. I mostly agree with Shadowmaster 625. But it would have been nice to see a dual channel memory test. The Elitebook supports it. Slap in the extra ram and test it. And try dual channel 1866 Ram too.
Shame the Lenovo doesn't support dual graphics - any reason why, or will this be updated in drivers? Especially as the integrated one has the same number of SPs as the dedicated, it could add a lot to the power equation.
Somebody *IS* paying OEMs to hamstring the machines: Customers. Customers who want cheap products that is.
AMD makes its reputation as: "Intel is too expensive! We're cheap!" Don't act all shocked and surprised when the rest of the components in the system end up being the cheap components too.
As Anand just pointed out with that price comparison, even with all the cheaping out you can still see a whopping $8 price advantage for AMD on comparably configured notebooks.
I feel like AMD needs to pull a MS surface or Nexus and put out a reference model to show OEMs how it is supposed to be done. If all OEMs will do is put out a half assed effort, at least then they can just copy the reference design and it will work well.
Sure, if they had the money to. As it stands, the company is now banking on Zen to rescue them. I don't think they can afford to invest in going solo with device designs, at least not right now.
Great write-up, Ian. This is enlightening, and the buoyant attitude at AMD might be saying a lot about what we can expect to see from the 2016/17 product releases.
Speaking to Carrizo, I'm not sure they realized how badly they were hurting themselves when they elected to keep Kabini/Temash as single-channel designs and then provide OEMs a cheap out by making it pin-compatible with the big architecture. GCN has always been very bandwidth-dependent in every APU they've released. These single-channel setups have got to be really starving the SoC.
Either way, the performance picture points out what everyone already knows. Zen can't get to mobile quickly enough.
Including all, AMD and nVidia both at their funeral state! They can not possibly open 22, 14, 10 etc. micron fabric.
Intel spended 5 billion dollars to open their new Arizona factory, they will pass lower processes there as well. AMD and nVidia can not get, even a billion dollar profit in these years. It is impossible for them to spend that much money to a new low process factory.
Those little tweaks can not help them to survive....
They don't build factories. TSMC and Samsung (and GloFo to a lesser extent) build factories and do R&D for these processes. Nvidia, AMD. Samsung, Qualcomm, MediaTek and many other companies design chips to the standards of TSMC/Samsung/GloFo and pay money for wafers and running the wafers through the fab.
The cost for this per wafer is meant to get all that money back in a few years. And than the process keeps on running for over 10 years sometimes.
It is getting more expensive to get to smaller nodes and the performance increase and power decrease is getting smaller. And costs more to design chips and run wafers. So it is getting harder to find the funds to shrink. Which is one of the reasons Intel has delayed their 10nm process.
Thanks for this review. Really needed for sometime. It was missing from the internet, not just Anandtech.
As for the laptops, they say as much as there is to tell. Small Chinese makers, who no one knows they exist, would built better laptops than these. HP, Toshiba and Lenovo in this case, multibillion international giants that seems have all the technicians and the R&D funds necessary, end up producing Laptops with "strange" limitations, bad choices, low quality parts and in the end put prices that, even with all those bad choices and limitations, are NOT lower than those on Intel alternatives. It's almost as if Intel makes the choices for the parts in those laptops. Maybe their is a "trololol" sticker on them somewhere hidden addressed to AMD. I guess that way those big OEM don't make Intel too angry and at the same time, if there is another legal battle between AMD and Intel in the future, they will have enough excuses to show to the judge in their defense, if accused that they supported a monopoly.
This article is what makes Anandtech great. Just keep being like this guys, your work is awesome! I'm going to spend some time clicking your ads, you deserve it :)
As for the "poll" about who's to blame, IMHO it is:
1 - AMD for letting OEMs place Carrizo in designs with terrible panels and single-channel solutions. It's just not good for the brand. "You can't put a Carrizo with single-channel cheap RAM because that's not how it was designed. You want to build bottom-of-the-barrel laptop? We have Carrizo-L for you." I'm pretty sure Intel has this conversation regarding Core M and Atom/Pentium/Celeron solutions. I know AMD is in a worse solution to negotiate, but downplaying Carrizo like this isn't good for anyone but Intel. In the end, what AMD needs is a guy who can properly sell their product. Someone who convince the OEMs that good SoCs need to be paired with decent everything-else. $500 is plenty for a 12/13" IPS/VA screen (even if it's 720/800p), 128GB SSD and 4+4GB DDR3L. Why not pull a Microsoft's Surface and build a decent SKU for that price range so that other OEMs can follow? Contract one OEM to make the device they envisioned, sell it and see all others following suit.
2 - OEMs for apparently not having this ONE guy who calls the shots and knows that selling a crappy system automatically means losing customers. And this ONE other guy (or the same) for not knowing that constantly favoring Intel with their solutions is bound to make the whole company's life miserable if Intel's only competitor kicks the bucket. The consumer isn't meant to know these things, but the OEMs certainly are. It's 2016. We're way past the age of tricking the customer to buy a terrible user experience through big numbers (like "1TB drive woot"). He/She will feel like the money just wasn't and next time will buy a mac. Want a $300-400 price point? Get a Carrizo-L with a 128GB SSD and a 720p IPS panel. Want $500-700 Price point? Get a Carrizo with dual-channel, 256GB SSD and 900p/1080p IPS screen.
Anything under 1080p is simply not usable. All these 1366x768 panels are just awful. I have an old netbook with one (12.1") and I've put a small SSD in there and loaded it with Ubuntu. I cannot have a Google Hangouts window open and a web browser open wide enough to view most pages. Basic web browsing + IM - 1366x768 completely fails at the task.
Indeed, 768p is fine on my 11" Samsung Chromebook but I would not tolerate it on anything bigger. IMO 1600x900 should be the minimum screen res for budget machines. 1080p for midrange and whatever you like for higher end.
Resolution is not as important as the quality of the panel. I used a Lenovo X1 Carbon. It has a 14" 1080p screen. But it's a TN panel and that just makes it a pain in the ass. I am amazed that Lenovo uses such a lousy panel in its $1k+ laptop while some 10" sub-$200 tablets use IPS.
Toshiba can make a $400 chromebook with a good 1080p display. Fully agreed.
1080p panel, make it thicker so you can put a larger battery and so the laptop can handle up to 35W from the APU. Do dual channel.
When plugged change APU power mad to 35W, when in battery make it 15W. Probably can be done for $500 for a 15" laptop with an A8. $50/100 upgrade to 128/256GB SSD and $50/100 upgrade to A10/FX.
So what I had originally thought would be an advantage for Carrizo, the same motherboard for both Carizzo and Carizzo-L, turned out to screw AMD since OEMs refuse to provide any semblance of sufficient memory on the Carizzo non L chipsets.
As for Zen, I can promise you that it will be a failure in laptop configurations if OEMs continue to reign it in with poor configurations such as single channel memory, HDDs and low quality screens.
The only way to get a quality AMD system in this day and age is to go to a custom PC builder and give him the specs you require. Unfortunately, 90% of PC consumers wouldn't know what specs to give the builder and I'm sure Intel has coerced a lot of custom builders to push their CPUs through kickbacks.
Amazing article, Ian! Took the better part of an hour to read it between chores and emails, but it was time well spent :)
That said, I feel like one aspect regarding AMD's race-to-the-bottom has been ignored: AMD's own role in it. For decades, and with only a couple of notable exceptions, AMD has marketed itself as the cheaper alternative with 'good enough' performance. Well, unfortunately they've succeeded and this is the result. Carrizo processors on lagging nodes being sold, if only to decrease OEM investments, for dirt cheap and can only just compete with Intel's low end/mid-tier chips. If their engineers are proud of their efforts, then perhaps they need a reality check and take a look at those benchmarks. The APU is so lopsided and bandwidth starved that it should have never made it past the initial stages of design. (Why on earth are they selling 512SPs if they can't feed them? Is the company more worried about chewing up GloFo wafer commitments than designing a balanced design?)
For AMD to command more volume, higher profit margins, and dictate minimum design/spec requirements, AMD also has to start making class-leading products. 'Good enough' should never be uttered within corporate offices else risk being fired. Unfortunately, mediocrity has been the staple of AMD's CPU side for as long as I can remember. CEOs and chief architects have come and gone, and things still haven't changed. After the X2 derivatives of the A64/K8 the company admitted defeat, if not outwardly than certainly tacitly.
I'm not hopeful. Those days are long gone. It's been far too long since AMD has made something that has piqued my, or consumers', interest. They've got nothing but recent failures to point to. Unless Zen comes out and actually beats out Intel's comparable chips in cost, single-threaded, multi-threaded, and power consumption, every person within AMD should admit defeat. The goal is perfection, and personally it seems they still don't understand that.
AMD PLEASE, start selling mobiles devices under your brand.
4 of 5 "design wins" shown here are complete sh*t, the Lenovo supposed to be at least decent got serious problems of throttling because they designed the cooling for a 15w TDP.
You're screwing yourself AMD letting OEM's troll you time and time again.
my Lenovo y700 came with 8gb ram in two 4gb sticks. Sandra and cou z show duel channel. memory test is very similar to my desktop kaveri system with ddr1600. also my r9m385x has 4gb memory. amd's specs list it as 896 shader, which I would agree with as it performs like my 7790 in firestrike
I am really surprised that with AMD's current objectives, and strength in graphics, they didn't make the decision to have the cat cores use dual-channel memory controllers. Intel Atom x7 uses a dual-channel controller.
I am really happy to see AMD's long-term decision making. I've read them saying things like "Going forward, we don't want to be regarded as the ultra-low cost option." Which hopefully means the end of articles like this one.
I love the graphs and detail. In the end there's one simple fact which is giving AMD the problem. It is Chipzilla's cash and capability in process nodes. Since you had the good point of mentioning that, most of the time, the SoC didn't mattered to consumers as probably because of good enough performance, AMD's simple goal is to achieve Intel's same process advantage for its known values.
AMD's chips are too big now with half the price of Intel's chips. They are selling near costs and is fighting for survival only. AMD's team is probably excited with their partnership with Samsung as this will put them again close to Intel in terms of process node advantage.
I believe, it didn't matter for AMD with the shortcomings of available devices as their goal seems to be surviving while continue research and development for future products and process nodes and put them back in the game.
I just saw some benchmarks with dual-channel memory and they are pretty impressive for entry level gaming on a 1366x768. I could have bought this versus an i5-5200 laptop I bought last year. But then, I haven't seen any Carrizo in the local market yet.
Right! The review should have included dual channel performance. Going through the review, I thought Intel finally came close with AMD in graphics performance. With dual channel, Carrizo is well ahead in gaming benchmarks at nearly half the price.
Anandtech: how did you determine that the Y700 pre-production unit that you tested was accessing its two memory cards through a single channel only? Are you simply reporting what AMD told you, or is there a test that readers can use to check production laptops, and other machines? (Might the two memory cards be mismatched in some way, so the processor backed off to single channel mode?)
Aside from being told directly, I did memory bandwidth testing and other software indicators (CPU-Z, AIDA, etc). Both modules were matched, I took them out and had a look.
@Ian Cutress, any reason you didn't put an extra 4GB stick in the G3 745? Seems like a really simple thing to do and would have given a really useful graphical comparison. I guess you guys are too poor to have a stick floating around!
Aside from your snarky comment, your answers are explained in the review.
The laptops were tested as sold. This is a review on the user experience of these devices. As shown on the Carrizo vs Core page, device after device from Carrizo comes by default with a single stick of memory. Most users who pick a device and go don't want to understand why their UX is the way it is, it just needs to work when they buy it.
I'd also like to mention that testing five laptops with a our suite of tests plus power testing and thermal testing in a single week without an opportunity to revisit is mightily tough for one person who doesn't have access to all their normal gear (testing was done on location, as mentioned), and adding in more variables extrapolates testing time which I didn't have.
We'll be doing further testing for Carrizo, specifically on generational updates, when the Athlon X4 845 comes out. I'm hoping to rope in an R-Series Carrizo platform as well (with IGP) to test DDR3/DDR4 comparison points.
Dude, you highlighted the fact that the 512 core Carrizo chip was running on a single channel, weren't you even slightly curious to find out how it performed on dual channel? It's like reviewing a water proof phone and not trying to drown it!
No, its like testing a phone as it came from the factory, then not paying for some third party "waterproofing" company to waterproof the phone and testing it underwater.
No it's really not, this laptop came from the factory with dual channel capability but that capability was not utilised because that would have shown the platform in a much better light, he even states that he checked the chips in the G2 to confirm that it was single channel. Upgrading the RAM on a laptop is a simple process that any end user can perform. The only discernible difference between the APU in the G2 & G3 is the number of GPU cores so why did he even bother testing the G3 without using dual channel configuration?
I look forward to that R-series test as it will provide a sneak peek at how much DDR4 relieves the bottleneck on integrated graphics when Bristol Ridge comes out.
Good article (although to be fair, I mostly skimmed it), and I agree with the conclusions. AMD should try harder to make sure their high-end products are paired with good components. Single-channel ram, bad screens, and slow hard drives with an A10 or mobile FX defeats the purpose of having those higher end APU's.
Plus, people will get a bad impression of AMD if a lot of them have poor trackpads, etc. I wish they'd make their own "signature" brand of laptops, and find someone to help make them a thing.
I'm really sorry for AMD. Kaveri and Carizzo on mobile, when configured to the proper ram, cooling and when using the highest performing part ... would've provided awesome performance, compared to Haswell and Broadwell. But no one bothered.
Bristol Ridge will basically be Carizzo with DDR4 support and since it will be even better binned 28 nm CPUs, maybe we'll get even higher frequency out of Excavator. As for GCN 2.0 GPUs ... it will be interesting to see.
I love my Surface Pro 4, even given the disaster that is Skylake drivers and Windows 10 horrible efficiency compared to W8.1. But MAN. I would've loved a proper Carrizo based Surface Pro/Book.
I would have really liked to see some dual channel results, or at least pulling a memory stick from the Kaveri and Intel systems to get a fair comparison. AMD says Zen brings a 40% IPC improvement. It'd be great to have a baseline to see if that 40% improvement is enough. In the dual channel intel to single channel AMD comparisons it does not appear to be enough, but we don't know how big of a factor memory was.
I want to buy an amd part for my next notebook but as was mentioned in the article, oems only choose bargain basement platforms to put the amd inside. The elitebook is the one exception, along with the lenovo if you don't mind the bulk.
But the elitebooks are super overpriced for what you get. They need to release an hp spectre version of a notebook with a zen apu, a dell xps notebook variant with an apu. Ideally, the models that include a discreet gpu should allow the apu to work in tandem.
In 2017 dx12 will be in full effect with games, and having two gpus working together by default could give a lot of amd equipped systems a larger edge, especially if the oversized ipc deficits between excavator and intel parts is minimized with zen.
The future really does rest on Zen, amd needs to laser focus on performance per watt and ipc, and equip the 2017 apus with polaris gpu parts or vega or whatever the first iterations will be called. That has to be the minimum. Put those in nice chassis with solid battery life and that is all they need.
In DX12 dual graphics will be automatic. Even an Intel Igpu combined with a discrete Nvidia or AMD GPU will "merge" the graphic capabilities in the laptop.
Theoretically, an AMD APU combined with an AMD GPU might have an advantage as all graphics would be from the same underlying graphic architecture. Time will tell if this bares out.
Note that it's only going to be as automatic as the game developer makes it, as devs will be responsible for implementing it. For the moment game devs are going to be the wildcard.
So AMD's marketing and distribution strategy is a failure. The way it's described it would seem consumers specifying their own PCs would be a away around the dominant logic determined by the existing channels. With today's production technology tailor made products on demand should be possible.
The other thing I don't get, is why doesn't AMD release a desktop Carrizo 4K capable APU for the FM2+ platform? Do they want to help the motherboard manufacturers sell more motherboards once the new AM4 socket APU:s are out in 2017, or do they want to sell their own existing products?
I have actually ordered Dell's AMD A8-8600P. It is intended as a media machine with the selling points being the low power equating to quiet and the 4K capability. The one thing I did notice is that he does have the Single Channel DDR3L 1600MHz memory. There is no indication on if it unlocks the watts to 35, but I have my doubts given the choice of RAM.
I will know more when I get it on Thursday and will update if anyone is still view this thread. But, at $380.00 it is not a bad choice for a media machine.
OBM (the brands) bid for designs by the ODM's based on the design cost and the expected volume. I high cost Intel design can be made profitable by the expectation of very high volumes. Even the most popular AMD design is expected to sell fewer than a low-volume Intel design. Business limitations and commercial forces bias the system towards Intel. Intel also have deeper pockets to sponsor/partner/subsidise designs to make them Intel exclusive. From manufactures to distributors to retail, Intel penalise (withdraw discounts/subsidies) anyone who lets AMD gain market share (many limited to <10%) and limit the use of the "best" designs for AMD (forced to sell only A4 & A6 instead of A8 or better, limit battery and other features so Intel always looks better). The "Intel brakes" applied to AMD limits their opportunities and potential earnings. This has limited the AMD R&D spending and forced AMD to stay behind in some aspects. It's amazing what AMD has done with 28nm but think of the advantage they could have had with 22nm and 14nm if successful achieved much earlier (no more than 9months after Intel).
I owned (owned being the operative word there) a Y700 with the AMD Carrizo FX8800P and can attest to the fact that the cooling solution and probably several other pieces of that device reviewed in this article are not the same design as what is available on the market in the US. There is a known issue of Lenovo skimping on the VRMs on the AMD Y700 which results in heavy throttling taking place. I couldn't play any game for more than 15 minutes before heavy throttling would occur. The data gathered from the review sample in this article should not be associated with the available product on the market. There appears to also be an FX-8700P variant of the Y700 out there however I cannot find any documentation of the existence of this device on Lenovo's site. Needless to say that I returned that laptop due to the significant throttling problems. I wish this site of some other site could get their hands on one of the FX-8800P Y700 laptops available in the US and put it through testing to reveal the problems with the unit. I'm guessing that they intend on releasing a Carrizo-L version of that laptop with the same motherboard which is why the VRMs are not up to the task of the 35w Carrizo and the added consumption of the dedicated graphics chip.
Why are there no units out there that can handle the 35w TDP Carrizo and a dedicated graphics card!?!?!?! It would be a great alternative to the Intel/Nvidia gaming notebook monopoly.
I'm hoping Zen/Polaris will actually see some adoption from OEMs and maybe AMD could even get involved in assisting proper implementation of their products so that the negative stigma could get nullified.
The FX-8700P would more properly be called an A10-8700P. It sounds like a bit of marketing if they are using the FX handle.
On gaming sites people are suggesting you turn off AMD's Turbo Core when gaming to avoid the FPS jumping up and down and overclock the processors. Overclocking a laptop is dicey at best though.
I just don't understand why in a comparison carrizo vs intel you didn't take out the intel chips memory in order to both have 1 channel memory, so do a benchmark for us in a same condition. The entire article show that intel offering has OEMs given what intel chips need, so the point in comparing carrizo vs intel is the chip itself not platform, since AMD has no platform at all.
That's a large focus of this article, though. The whole point was an investigation in to the implementation of Carrizo APUs by the OEM. It's highlighting exactly how like you said, the OEM platform, is hindering the potential of Carrizo processors.
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.
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 $...
@Ian - great article, really a good example of investigative journalism. I'm happy this kind of articles are being revived, but being a reader of Tom's I see where this may be coming from.
As the "guy that says what laptop/phone to buy" to my family and friends I have to say your findings and conclusions speak to me very clearly - AMD has a system-problem, not so much a CPU-problem (though some may argue differently). AMD chips are fed into cheap looking/feeling PCs with far too many corners cut, but this is how under 700$ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
90% of people don't notice a performance difference above 3000 Super CPU Points, Intel CPUs are usually 4000-8000 Super CPU points, our chips may only range from 3500-4500 Super CPU Points but regular users won't actually notice it, and at the same performance marks we're a hundred dollars cheaper. Make the sensible choice.
Another way, we've done extensive testing to see what end users want and need, then we targeted those sectors, and where we matched Intel we made sure we were a hundred bucks cheaper on the same devices.
"We don't hold the performance crown but the price/performance crown"
Dammit, the solution should be simple, but must come from AMD, since can't expect it from oem's and all of them offer let's say 2011 sockets as example, why amd do not develop a socket switch, so a small board with 2011 pins on the bottom and a circuit on this boad to give a whatever socket amd choose connections on top of it, in order to accept amd chips. But AMD must understand that the memory on their chips must be ddr4(Carrizo do), because the lazy OEMs whon't change memory sockets, as example. In this case the lazy ones have only to change the chip, and even better if any consumer have a old machine can upgrade to a chip that they choose. simple as that. Anyone that sales more creates the standard on the market, the others is that must follow. So who control the user experience? I think no one. everyone in the process just looking to explore the users in order to get money nothing more, but if i have to guess, problably the users. Because they are the one that really have the power to say "i won't buy it or that' or even better "until they give to me what i want" just my 2 cents.
Seems like you missed out on some highlights of the Y700. The memory is dual channel, the IPS screen has Freesync, and the sound is surprisingly awesome. Replaced the HDD with a Samsung 850 Pro and have thoroughly enjoyed it since.
Lol have they never seen a 17" laptop before? The HP Pavilion has a 1600x900 because it's 17". 1600x900 is the minimum resolution on all 17" laptops, not 1366x768.
Articles like these make me want to see how good the unrestricted Athlon X4 845 will be, however as it's probably defective Carrizo silicon, I wouldn't expect it to be massively frugal. I do wonder if there will be any Bristol Ridge Athlons; the top models are rated with a cTDP of 25-45W which is a decent improvement and would reduce/eliminate throttling. Overclocking may not help in terms of power but performance would be more consistent. You also get DDR4 which isn't as big a help for the Athlons but it would be interesting to see the difference.
A review of the Dell Inspiron I3656-7800BLK would be a good marker, if only to show the maximum performance of the mobile chips.
Seems like the best configuration of a Carrizo machine would be a 35w TDP A12 with dual channel memory and integrated graphics (or discrete graphics with crossfire enabled).
It's a shame that all of the machines available are severely compromised with either single channel memory, 15w TDP, lack of crossfire, or a combination of these. Seriously. The machines tested have terrible designs. Looks like AMD made a huge mistake providing a common configuration with Carrizo-L with the single channel memory.
After a decade of hype since the ATI acquisition, nothing has changed. AMD has a massive OEM problem. Moreover, laptops have been outselling desktops for like a decade, yet AMD if you look at the history of AMD, it's hard to believe they ever really cared about portables. The Kaveri parts didn't even show up, while the Carrizo notebooks are already botched technology as explained in the article..
I have to say that the $400 to $700 notebooks on sale are garbage. The IGPs are not strong enough for casual gaming like LOL and CS GO. Crappy 5400RPM harddisk will make you want to throw the machine out of the window. If you really need that little bit more performance. Pay few hundred more. Or you can get a notebook that will hurt your arm if you carry it with one hand.
AMD needs to be more aggressive. Talk to the OEMs and give them better offer. Convince them build a $700 notebook with 13 Inch 1080p IPS touch screen, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, A8 or A6 APU and below 1.5KG. A lower end $600 one would work with 1366*768 IPS touch screen, 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM and A6 APU, below 1.5KG.
My $640 Asus TP300L is absolutely bullshit! I thought a mobile i5 would be enough for my daily use since I had a i5 desktop and was really satisfied with it. CPU performance is not a issue nowadays. The IGP is slow, but I didn't expect it to be fast(Although the one on desktop is way more powerful). The biggest problem is the GOD DAMN 5400RPM HARD DISK. Not only did it affect the boot up speed. Every action I performed is awfully slow when there are some OS things running in background. Only if I wait for 5 or 10 minutes after boot-up, then I can use it normally.
Please, kill all the 5400RPM Hard disk. They should not be in 2016.
That's what I find so hilarious about all the Y700 6700hq lovers out there - all the CPU power in the world is relegated to potato status outside of b.s. benchmarks with that 5400rpm HDD. Save money with the FX8800p Y700 and buy an $80 250GB Samsung 850 Evo to slap in it...
Will it be more appropriate to have "Additional" (Why not Update?) in the beginning, particularly the misleading pre-production stuff? Thanks for the article.
LOL, because the entire point of this article would be nullified. They didn't even bother comparing the FX8800p Y700 with the intels head to head outside of some DX9 garbage. Pitiful anandtech shills are pitiful. How many times did they mention Freesync? Yeah...
"Some companies in the past have dealt with contra-revenue, selling processors at below cost or with deals on multiple parts when purchased together. Very few companies, typically ones with large market shares in other areas, have access to this. Some members of the industry also see it as not fighting fair, compared to actually just pricing the parts lower in the first place."
I had to laugh so much as this. WHO COULD IT BE? MYSTERY!
still ... there is just no saving the bulldozer architecture, no matter how much they improve or iterate it.
bulldozer and amd by proxy for normal users are synonyms for "just not as good as intel" and for a little more experienced users "that processor that cheated with its core count".
the few people who actually read articles like the one above and compare performance/value represent literally no market share.
the only way out for amd at this point is to create as much boom around their zen-cores as possible, get them out asap, hitch their little start to new buzzwords like hbm, old buzzwords like rage and hope they can actually deliver the performance figures needed in the first reviews to drive a wave of positive articles through the press. only then will they be able to get back into the market. i wish them the best, a surface 5 (non pro) with a low power zen apu on hbm sounds awsome ... i'd get one of those in a heartbeat.
I own a Toshiba P50D-C-104. I read with interest this article and, albeit extremely helpful and rich of information, left some questions open, at least as far a I'm concerned. First of all, the P50D-C-104 costs <$600 and has an A10-8700P. I find this price range more relevant for home-users and, in general, for somebody interested in AMD offering. 1Kusd for a laptop with integrated GPU seems too expensive. The P50D-C-104 has 2 DIMM slots; couldn't find for sure whether it is dual channel or not.
I am curios to know how it performs on some popular games against Intel's offering (at that price level, it would go against core i3, at best). In the page with comparison against Intel's offering there are almost only synthetic benchmarks: it would have been nice to compare on some actual games.
My point is that in the $1K range, there are many features that could add cost while not necessarily improving performance.
An interesting read. I'll say I'm glad you went to the bother even if the ends weren't quite what you were expecting from the outset.
I agree that it would be quite interesting to see someone make a proper halo device to showcase Carrizo at its best, rather than the trend of taking an established Intel chassis and then stuffing a hobbled AMD configuration inside it.
Speaking of which, I had a look at the HP UK website since I remembered seeing exactly that situation in the past (was an Envy 15 model that time) and came across an interesting trio of devices:
Three models from the Pavilion Black Edition range, all three using the same chassis and internal components, the only difference being the wifi card on the A10 model is upgraded.
I'd be interested in seeing a true apples-to-apples comparison between devices like these, where the Intel and AMD models are priced and specified so closely together.
Another Carrizo 'capability' not implemented: Carrizo was advertised as the first architecture to support full HSA 1.0, but ... Can any retail Carrizo systems run HSA?
As I understand, to run HSA currently requires installing Linux and the HSA driver. (Possible running the HSA Docker container on this host, but the host must have the HSA driver.) https://github.com/HSAFoundation/HSA-Docs-AMD/wiki... https://github.com/HSAFoundation/HSA-Drivers-Linux... The only test system listed is a "A88X-PRO" desktop motherboard and Kaveri "A10-7850K" APU. (No Carrizo chips are available for that socket.) The host must have "the IOMMU enabled in the BIOS".
However, I have not seen any retail Carrizo systems that implement that BIOS option. Do they exist? (The closest thing is the option to enable AMD-V as required for Docker, but that is not the same thing, as the above link indicates.)
If not, why not? (Is an effort/investment needed to get the support into common AMD chip BIOS/UEFIs used by ODMs, similar like it was needed to get support into the Linux kernel?)
Although I congratulate Anandtech after repeated demands from consumers like myself as to why a review of Carrizo wasn't done sooner the result is a review that leaves one ask many questions and a demand for another review since new info has come to light. So redo the whole review under dual channel conditions for AMD's Carrizo. Otherwise you'll be leaving this review incomplete and short changing a competitor of Intel leaving us to wonder how bias Anandtech is towards AMD !
hey.i just bought this as a refurb. it seems to lag/stutter with certain programs. Mine has 2 ram slots with 4gb in each..does anyone know if that can be upgraded?
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ImSpartacus - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Holy shit, I haven't seen that many pages in a long time. You don't see this much content very often. Gotta love dat chorizo.close - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
ImSpartanus, they're just writing a comprehensive article. I'm sure they put in good work with all of them.ImSpartacus - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
I think this article provides a pretty delicate and nuanced treatment of chorizo and its place in the market (both potential & actual). There's no doubt that the circumstances demanded it. This was not business as usual and I'm glad Anandtech recognized the need for that additional effort.We're fooling ourselves if we pretend that any journalistic entity puts the sane amount of effort into every project. We're talking about living, breathing humans, not robots.
fmcjw - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
I found the language convoluted, verbose, and difficult to read, compared to, say, Anand's straightforward and logical writing:"Nonetheless, Intel’s product line is a sequence of parts that intersect each other, with low end models equipped with dual core Pentiums and Celerons, stretching into some i3 and i5 territory while still south of $1000. In this mix is Core M, Intel’s 4.5W premium dual core parts found in devices north of $600."
"south of/north of"... can't you just put in "below/above"? And all that "intersecting of parts", can't you just say from the Atom to Pentiums, Celerons, i3's, and i5's....
The whole thing reads like they're paying you to score a high word count. Lots of information to extract here, but it can be 3 pages shorter and take half as long to read.
Cellar Door - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
That is why Anandtech has video adds on their main page - designed for people like you. Who simply lack reading comprehension past 8th grade and find it hard to understand. Just watch watch the video on how to loose weight that auto-plays on the side.Or... try Tom's Hardware - they cater to your demographic.
ImSpartacus - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
There's no question that Anand had a powerful way of writing that was uniquely simple yet educated you nevertheless. And for a layman that reads this sort of stuff to learn new information, that's very attractive and I kinda miss it (along with Klug).However, I give Ian a pass because he at least attempted to use other brand of conveying his ideas. In certain sections he used special table-like fitting to separate "parallel" sections/stances so that the rader would be more apt to compare them. So there's at least some effort, though he surely could do better.
10basetom - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
fmcjw does have a point, but in all fairness it is much harder to explain techical stuff in layman terms than it is to be long-wordy. Carl Sagan was the master of it on TV, and Anand was excellent at it on paper.JMC2000 - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
I didn't find anything wrong with the language Ian used, as this is piece is still on a technical level, but can be understood by the layman that knows a bit more than just what the stickers on the outside tell.To me, the phrase "parts that intersect each other" lays out that there is a myriad of options where configurations overlap, where as saying "from the Atom to Pentiums, Celerons, i3s and i5s" indicates that there is a pricing structure that is related to general CPU performance, which there really isn't when it comes to low-end machines.
plonk420 - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
"south of/north of" sounds better than "greater than/less than," which is more correct than "below/above"Sushisamurai - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
yeah, colorful language is nice. Dumbing down adjectives or descriptions can often construe the true message IMO. This way, it paints a more descriptive/colorful picture.Keep up the good work Ian.
Kylinblue - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
When I saw the sub-page title "AMD's Industry Problem" I though it is the conclusion, after reading that page I found out I am just at half of the whole article. Well done Ian, well done...ImSpartacus - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
I know, right? I'm one of those weirdos that reads the pages backwards (mostly), so I was immediately surprised at the list of pages before the conclusion. I honestly haven't finished even half of the article, but it's already evident that some tlc went into it.just4U - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
A excellent article Ian.. and actually a surprise I wasn't expecting anything in the pipe like this right now.SviatAI - Friday, February 19, 2016 - link
Unfortunately, this often happens when you work for some ecommerce shop selling various goods, the boss of the shop may not want such kind of articles about the products he or she sells. They want it now and fast, just to fill the site with irrelevant content. The problem is that you want to make something better than a stupid re-write. But who cares? So, I am happy for those guys who write for AnandTech and other similar websites. They can learn something new while doing their job.CajunArson - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
This article certainly proves one thing: When it comes to price lists on Intel Mobile parts, the numbers you see on ARK have absolutely nothing to do with the actual price that OEMs pay in real life.Observe the supposedly major $200 price premium for Intel chips when you read a price list in a vacuum, but then see that the real-life Intel system [with an honest-to-God *quad core* chip!] is basically selling for the exact same price as a much less capable Chorrizo part.
I personally got a Costco-Special notebook for the wife last year at $500.. it has an I5-5200U, and I assure you that the OEM most certainly didn't sell that notebook at that price after spending $300 on the CPU.
extide - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
BTW, that's not a quad core. It's dual, with hyperthreading :)CajunArson - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
When I said quad core I was referring to the Core i5-6300HQ (45W) in the price comparison that Anand posted. It is a 4 physical core part in a notebook that only costs $8 more than a "4 core" Carrizo using AMD's "cores".I am aware that the 5200U is a dual-core hyperthreaded part too. Like I said, the entire price of the notebook including the 5200U was only $500 (it has 8 GB of RAM too).
extide - Tuesday, March 22, 2016 - link
Ah, yes, Intel is FINALLY shipping quad core mobile i5's. Good call :)vladx - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Except you didn't put in consideration that what you bought was called "Special" for a reason and it wasn't the release price of the product that was most likely $200+ more.Braincruser - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
AMD still has a long way to go before its considered a valid choice. The 4.5W intel beats it in the tasks its gonna be used in. Even in graphics, the supposed strong side of amd's APU.CajunArson - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Yes, and while Zen is going to be much more power efficient, the first models are for servers and desktops. It won't be until well into 2017 until we see a mobile part from AMD based on Zen.Flunk - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Claims of future products should always be taken with a grain of salt. It's not real until the product is available and the benchmarks are in.CajunArson - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
I agree. I'm not saying that Zen will beat whatever Intel is selling in 2017. I'm just saying that it would be hard for mobile Zen parts not to be more power efficient than these last-gasp Carrizo's when mobile Zen finally launches.nandnandnand - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
2017 for mobile Zen? OmgCajunArson - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Well, I can guarantee it won't launch in 2016. I'm also an optimist so 2017 (and not January either) it is (a pessimist would say 2018).Dobson123 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Obviously, a new mobile chip every year around June: Llano in 2011, Trinity in 2012, Richland in 2013, Kaveri in 2014, Carrizo in 2015, Bristol Ridge (same as Carrizo) in 2016, Raven Ridge (Zen, 14nm) in 2017.psychobriggsy - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Carrizo with single-channel DDR3 1600 is pointless, especially for games. Did I miss the results when you put the second DIMM in?I've said it before, AMD needs to create its own laptop designs, like it designs its own GPUs, and then sell them via its own OEM channels that it uses for Graphics Cards.
Obviously, it needs to shift its APUs to 14nm first, because 28nm has been pushed as far as possible with Carrizo, but there's a massive gap in power consumption and performance still.
ImSpartacus - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Doesn't amd already have Radeon-branded ram and ssds? An entire device doesn't seem unthinkable.Ian Cutress - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
When we get the desktop Carrizo parts in (Athlon X4 845), we'll be doing a breakdown at 65W with IPC and DRAM analysis.nathanddrews - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
It will be nice to finally see Carrizo get a proper shake. Limiting it to 15W and single-channel seems like a terrible shame, especially in the category of laptop it is being sold in. Nearly everyone that I interact with never actually counts the hours or minutes of battery life they get. Instead, they just keep their laptops plugged in any time they are near an outlet.Desktop Carrizo excites me mostly just because I want to build a UHD-proof HTPC out of it.
yannigr2 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
The 845 doesn't have an iGPU. You threw away the chance to directly compare the color compression advantage of Carrizo's GPU in a very limited bandwidth scenario like this one by either removing one dimm from the Kaveri laptop or adding another one in one of the Carrizo laptops. I wouldn't ask why. Thanks for the article.FriendlyUser - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Thank you for this extensive article. Many people seem to dismiss AMD CPUs today without actual data. I commend your efforts to examine all aspects of real systems. I'll be waiting for the data from 845 (which sound like a decent upgrade for a NAS...).Keep up the good work.
JMC2000 - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
This is something I've been interested in since AMD released the 845 (wasn't there a Phenom II-based Athlon 845? I know there was a Phenom II 845...). Shame that they chose not to release an A12/FX Carrizo APU, those 512 shaders could be nice...mczak - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
I agree with that, it's _really_ missing results with dual channel. I understand why single-dimm configurations were tested, but at least two of the notebooks had the option to use dual channel, and even if it might be difficult to get preconfigured options with dual-channel, it's easily upgradeable - I'm also interested in what Carrizo can do as a chip, not only what it can do if sufficiently crippled by the OEM.(Not that I expect wonders with dual channel though, at least not at 15W where the graphics doesn't run with more than half the max clock anyway, but still...)
Ian Cutress - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
On the chip side, we'll do a full breakdown of perf and IPC when we get our hands on the desktop version in Athlon X4 845. I'm hoping to get some R-Series too, and we can do DDR3 vs DDR4 on AMD as well. That might provide a better pure comparison which I know some users want to see. I do too :)bojblaz - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Excellent, excellent article. Lucid questions asked and answers pursued - we need more of this kind of journalism. I can't praise this enough.It would have been really interesting to see the results had you filled the second SODIMM on the laptops that supported dual channel? I assumed time constraints prevented you from doing so. Also any chance of going to the OEMs directly and asking them why they make the decisions they make?
Lolimaster - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
That's like givin 5 tons of deadweight to pre-Raditz-Vegeta saga Goku. AMD, why even bother, release your products under Ruby brand or something...TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
I second that. A proper 13 inch design with a 35 watt 8800p, none of this hybrid graphics stuff, and good battery life, would be an insta-buy. Or 14 or 15 inch. I just want something like my old lenovo e535, but smaller. It cant be THAT hard, can it?nfriedly - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
Agreed. This article was basically a long-winded way of saying "all current AMD laptops suck, and we aren't even sure how good they could be because *all* the OEMs half-assed their designs"I, for one, would be very interested in an AMD designed laptop.
Cryio - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
Apparently AMD wants to push 28 nm even farther with Bristol Ridge, maybe better binned chips and hopefully DDR4 support will provide a much needed boost.chris471 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
What do you do with all those split hares? Are they any good barbecued?("Octane splits hares between the Kaveri ...")
Ian Cutress - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Lightly roasted for me :) Edited, thanks!maglito - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Were you able to test 18Gbps HDMI? The ability to drive an external display with 2160p 4:2:2 @ 60Hz? I guess the lack of a 10bit accelerated video decoder almost makes the point moot for future 2160p content though....Otherwise, fantastic article!
MonkeyPaw - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Last time I shopped for a laptop (which was recently), I was considering an A10-based HP with a 1080p screen. The problem I saw was in reviews the battery life was really poor. It looked like HP put a small battery in it, making the thing only worthy as a DTR. I ended up going with a Lenovo with an i3. I guess part of the problem is that there are so many variants of laptops that finding a review of a specific model is impossible, and all you have to go on are things like Amazon or Best Buy ussr reviews, which can be extremely painful to read.Lolimaster - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
HP sometimes release near "nice" AMD laptops but always cripples it with laughable battery capacities, same models intel inside dont get the nerfs.euskalzabe - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
That was a wonderful article that I thoroughly enjoyed reading to start my Friday. Long story short, you perfectly define my laptop buying rationale with "SSD, dual channel memory, 8 hours+ light battery, under 2kg, Full HD IPS panel".That's why I bought an i5 UX305. I wanted an AMD machine because I plain like the company and would like them to succeed to bring more competition to Intel, but I found NOTHING even close to the specs you mentioned. The UX305 fit the description perfectly and cost me $750. It was an immediate purchase for me. If AMD managed the OEM relationship to create such a machine, it would be an insta-buy for me. Also, Zenbooks with Zen APUs oculd be a great marketing strategy :)
Shadowmaster625 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
AMD is a company that shoots itself in the foot at every opportunity. I am truly perplexed. Their cat cores shouldnt even exist. But not only do those crippled parts exist, they crippled their premium parts by combining the two platforms! WHY? How could they not see that every notebook would be single channel? They wasted the entirety of their ATI purchase, as you can see with the Rocket League results vs Intel. This is a disgrace.AMD needs to realize that it IS AMD who controls the User experience. Look at the Mackbook Air. Look at the Surface Pro. Look at the Playstation 4 and Xbox One. All of these platforms have a set minimum level of performance. Sure they might be more expensive than a $300 atom clunker, but at least the user will not throw the thing out the window after pulling their hair out.
AMD needs to put a floor under their products. 4 cores. 8GB of unified HBM. 512 cores GPU. This is the SoC that they need. Sure they can fuse off a core or whatever to harvest bad dies, but this is the minimum die they should be making. Ideally within 2 years they will move to a 4 core, 16GB HBM, and they will replace one stack of HBM with 128GB of HBF. They need to control the memory bandwidth of their SoC. Take away the ability of the OEMs to cripple performance. Use HBF to take away the ability for OEMs to cripple storage performance also. Do this, and every AMD system will be fast. And it will get design wins.
t.s - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
If you read the article: AMD not crippled their premium parts. It was OEM. If only OEM create mobos that have dual channel mems.xthetenth - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
OEMs shaving pennies is as universal a phenomenon as gravity, and designs should be made as such.t.s - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
hence the title, "who controls user experience" :)MonkeyPaw - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
The cat cores exist to compete with Atom-level SOCs. Intel takes the Atom design from phones and tablets all the way up to Celeron and Pentium laptops. It makes some business sense due to low cost chips, but if the OEM puts them in a design and asks too much of the SOC, then there you have a bad experience. Such SOCs should not be found in anything bigger than a $300 11" notebook. For 13" and up, the bigger cores should be employed.michael2k - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
The cat cores can't compete with Atom level SoC because they don't operate at low enough power levels (ie, 2W to 6W). The cat cores may have been designed to compete with Atom performance and Atom priced parts, but they were poorly suited for mobile designs at launch.Intel999 - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
AMD hasn't updated the cat cores in over three years! It is a dead channel to them. They had a bit of a problem competing in the tablet market against a competitor that was willing to dump over $4 billion pushing inferior bay trail chips. Take a plane to China and you can still find a lot of those Bay Trail chips sitting in warehouses as once users had the misfortune of using tablets being run by them the reviews destroyed any chance that those tablets ever had at being sales successes.AMD was forced to stop funding R&D on cat cores as they were in no position to be selling them at negative $5.
In the time that AMD has stopped development on the cat cores Intel has improved their low end offerings, but still not enough to compete with ARM offerings that have improved as well. And now tablets are dropping at similar rates to laptops so it is actually a good thing for AMD that they suspended research on the cat cores. Sorta dodged a bullet.
At least they still get decent volume out of them through Sony and Microsoft gaming platforms.
testbug00 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
If the cat cores didn't exist AMD likely would have died as we know it a few years ago.
BillyONeal - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
The "cat cores" are why AMD is not yet bankrupt; it let them get design wins in the PS4 and XBox One which kept the company afloat.mrdude - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
YoY Q4 earnings showed a 42% decline in revenue for computing and graphics with less than 2bn in revenue for full-year 2015 and $502m operating loss. You couldn't be more correct. The console wins aren't just keeping the company afloat, they practically define it entirely.Lolimaster - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
In that case simply remove the OEM's altogether and sell it at AMD's store or selected physical/online stores.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
10/10 would pay for an "AMD" branded laptop that does APUs correctly.Hrobertgar - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Since you are talking about use experience, AMD is not the only company with a bad user experience. I purchased an Alienware 15" R2 laptop on cyber Monday and it is horrible, and support is horrible. I compare my user experience to a Commodore 64 using a Cassette drive - its that bad (I suspect you are old enough to appreciate cassette drives). It arrived in a non-bootable configuration. It cannot stream Netflix to my 2005 Sony over an HDMI cable unless I use Chrome - took Netflix help to solve that (I took a cell-phone pic of a single Edge browser straddling the two monitors - the native monitor half streaming video and the Sony half dark after passing over the hdmi cable. It only occurs with Netflix). On 50% of bootups it gives me a memory change error despite even the battery being screwed in. On 10% of bootups it fails to recognize the HDD. Once it refused to shutdown and required holding the power button for 10 secs. Lately it claims the power brick is incompatible on about 10% of bootups. Yes, I downloaded all latest drives, bios, chipset, etc. Customer Service has hanged up on me once, deleted my review once, and repeatedly asked for my service tag after I already gave it to them. Some of the Netflix issue is probably Micorsoft's issue - certainly MS App was an epic fail, but much of even that must be Dell's issue. I realize it is probably difficult to spot many of these things given the timeframe of the testing you do, and the Netflix issue in particular is bizarre. I am starting to think a Lenovo might not be so bad.tynopik - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
"put of their hands"alexruiz - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Ian,What specific model of the Elitebook 745 G3 did you test?
You listed the QHD screen (2560 x 1440 IPS) but you also wrote that it came in at just under $700. Is this correct? The one that you received for $700 included the QHD screen?
Thanks
Anonymous Blowhard - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
The link on the page goes to the T3L35UT#ABA, which is a 1080p screen. I'm guessing the spreadsheet and/or pricing is incorrect somehow.Ian Cutress - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
I remember being told it was 700, though I may have misheard and perhaps they were speaking GBP. But AB is right, the larger screen is 1080p and more expensive.The HP website is surprising though - the UX on the website is crazy to find a product that isn't the latest and greatest. It is very difficult to find anything and you seem to pay a premium for speccing out a custom Elitebook. Trying to spec out the one I was given came to $1900 from a $1620 base, which clearly isn't right because the high end 'buy now' model was about $1120 with similar specifications.
http://goo.gl/5spQls
Anonymous Blowhard - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
GBP certainly makes a lot more sense. The base USD$750 model on HP's site has an A8-8600B, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB HDD. If you want to find a Carrizo system with an "awful user experience" there it is.Custom-building an HP business system from their site is also expensive for no reason other than "because we said so." They really want you to buy the mass-manufactured SmartBuy models, although you may have better luck with a custom unit (read: "reasonable pricing") if you buy from a 3rd-party reseller.
I would like to see some GPU benchmarks with a second stick of RAM added to the 745 G3 though. Single-channel memory gives integrated graphics the Tonya Harding treatment.
Intel999 - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
Another review of Carrizo in the HP 745 G3 showed a 30% improvement in gaming when the second stick of RAM was installed. It went from woefully behind Intel to just ahead of them after sufficient RAM was provided.It is remarkable that any OEM would damage their own reputation by putting out crap that is obviously intended to funnel sales to Intel.
Imagine an OEM putting out a model, let's call it HP100, and offering it with identical specs with the only difference being a Carrizo CPU vs. an I5 from Intel. Few if any, would notice a difference in performance in the real world, not talking benchmarks.
The OEM would have a $100 savings on the Carrizo version if not more. If they were to sell it for $50 less than the Intel version they would sell more and that extra $50 profit on the AMD machine would more than offset the "rebates" they are getting from Intel. So they could have a higher profit margin at a lower price point. Afterall, with all the Intel marketing you'd still have plenty of people opting for the Intel version with it's lower profit margin. Just not as many and overtime you could approach Intel and point out that you make more money off AMD machines and who knows, maybe for the first time in recent history the OEM would control how their company is run and Intel would say "I guess we can cut our price by $25" and then you would be making the same profit on both Intel and AMD machines since, of course, the OEM wouldn't pass that $25 to the customer.
They could still offer junk machines at lower price points. Fill em up with Celerons or whatever they wanted attached to HDDs, 4GB of RAM, and crap screens.
Surely, no OEM is still following the old Intel rebate plan that allowed Intel to determine the market share that the OEM is allowed to give AMD. Or, are they?
Lolimaster - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
I hate HP store with all my might, back in the day I got better experience donwloading from japanese p2p's not knowing japanese and just using a simple guide.keeepcool - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Please, just dont let Toshiba make laptops, just DON'T.Sorry for the word, but Toshiba is a shit brand that deserves to die. All their laptops have cooling solutions that are badly designed from the start, and the they cut all the corners and go for paper thin 4mm heatpipes on top of deformed and pitted 1.5mm cooper plates that make poor contact with the dies, the fans are thin, the thermal paste is worse than toothpaste, just stop allowing them to disgrace AMD name.
HP is also guilty of this, after the disgrace that where the dv6 models almost no one in Portugal and a lot other countries ever want a laptop with AMD cpu or gpu, because DV6's are just know for being litteral toasters that crash and burned, yes part of that was due to lack of maintenance, but still, it left a very sour taste regard AMD/ATI equiped laptops.
Today only people with low monetary margins will go for an AMD laptop, because they are the cheapest ones, and even then HP and Toshibas just manage to make toasters out of 7 and 15Watts TDP, its like they actually spend time engineering them to became so hot with so little TDP's...
tipoo - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
50.27 Wh, 3 cell Li-Po design, rated to 10.25 hours. Out of a 3.3GHz AMD APU.You know, HP, somehow, I don't believe you.
bluevaping - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Nice article. And I get the point of the article about OEM's and AMD. I mostly agree with Shadowmaster 625. But it would have been nice to see a dual channel memory test. The Elitebook supports it. Slap in the extra ram and test it. And try dual channel 1866 Ram too.tipoo - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Shame the Lenovo doesn't support dual graphics - any reason why, or will this be updated in drivers? Especially as the integrated one has the same number of SPs as the dedicated, it could add a lot to the power equation.jabber - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
You'd think someone was paying the OEMs to hamstring these machines...Some odd facepalm design decisions there.
CajunArson - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Somebody *IS* paying OEMs to hamstring the machines: Customers. Customers who want cheap products that is.AMD makes its reputation as: "Intel is too expensive! We're cheap!" Don't act all shocked and surprised when the rest of the components in the system end up being the cheap components too.
As Anand just pointed out with that price comparison, even with all the cheaping out you can still see a whopping $8 price advantage for AMD on comparably configured notebooks.
tipoo - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Seriously, some weird stuff. No dual graphics when the chips are almost the same performance? Single channel RAM? What the hell.Midwayman - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
I feel like AMD needs to pull a MS surface or Nexus and put out a reference model to show OEMs how it is supposed to be done. If all OEMs will do is put out a half assed effort, at least then they can just copy the reference design and it will work well.bojblaz - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
+1... You're right, OEMs have pissed off MS and Google enough for them to go solo. AMD could totally follow suitInquisitorDavid - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Sure, if they had the money to. As it stands, the company is now banking on Zen to rescue them. I don't think they can afford to invest in going solo with device designs, at least not right now.TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
They could team up with the likes of MSI or Clevo. Both have done good AMD laptops in the past.A 14 inch msi laptop with a 100wh battery, a 8800p, and 8gb dual channel ram would fetch a good price from those who want AMD laptops.
0razor1 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Attn Ed: The HP Elitebook 745 G2GCN 1.0 in the text and then 1.1 in the grid.
Nice read BTW.
Ian Cutress - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Fixed! Thanks :)RationalHaterade - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Great write-up, Ian. This is enlightening, and the buoyant attitude at AMD might be saying a lot about what we can expect to see from the 2016/17 product releases.Speaking to Carrizo, I'm not sure they realized how badly they were hurting themselves when they elected to keep Kabini/Temash as single-channel designs and then provide OEMs a cheap out by making it pin-compatible with the big architecture. GCN has always been very bandwidth-dependent in every APU they've released. These single-channel setups have got to be really starving the SoC.
Either way, the performance picture points out what everyone already knows. Zen can't get to mobile quickly enough.
karakarga - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Including all, AMD and nVidia both at their funeral state! They can not possibly open 22, 14, 10 etc. micron fabric.Intel spended 5 billion dollars to open their new Arizona factory, they will pass lower processes there as well. AMD and nVidia can not get, even a billion dollar profit in these years. It is impossible for them to spend that much money to a new low process factory.
Those little tweaks can not help them to survive....
testbug00 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
They don't build factories. TSMC and Samsung (and GloFo to a lesser extent) build factories and do R&D for these processes. Nvidia, AMD. Samsung, Qualcomm, MediaTek and many other companies design chips to the standards of TSMC/Samsung/GloFo and pay money for wafers and running the wafers through the fab.The cost for this per wafer is meant to get all that money back in a few years. And than the process keeps on running for over 10 years sometimes.
It is getting more expensive to get to smaller nodes and the performance increase and power decrease is getting smaller. And costs more to design chips and run wafers. So it is getting harder to find the funds to shrink. Which is one of the reasons Intel has delayed their 10nm process.
yannigr2 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Thanks for this review. Really needed for sometime. It was missing from the internet, not just Anandtech.As for the laptops, they say as much as there is to tell. Small Chinese makers, who no one knows they exist, would built better laptops than these. HP, Toshiba and Lenovo in this case, multibillion international giants that seems have all the technicians and the R&D funds necessary, end up producing Laptops with "strange" limitations, bad choices, low quality parts and in the end put prices that, even with all those bad choices and limitations, are NOT lower than those on Intel alternatives. It's almost as if Intel makes the choices for the parts in those laptops. Maybe their is a "trololol" sticker on them somewhere hidden addressed to AMD. I guess that way those big OEM don't make Intel too angry and at the same time, if there is another legal battle between AMD and Intel in the future, they will have enough excuses to show to the judge in their defense, if accused that they supported a monopoly.
ToTTenTranz - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
This article is what makes Anandtech great. Just keep being like this guys, your work is awesome!I'm going to spend some time clicking your ads, you deserve it :)
As for the "poll" about who's to blame, IMHO it is:
1 - AMD for letting OEMs place Carrizo in designs with terrible panels and single-channel solutions. It's just not good for the brand. "You can't put a Carrizo with single-channel cheap RAM because that's not how it was designed. You want to build bottom-of-the-barrel laptop? We have Carrizo-L for you."
I'm pretty sure Intel has this conversation regarding Core M and Atom/Pentium/Celeron solutions. I know AMD is in a worse solution to negotiate, but downplaying Carrizo like this isn't good for anyone but Intel.
In the end, what AMD needs is a guy who can properly sell their product. Someone who convince the OEMs that good SoCs need to be paired with decent everything-else.
$500 is plenty for a 12/13" IPS/VA screen (even if it's 720/800p), 128GB SSD and 4+4GB DDR3L. Why not pull a Microsoft's Surface and build a decent SKU for that price range so that other OEMs can follow? Contract one OEM to make the device they envisioned, sell it and see all others following suit.
2 - OEMs for apparently not having this ONE guy who calls the shots and knows that selling a crappy system automatically means losing customers. And this ONE other guy (or the same) for not knowing that constantly favoring Intel with their solutions is bound to make the whole company's life miserable if Intel's only competitor kicks the bucket. The consumer isn't meant to know these things, but the OEMs certainly are.
It's 2016. We're way past the age of tricking the customer to buy a terrible user experience through big numbers (like "1TB drive woot"). He/She will feel like the money just wasn't and next time will buy a mac.
Want a $300-400 price point? Get a Carrizo-L with a 128GB SSD and a 720p IPS panel. Want $500-700 Price point? Get a Carrizo with dual-channel, 256GB SSD and 900p/1080p IPS screen.
joex4444 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Anything under 1080p is simply not usable. All these 1366x768 panels are just awful. I have an old netbook with one (12.1") and I've put a small SSD in there and loaded it with Ubuntu. I cannot have a Google Hangouts window open and a web browser open wide enough to view most pages. Basic web browsing + IM - 1366x768 completely fails at the task.testbug00 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
768p panels are fine if they are good quality, in 11" laptops.900p good up to 13", and 1080p minimum for 14+.
Honestly I wish we stayed with 8:5 14x9, 16x10, 19x12z
jabber - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Indeed, 768p is fine on my 11" Samsung Chromebook but I would not tolerate it on anything bigger. IMO 1600x900 should be the minimum screen res for budget machines. 1080p for midrange and whatever you like for higher end.[email protected] - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
Resolution is not as important as the quality of the panel. I used a Lenovo X1 Carbon. It has a 14" 1080p screen. But it's a TN panel and that just makes it a pain in the ass. I am amazed that Lenovo uses such a lousy panel in its $1k+ laptop while some 10" sub-$200 tablets use IPS.testbug00 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Toshiba can make a $400 chromebook with a good 1080p display. Fully agreed.1080p panel, make it thicker so you can put a larger battery and so the laptop can handle up to 35W from the APU. Do dual channel.
When plugged change APU power mad to 35W, when in battery make it 15W. Probably can be done for $500 for a 15" laptop with an A8. $50/100 upgrade to 128/256GB SSD and $50/100 upgrade to A10/FX.
Dobson123 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
"The APU contains integrated ‘R6’ level graphics based on GCN 1.0, for 384 streaming processors at a frequency of 533 MHz."Isn't it GCN 1.1?
Ian Cutress - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
It is. It was correct in the table :P fixed!Intel999 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
So what I had originally thought would be an advantage for Carrizo, the same motherboard for both Carizzo and Carizzo-L, turned out to screw AMD since OEMs refuse to provide any semblance of sufficient memory on the Carizzo non L chipsets.As for Zen, I can promise you that it will be a failure in laptop configurations if OEMs continue to reign it in with poor configurations such as single channel memory, HDDs and low quality screens.
The only way to get a quality AMD system in this day and age is to go to a custom PC builder and give him the specs you require. Unfortunately, 90% of PC consumers wouldn't know what specs to give the builder and I'm sure Intel has coerced a lot of custom builders to push their CPUs through kickbacks.
reepca - Saturday, February 13, 2016 - link
Could you name a custom PC builder that can build a laptop with Carrizo for me...? Or when you say "PC" do you mean "Desktop" (already gottaone)?junky77 - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
My Y700 has 4GB of vRAM and GPU-Z show M385XAlso, no talk about DX12?
Bateluer - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Any idea when we'll see the X4 845 arrive for desktops?mrdude - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
Amazing article, Ian! Took the better part of an hour to read it between chores and emails, but it was time well spent :)That said, I feel like one aspect regarding AMD's race-to-the-bottom has been ignored: AMD's own role in it. For decades, and with only a couple of notable exceptions, AMD has marketed itself as the cheaper alternative with 'good enough' performance. Well, unfortunately they've succeeded and this is the result. Carrizo processors on lagging nodes being sold, if only to decrease OEM investments, for dirt cheap and can only just compete with Intel's low end/mid-tier chips. If their engineers are proud of their efforts, then perhaps they need a reality check and take a look at those benchmarks. The APU is so lopsided and bandwidth starved that it should have never made it past the initial stages of design. (Why on earth are they selling 512SPs if they can't feed them? Is the company more worried about chewing up GloFo wafer commitments than designing a balanced design?)
For AMD to command more volume, higher profit margins, and dictate minimum design/spec requirements, AMD also has to start making class-leading products. 'Good enough' should never be uttered within corporate offices else risk being fired. Unfortunately, mediocrity has been the staple of AMD's CPU side for as long as I can remember. CEOs and chief architects have come and gone, and things still haven't changed. After the X2 derivatives of the A64/K8 the company admitted defeat, if not outwardly than certainly tacitly.
I'm not hopeful. Those days are long gone. It's been far too long since AMD has made something that has piqued my, or consumers', interest. They've got nothing but recent failures to point to. Unless Zen comes out and actually beats out Intel's comparable chips in cost, single-threaded, multi-threaded, and power consumption, every person within AMD should admit defeat. The goal is perfection, and personally it seems they still don't understand that.
wow&wow - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
"they still don't understand that."Because the paychecks are automatically deposited, no feeling about whether having paychecks or not since having them is a given : )
Lolimaster - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
AMD PLEASE, start selling mobiles devices under your brand.4 of 5 "design wins" shown here are complete sh*t, the Lenovo supposed to be at least decent got serious problems of throttling because they designed the cooling for a 15w TDP.
You're screwing yourself AMD letting OEM's troll you time and time again.
wow&wow - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
A must read for AMD employees, particularly those who define, approve, or market products, tests needed for those : )thatthing - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
my Lenovo y700 came with 8gb ram in two 4gb sticks. Sandra and cou z show duel channel. memory test is very similar to my desktop kaveri system with ddr1600. also my r9m385x has 4gb memory. amd's specs list it as 896 shader, which I would agree with as it performs like my 7790 in firestrikeLarsBars - Friday, February 5, 2016 - link
I am really surprised that with AMD's current objectives, and strength in graphics, they didn't make the decision to have the cat cores use dual-channel memory controllers. Intel Atom x7 uses a dual-channel controller.I am really happy to see AMD's long-term decision making. I've read them saying things like "Going forward, we don't want to be regarded as the ultra-low cost option." Which hopefully means the end of articles like this one.
GREAT article, Ian.
bluevaping - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Zen-L with single channel memory? I hope for none...leopard_jumps - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
I expected much more from AMD ! Very disappointed .mdriftmeyer - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
What's up with POV-Ray 3.7 Beta? POV-Ray 3.7 was released in November 3, 2013.MUSON - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Notebookcheck.net tested the HP Elitebook 745 G3 with a dual channel setup. Performance gains range anywhere between 40% and 50% with gaming.http://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-EliteBook-745-G3-N...
leopard_jumps - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Good find ! Yet the performance is insufficient . GT 940M is the better choiceleopard_jumps - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
They call it Geforce 940M instead of GT 940M . Interesting why ?extide - Thursday, March 24, 2016 - link
Both are somewhat incorrect, the proper name is Geforce GT 940Mzodiacfml - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
I love the graphs and detail. In the end there's one simple fact which is giving AMD the problem. It is Chipzilla's cash and capability in process nodes. Since you had the good point of mentioning that, most of the time, the SoC didn't mattered to consumers as probably because of good enough performance, AMD's simple goal is to achieve Intel's same process advantage for its known values.AMD's chips are too big now with half the price of Intel's chips. They are selling near costs and is fighting for survival only. AMD's team is probably excited with their partnership with Samsung as this will put them again close to Intel in terms of process node advantage.
I believe, it didn't matter for AMD with the shortcomings of available devices as their goal seems to be surviving while continue research and development for future products and process nodes and put them back in the game.
zodiacfml - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
I just saw some benchmarks with dual-channel memory and they are pretty impressive for entry level gaming on a 1366x768. I could have bought this versus an i5-5200 laptop I bought last year. But then, I haven't seen any Carrizo in the local market yet.basicmath - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
can you post a link to those dual channel benchies please :)basicmath - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
actually just saw the notebook check graph, that is a considerable increase in performance!zodiacfml - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
Right! The review should have included dual channel performance. Going through the review, I thought Intel finally came close with AMD in graphics performance. With dual channel, Carrizo is well ahead in gaming benchmarks at nearly half the price.extide - Thursday, March 24, 2016 - link
AMD does not have a partnership with Samsung. GF does, but GF is, now, a separate company.Gc - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Anandtech: how did you determine that the Y700 pre-production unit that you tested was accessing its two memory cards through a single channel only? Are you simply reporting what AMD told you, or is there a test that readers can use to check production laptops, and other machines? (Might the two memory cards be mismatched in some way, so the processor backed off to single channel mode?)typo:
s/ R9 385MX / R9 M385X /
Ian Cutress - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Aside from being told directly, I did memory bandwidth testing and other software indicators (CPU-Z, AIDA, etc). Both modules were matched, I took them out and had a look.basicmath - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
@Ian Cutress, any reason you didn't put an extra 4GB stick in the G3 745? Seems like a really simple thing to do and would have given a really useful graphical comparison. I guess you guys are too poor to have a stick floating around!Ian Cutress - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Aside from your snarky comment, your answers are explained in the review.The laptops were tested as sold. This is a review on the user experience of these devices. As shown on the Carrizo vs Core page, device after device from Carrizo comes by default with a single stick of memory. Most users who pick a device and go don't want to understand why their UX is the way it is, it just needs to work when they buy it.
I'd also like to mention that testing five laptops with a our suite of tests plus power testing and thermal testing in a single week without an opportunity to revisit is mightily tough for one person who doesn't have access to all their normal gear (testing was done on location, as mentioned), and adding in more variables extrapolates testing time which I didn't have.
We'll be doing further testing for Carrizo, specifically on generational updates, when the Athlon X4 845 comes out. I'm hoping to rope in an R-Series Carrizo platform as well (with IGP) to test DDR3/DDR4 comparison points.
basicmath - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Dude, you highlighted the fact that the 512 core Carrizo chip was running on a single channel, weren't you even slightly curious to find out how it performed on dual channel? It's like reviewing a water proof phone and not trying to drown it!erple2 - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
No, its like testing a phone as it came from the factory, then not paying for some third party "waterproofing" company to waterproof the phone and testing it underwater.basicmath - Tuesday, February 9, 2016 - link
No it's really not, this laptop came from the factory with dual channel capability but that capability was not utilised because that would have shown the platform in a much better light, he even states that he checked the chips in the G2 to confirm that it was single channel. Upgrading the RAM on a laptop is a simple process that any end user can perform. The only discernible difference between the APU in the G2 & G3 is the number of GPU cores so why did he even bother testing the G3 without using dual channel configuration?Intel999 - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
@IanI look forward to that R-series test as it will provide a sneak peek at how much DDR4 relieves the bottleneck on integrated graphics when Bristol Ridge comes out.
That $70 Athlon X4 845 is intriguing as well.
AS118 - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
Good article (although to be fair, I mostly skimmed it), and I agree with the conclusions. AMD should try harder to make sure their high-end products are paired with good components. Single-channel ram, bad screens, and slow hard drives with an A10 or mobile FX defeats the purpose of having those higher end APU's.Plus, people will get a bad impression of AMD if a lot of them have poor trackpads, etc. I wish they'd make their own "signature" brand of laptops, and find someone to help make them a thing.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
Both clevo and MSI have treated AMD well before, Im sure either would love to have exclusive rights to the high end AMD notebook.That being said, I doubt AMD has the intelligence to pull it off. They seem to be run by monkeys 90% of the time.
Cryio - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
I'm really sorry for AMD. Kaveri and Carizzo on mobile, when configured to the proper ram, cooling and when using the highest performing part ... would've provided awesome performance, compared to Haswell and Broadwell. But no one bothered.Bristol Ridge will basically be Carizzo with DDR4 support and since it will be even better binned 28 nm CPUs, maybe we'll get even higher frequency out of Excavator. As for GCN 2.0 GPUs ... it will be interesting to see.
I love my Surface Pro 4, even given the disaster that is Skylake drivers and Windows 10 horrible efficiency compared to W8.1. But MAN. I would've loved a proper Carrizo based Surface Pro/Book.
Gadgety - Saturday, February 6, 2016 - link
A confirmation, with in depth detail. Nice write up.Khenglish - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
I would have really liked to see some dual channel results, or at least pulling a memory stick from the Kaveri and Intel systems to get a fair comparison. AMD says Zen brings a 40% IPC improvement. It'd be great to have a baseline to see if that 40% improvement is enough. In the dual channel intel to single channel AMD comparisons it does not appear to be enough, but we don't know how big of a factor memory was.Jon Irenicus - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
I want to buy an amd part for my next notebook but as was mentioned in the article, oems only choose bargain basement platforms to put the amd inside. The elitebook is the one exception, along with the lenovo if you don't mind the bulk.But the elitebooks are super overpriced for what you get. They need to release an hp spectre version of a notebook with a zen apu, a dell xps notebook variant with an apu. Ideally, the models that include a discreet gpu should allow the apu to work in tandem.
In 2017 dx12 will be in full effect with games, and having two gpus working together by default could give a lot of amd equipped systems a larger edge, especially if the oversized ipc deficits between excavator and intel parts is minimized with zen.
The future really does rest on Zen, amd needs to laser focus on performance per watt and ipc, and equip the 2017 apus with polaris gpu parts or vega or whatever the first iterations will be called. That has to be the minimum. Put those in nice chassis with solid battery life and that is all they need.
Intel999 - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
In DX12 dual graphics will be automatic. Even an Intel Igpu combined with a discrete Nvidia or AMD GPU will "merge" the graphic capabilities in the laptop.Theoretically, an AMD APU combined with an AMD GPU might have an advantage as all graphics would be from the same underlying graphic architecture. Time will tell if this bares out.
Ryan Smith - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
Note that it's only going to be as automatic as the game developer makes it, as devs will be responsible for implementing it. For the moment game devs are going to be the wildcard.Gadgety - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
So AMD's marketing and distribution strategy is a failure. The way it's described it would seem consumers specifying their own PCs would be a away around the dominant logic determined by the existing channels. With today's production technology tailor made products on demand should be possible.The other thing I don't get, is why doesn't AMD release a desktop Carrizo 4K capable APU for the FM2+ platform? Do they want to help the motherboard manufacturers sell more motherboards once the new AM4 socket APU:s are out in 2017, or do they want to sell their own existing products?
JMC2000 - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
I think it's more along the lines of having an installed base of AM4 boards before any Zen-based APUs roll out.It is possible that if the Athlon X4 845 sells well, AMD could release a full Carrizo part on FM2+.
AlB80 - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
What is discrete graphic chip in Lenovo?512sp GCN1.2.... I suspect that this combination is unreal.
Jamesiii - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
I have actually ordered Dell's AMD A8-8600P. It is intended as a media machine with the selling points being the low power equating to quiet and the 4K capability. The one thing I did notice is that he does have the Single Channel DDR3L 1600MHz memory. There is no indication on if it unlocks the watts to 35, but I have my doubts given the choice of RAM.I will know more when I get it on Thursday and will update if anyone is still view this thread. But, at $380.00 it is not a bad choice for a media machine.
tygrus - Sunday, February 7, 2016 - link
OBM (the brands) bid for designs by the ODM's based on the design cost and the expected volume. I high cost Intel design can be made profitable by the expectation of very high volumes. Even the most popular AMD design is expected to sell fewer than a low-volume Intel design. Business limitations and commercial forces bias the system towards Intel. Intel also have deeper pockets to sponsor/partner/subsidise designs to make them Intel exclusive. From manufactures to distributors to retail, Intel penalise (withdraw discounts/subsidies) anyone who lets AMD gain market share (many limited to <10%) and limit the use of the "best" designs for AMD (forced to sell only A4 & A6 instead of A8 or better, limit battery and other features so Intel always looks better). The "Intel brakes" applied to AMD limits their opportunities and potential earnings. This has limited the AMD R&D spending and forced AMD to stay behind in some aspects. It's amazing what AMD has done with 28nm but think of the advantage they could have had with 22nm and 14nm if successful achieved much earlier (no more than 9months after Intel).every1hasaids - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
I owned (owned being the operative word there) a Y700 with the AMD Carrizo FX8800P and can attest to the fact that the cooling solution and probably several other pieces of that device reviewed in this article are not the same design as what is available on the market in the US. There is a known issue of Lenovo skimping on the VRMs on the AMD Y700 which results in heavy throttling taking place. I couldn't play any game for more than 15 minutes before heavy throttling would occur. The data gathered from the review sample in this article should not be associated with the available product on the market. There appears to also be an FX-8700P variant of the Y700 out there however I cannot find any documentation of the existence of this device on Lenovo's site. Needless to say that I returned that laptop due to the significant throttling problems. I wish this site of some other site could get their hands on one of the FX-8800P Y700 laptops available in the US and put it through testing to reveal the problems with the unit. I'm guessing that they intend on releasing a Carrizo-L version of that laptop with the same motherboard which is why the VRMs are not up to the task of the 35w Carrizo and the added consumption of the dedicated graphics chip.Why are there no units out there that can handle the 35w TDP Carrizo and a dedicated graphics card!?!?!?! It would be a great alternative to the Intel/Nvidia gaming notebook monopoly.
I'm hoping Zen/Polaris will actually see some adoption from OEMs and maybe AMD could even get involved in assisting proper implementation of their products so that the negative stigma could get nullified.
Jamesiii - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
The FX-8700P would more properly be called an A10-8700P. It sounds like a bit of marketing if they are using the FX handle.On gaming sites people are suggesting you turn off AMD's Turbo Core when gaming to avoid the FPS jumping up and down and overclock the processors. Overclocking a laptop is dicey at best though.
Malih - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
maybe Microsoft should start making an AMD Surface laptop if they want good competition to drive PC SalesMarcelo Viana - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
I just don't understand why in a comparison carrizo vs intel you didn't take out the intel chips memory in order to both have 1 channel memory, so do a benchmark for us in a same condition.The entire article show that intel offering has OEMs given what intel chips need, so the point in comparing carrizo vs intel is the chip itself not platform, since AMD has no platform at all.
Elensar286 - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
That's a large focus of this article, though. The whole point was an investigation in to the implementation of Carrizo APUs by the OEM. It's highlighting exactly how like you said, the OEM platform, is hindering the potential of Carrizo processors.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.
Danvelopment - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
Strategy AMD should adopt:90% of people don't notice a performance difference above 3000 Super CPU Points, Intel CPUs are usually 4000-8000 Super CPU points, our chips may only range from 3500-4500 Super CPU Points but regular users won't actually notice it, and at the same performance marks we're a hundred dollars cheaper. Make the sensible choice.
Another way, we've done extensive testing to see what end users want and need, then we targeted those sectors, and where we matched Intel we made sure we were a hundred bucks cheaper on the same devices.
"We don't hold the performance crown but the price/performance crown"
Marcelo Viana - Monday, February 8, 2016 - link
Dammit, the solution should be simple, but must come from AMD, since can't expect it from oem's and all of them offer let's say 2011 sockets as example, why amd do not develop a socket switch, so a small board with 2011 pins on the bottom and a circuit on this boad to give a whatever socket amd choose connections on top of it, in order to accept amd chips.But AMD must understand that the memory on their chips must be ddr4(Carrizo do), because the lazy OEMs whon't change memory sockets, as example.
In this case the lazy ones have only to change the chip, and even better if any consumer have a old machine can upgrade to a chip that they choose. simple as that.
Anyone that sales more creates the standard on the market, the others is that must follow.
So who control the user experience? I think no one. everyone in the process just looking to explore the users in order to get money nothing more, but if i have to guess, problably the users. Because they are the one that really have the power to say "i won't buy it or that' or even better "until they give to me what i want" just my 2 cents.
farmergann - Tuesday, February 9, 2016 - link
Seems like you missed out on some highlights of the Y700. The memory is dual channel, the IPS screen has Freesync, and the sound is surprisingly awesome. Replaced the HDD with a Samsung 850 Pro and have thoroughly enjoyed it since.bitech - Tuesday, February 9, 2016 - link
Lol have they never seen a 17" laptop before? The HP Pavilion has a 1600x900 because it's 17". 1600x900 is the minimum resolution on all 17" laptops, not 1366x768.UtilityMax - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
1600x900 is still a crappy resolution for such a large screen. I had a notebook with 15.5 inch 900p screen, and it was visibly grainy.mosu - Tuesday, February 9, 2016 - link
Just few words: Sabotage and corruption at high level OEM decision level. Simple as that.Arief Sujadmika - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
AMD just need a feature to turn off the chips if its detect single channel memory for Carrizo then the OEM will make dual channel memory for it...thatthing - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
the y700 r9 385x is a bonaire gpu, amd has no 512sp chips mobile r9 series, http://www.amd.com/en-us/products/graphics/noteboo...silverblue - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Articles like these make me want to see how good the unrestricted Athlon X4 845 will be, however as it's probably defective Carrizo silicon, I wouldn't expect it to be massively frugal. I do wonder if there will be any Bristol Ridge Athlons; the top models are rated with a cTDP of 25-45W which is a decent improvement and would reduce/eliminate throttling. Overclocking may not help in terms of power but performance would be more consistent. You also get DDR4 which isn't as big a help for the Athlons but it would be interesting to see the difference.A review of the Dell Inspiron I3656-7800BLK would be a good marker, if only to show the maximum performance of the mobile chips.
Masospaghetti - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
Seems like the best configuration of a Carrizo machine would be a 35w TDP A12 with dual channel memory and integrated graphics (or discrete graphics with crossfire enabled).It's a shame that all of the machines available are severely compromised with either single channel memory, 15w TDP, lack of crossfire, or a combination of these. Seriously. The machines tested have terrible designs. Looks like AMD made a huge mistake providing a common configuration with Carrizo-L with the single channel memory.
jakemonO - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
no A12 core parts for the test? I can't find the A10 part on the HP websiote, only A8 & A12UtilityMax - Wednesday, February 10, 2016 - link
After a decade of hype since the ATI acquisition, nothing has changed. AMD has a massive OEM problem. Moreover, laptops have been outselling desktops for like a decade, yet AMD if you look at the history of AMD, it's hard to believe they ever really cared about portables. The Kaveri parts didn't even show up, while the Carrizo notebooks are already botched technology as explained in the article..gserli - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
I have to say that the $400 to $700 notebooks on sale are garbage.The IGPs are not strong enough for casual gaming like LOL and CS GO.
Crappy 5400RPM harddisk will make you want to throw the machine out of the window.
If you really need that little bit more performance.
Pay few hundred more. Or you can get a notebook that will hurt your arm if you carry it with one hand.
AMD needs to be more aggressive. Talk to the OEMs and give them better offer.
Convince them build a $700 notebook with 13 Inch 1080p IPS touch screen, 256GB SSD, 8GB RAM, A8 or A6 APU and below 1.5KG.
A lower end $600 one would work with 1366*768 IPS touch screen, 128GB SSD, 4GB RAM and A6 APU, below 1.5KG.
My $640 Asus TP300L is absolutely bullshit! I thought a mobile i5 would be enough for my daily use since I had a i5 desktop and was really satisfied with it.
CPU performance is not a issue nowadays. The IGP is slow, but I didn't expect it to be fast(Although the one on desktop is way more powerful).
The biggest problem is the GOD DAMN 5400RPM HARD DISK.
Not only did it affect the boot up speed. Every action I performed is awfully slow when there are some OS things running in background.
Only if I wait for 5 or 10 minutes after boot-up, then I can use it normally.
Please, kill all the 5400RPM Hard disk. They should not be in 2016.
farmergann - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
That's what I find so hilarious about all the Y700 6700hq lovers out there - all the CPU power in the world is relegated to potato status outside of b.s. benchmarks with that 5400rpm HDD. Save money with the FX8800p Y700 and buy an $80 250GB Samsung 850 Evo to slap in it...wow&wow - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
Will it be more appropriate to have "Additional" (Why not Update?) in the beginning, particularly the misleading pre-production stuff? Thanks for the article.farmergann - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
LOL, because the entire point of this article would be nullified. They didn't even bother comparing the FX8800p Y700 with the intels head to head outside of some DX9 garbage. Pitiful anandtech shills are pitiful. How many times did they mention Freesync? Yeah...silverblue - Friday, February 12, 2016 - link
To be fair, is there a point?xrror - Thursday, February 11, 2016 - link
"Some companies in the past have dealt with contra-revenue, selling processors at below cost or with deals on multiple parts when purchased together. Very few companies, typically ones with large market shares in other areas, have access to this. Some members of the industry also see it as not fighting fair, compared to actually just pricing the parts lower in the first place."I had to laugh so much as this. WHO COULD IT BE? MYSTERY!
It must be... Cyrix ! no? hrm. I give up. =P
dustwalker13 - Saturday, February 13, 2016 - link
still ... there is just no saving the bulldozer architecture, no matter how much they improve or iterate it.bulldozer and amd by proxy for normal users are synonyms for "just not as good as intel" and for a little more experienced users "that processor that cheated with its core count".
the few people who actually read articles like the one above and compare performance/value represent literally no market share.
the only way out for amd at this point is to create as much boom around their zen-cores as possible, get them out asap, hitch their little start to new buzzwords like hbm, old buzzwords like rage and hope they can actually deliver the performance figures needed in the first reviews to drive a wave of positive articles through the press. only then will they be able to get back into the market. i wish them the best, a surface 5 (non pro) with a low power zen apu on hbm sounds awsome ... i'd get one of those in a heartbeat.
yankeeDDL - Monday, February 15, 2016 - link
I own a Toshiba P50D-C-104. I read with interest this article and, albeit extremely helpful and rich of information, left some questions open, at least as far a I'm concerned.First of all, the P50D-C-104 costs <$600 and has an A10-8700P. I find this price range more relevant for home-users and, in general, for somebody interested in AMD offering.
1Kusd for a laptop with integrated GPU seems too expensive.
The P50D-C-104 has 2 DIMM slots; couldn't find for sure whether it is dual channel or not.
I am curios to know how it performs on some popular games against Intel's offering (at that price level, it would go against core i3, at best). In the page with comparison against Intel's offering there are almost only synthetic benchmarks: it would have been nice to compare on some actual games.
My point is that in the $1K range, there are many features that could add cost while not necessarily improving performance.
Squinoogle - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
An interesting read. I'll say I'm glad you went to the bother even if the ends weren't quite what you were expecting from the outset.I agree that it would be quite interesting to see someone make a proper halo device to showcase Carrizo at its best, rather than the trend of taking an established Intel chassis and then stuffing a hobbled AMD configuration inside it.
Speaking of which, I had a look at the HP UK website since I remembered seeing exactly that situation in the past (was an Envy 15 model that time) and came across an interesting trio of devices:
Three models from the Pavilion Black Edition range, all three using the same chassis and internal components, the only difference being the wifi card on the A10 model is upgraded.
http://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=... - Core i3-6100U £459
http://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=... - A10-8780P + R7 M360 £529
http://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Product.aspx?id=... - Core i5-6200U £549
I'd be interested in seeing a true apples-to-apples comparison between devices like these, where the Intel and AMD models are priced and specified so closely together.
Gc - Sunday, February 28, 2016 - link
Another Carrizo 'capability' not implemented:Carrizo was advertised as the first architecture to support full HSA 1.0, but ...
Can any retail Carrizo systems run HSA?
As I understand, to run HSA currently requires installing Linux and the HSA driver.
(Possible running the HSA Docker container on this host, but the host must have the HSA driver.)
https://github.com/HSAFoundation/HSA-Docs-AMD/wiki...
https://github.com/HSAFoundation/HSA-Drivers-Linux...
The only test system listed is a "A88X-PRO" desktop motherboard and Kaveri "A10-7850K" APU.
(No Carrizo chips are available for that socket.)
The host must have "the IOMMU enabled in the BIOS".
This is the IOMMU of the GPU, typically under Graphics Configuration in the BIOS.
https://community.amd.com/thread/169962
However, I have not seen any retail Carrizo systems that implement that BIOS option. Do they exist? (The closest thing is the option to enable AMD-V as required for Docker, but that is not the same thing, as the above link indicates.)
If not, why not? (Is an effort/investment needed to get the support into common AMD chip BIOS/UEFIs used by ODMs, similar like it was needed to get support into the Linux kernel?)
albert89 - Wednesday, March 23, 2016 - link
Although I congratulate Anandtech after repeated demands from consumers like myself as to why a review of Carrizo wasn't done sooner the result is a review that leaves one ask many questions and a demand for another review since new info has come to light.So redo the whole review under dual channel conditions for AMD's Carrizo. Otherwise you'll be leaving this review incomplete and short changing a competitor of Intel leaving us to wonder how bias Anandtech is towards AMD !
DJ Dave - Saturday, March 25, 2017 - link
hey.i just bought this as a refurb. it seems to lag/stutter with certain programs. Mine has 2 ram slots with 4gb in each..does anyone know if that can be upgraded?krissh6563 - Sunday, August 9, 2020 - link
Sir I have Hp Elite-book 745 G2 laptop. Now I am facing overheating problem in my laptop. So what should I do.