Occasionally the stars align. It is very rare in the laptop space that we're able to test two devices, with two very different CPU platforms, with the fewest number of variables possible. But those stars have aligned in 2019, and thanks to Microsoft's Surface Laptop 3 family, we have a rare opportunity to compare AMD and Intel's current-generation laptop platforms in a way that wouldn't normally be possible.

In October at Microsoft’s Surface product launch in New York City, the Redmond company announced the new Surface Laptop 3 family, complete with a new 15-inch model. But what was particularly interesting for us is that the company launched not one, but two variants of this laptop: a consumer model based on AMD's Ryzen "Picasso" Zen+ APU platform, and a corporate model based on Intel's Ice Lake-U platform. And today we're going to get a chance to compare both of these laptops, pitting the top-end Ryzen 7 3780U model against the equally top-end Core i7-1065G7 model.

Microsoft sampled the Ryzen 5 3580U at the launch, and if you’ve not seen the Surface Laptop 3 review, be sure to check that out as well as it goes over the laptop in detail. Today’s focus will be strictly on what is inside.

Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Showdown
	15-Inch Consumer (AMD)	15-Inch Enterprise (Intel)
Processor	AMD Ryzen 7 3780U 4C/8T, 2.3-4.0GHz, 15w	Intel Core i7-1065G7 4C/8T, 1.3-3.9GHz, 8MB L3, 10nm
Memory	16 GB Dual-Channel DDR4-2400	16 GB Dual-Channel LPDDR4X-3733
Graphics	AMD Ryzen 7 3780U Vega 11 Graphics (11 CUs)	Intel Core i7-1065G7 Intel Iris Plus "G7" Graphics (Gen 11, 64 EUs)
Display	15" 2496x1664 3:2 PixelSense Touch and Pen support Individually calibrated panels
Storage	512 GB PCIe NVMe	256 GB PCIe NVMe
Networking	802.11ac 2x2 MIMO Bluetooth 5.0	802.11ax Bluetooth 5.0
Audio	Omnisonic Speakers Dolby Audio Premium
Battery	46 Wh 60 + 5 W AC Adapter
Right Side	Surface Connect Port
Left Side	USB Type-A USB Type-C Headset Jack
Dimensions	339.5 x 244 x 14.69 mm (13.4 x 9.6 x 0.57 inches)
Weight	1.54kg
Camera	Front: 720p Camera and Windows Hello support Dual far-field Studio Mics
Extras	Surface Pen and Dial (sold separately) TPM 2.0
Operating System	Windows 10 Home	Windows 10 Pro
Pricing	16GB/512GB/R7: $2099	16GB/256GB/i7: $1799 (16GB/512GB/i7: $2199)

As a quick refresher to the platforms we'll be testing, AMD launched the Picasso APU at CES in January 2019. Built on the GlobalFoundries' 12 nm process, it promised to be a significant upgrade to AMD's previous laptop / mobile platform, Raven Ridge. Featuring two or four cores based on AMD's Zen+ architecture, the processor peaks at 4.0 GHz in the top model. On the graphics side, AMD has continued with the Vega iGPU which has been so successful for them in the laptop space, providing significantly more 3D grunt than the previous Intel models could match.

Picasso ships with different size GPUs in terms of Compute Units (CUs) depending on the APU model. The lowest tier Ryzen 3 3200U offers just three CUs, the Ryzen 3 3300U offers six, the Ryzen 5 models offer eight, and the top-tier Ryzen 7 normally offers ten CUs. But for Microsoft and the Surface Laptop 3, AMD has quite literally taken that up to 11, with the Surface Laptop APUs coming with one additional compute unit, bringing about Vega 9 and Vega 11 respectively.

Picasso has been a solid offering, bringing a much-needed boost to AMD’s laptop focused efforts. Raven Ridge suffered from particularly high idle power draw and we were glad to see that AMD has addressed that to a degree with Picasso, although they still have work to do in that area. They also entered 2019 supporting only DDR4-2400, putting them at a disadvantage in the laptop space compared to the LPDDR that most laptops ship with, although Intel has been slow to move to LPDDR4, they’ve finally made that jump.

When it comes to Picasso and today's article, it should also be noted that like previous AMD APUs before it, AMD's fully integrated chips are about half a generation behind their discrete CPUs and GPUs. So while AMD is shipping the even newer Zen 2 architecture on desktops and servers, it's not yet available for laptops. Instead, the Zen+ based Picasso is still their current-generation platform for mobile.

On the Intel side, Microsoft opted for Intel’s Ice Lake platform for the business version of the Surface Laptop 3. Intel's latest and greatest platform, Ice Lake has seen a rough bring-up. Intel’s manufacturing woes are well documented, and it's only now, after more than two years of delays that Intel is shipping 10 nm chips in volume.

Intel’s Ice Lake platform features the new Sunny Cove CPU architecture, which Intel claims has an 18% higher Instruction-per-clock rate (IPC) than its outgoing Skylake microarchitecture, which has more or less played out to be pretty accurate. But the new 10 nm process is not as optimized as the outgoing 14 nm one has become, and the top-tier Ice Lake Core i7-1065G7 maxes out at just 3.9 GHz, a 20% lower clockspeed than Intel's top-tier 14 nm laptop chip, the 4.9 Ghz Comet Lake Core i7-10510U. So, while Intel’s newest CPU is still faster than the old one, things are never as clear as they may seem. With an 18% IPC increase but 20% lower peak clockspeeds, the overall net gain has not been very much. Luckily for Intel, they have enjoyed a significant historical CPU performance lead, which has buffered them somewhat in the laptop space.

But for everything going on with the CPU of Ice Lake, it's the GPU side where things really get interesting. Intel’s integrated GPU offerings have been sufficient for desktop use for quite some time – but just so. Intel has offered excellent media blocks, however the 3D gaming performance of their standard chips has been lacking, especially compared to AMD’s excellent Vega iGPU. Ice Lake addresses that in a couple of ways. The first is through their new Gen 11 graphics architecture, bringing about some minor architectural changes to improve their performance. The second is how much die space Intel is outright allocating for the GPU. In terms of the top-tier processor, the amount is a lot. The latest Intel Comet Lake Core i7-10510U processor offers 24 Execution Units (EUs) of Gen 9.5 graphics, but Intel’s Ice Lake processors offer up to 64 EUs of Gen 11 graphics.

Ice Lake also offers some new functionality, including the much-needed introduction of LPDDR4X support. LPDDR4X not only offers more memory bandwidth (up to 60.6GB/sec), but it's also available in higher capacities than the last-generation LPDDR3, finally allowing low power laptops to pack in more than 16GB of RAM. There’s also broader Thunderbolt 3 support, as well as major improvements to Modern Standby which provides a more tablet-like experience when resuming the device. It all adds up to a significantly better offering than Intel was able to achieve previously.

The Showdown

As stated earlier, it is rare to get a chance to test two different laptop platforms within the same laptop chassis. For various reasons, manufacturers typically use different chassis designs for different platforms – to accommodate things like differences in PCB sizes and batteries – making it difficult to do an apples-to-apples laptop platform comparison. Being able to review two platforms within the same laptop design is incredibly important, since as we’ve seen so many times, the manufacturer can play a significant role in overall system performance based on what the select for a laptop’s size, weight, cooling capabilities, and its SoC power limits.

Consequently, the Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 15-inch laptops are as close to an apples-to-apples comparison between Picasso and Ice Lake as you can make. They both feature the top-end processor from each manufacturer, both offer 16 GB of RAM, and both share the same chassis for cooling.

The remaining differences between the laptops are minor. The AMD laptop features a 512 GB SK-Hynix NVMe SSD, whereas the Intel one ships with a 256 GB Toshiba drive. The Intel laptop features an Intel Wi-Fi 6 wireless adapter, and the AMD model offers a Qualcomm Wi-Fi 5 model. And, the AMD laptop features the black anodized aluminum finish, and the Intel version is silver. None of which should impact our testing too significantly.

Section by Andrei Frumusanu

SPEC2017 - ST & MT Performance

Starting off with SPEC, we’re trying to analyze the AMD and Intel systems in direct comparison to each other in a wide variety of workloads. In general, we shouldn’t be expecting too big surprises in the results as earlier this summer we had the opportunity to cover Intel’s Ice Lake CPUs, and the Surface Laptop 3 implementation of the Core i7-1065G7 should pretty much fall in line with those scores.

On AMD’s side, we hadn’t tested the company’s mobile processors in SPEC so this should represent a good opportunity to showcase the two companies’ products side-by-side. As a reminder, the Ryzen 7 3870U tested today is based on AMD’s Picasso chip, a 12nm implementation of the Zen+ microarchitecture, which isn’t quite as up-to-date as the 7nm Zen2 silicon that the company offers in its desktop Ryzen 3000 chips. In a sense, while both products tested today represent the companies’ best mobile products, for Intel it also represents the company’s best technologies, and thus the ICL part has a generational advantage over AMD's current product-line.

We’re limiting our testing this time around to SPEC2017 as it represents the more modern workload characterisations, and we’ve already covered the microarchitectural giveaways presented by SPEC2006 in past articles. We’re testing under WSL1 in Windows due to simplicity of compilation and compatibility, and are compiling the suite under LLVM compilers. The choice of LLVM is related to being able to have similar code generation across architectures and platforms. Our compiler versions and settings are as follows:

clang version 8.0.0-svn350067-1~exp1+0~20181226174230.701~1.gbp6019f2 (trunk)
clang version 7.0.1 (ssh://[email protected]/flang-compiler/flang-driver.git 
  24bd54da5c41af04838bbe7b68f830840d47fc03)

-Ofast -fomit-frame-pointer
-march=x86-64
-mtune=core-avx2 
-mfma -mavx -mavx2

Our compiler flags are straightforward, with basic –Ofast and relevant ISA switches to allow for AVX2 instructions.

Single-Threaded Performance: Intel Dominance

Starting off with single-threaded tests, we’re having a closer look at the integer SPEC20017 suite results.

We’re also adding in AMD and Intel’s top-performing desktop chips into the mix to better convey a context as to where these mobile parts fall in terms of absolute performance, which I think is a major consideration point for the Surface Laptop 3, particularly the Ice Lake models.

The first thing that comes to mind when looking at these results is that there’s a huge discrepancy between what the Intel and AMD models of the Surface Laptop 3. It’s very evident that Intel’s new Ice Lake CPUs and the Sunny Cove microarchitecture have quite a large lead over the Zen+ based Picasso SoC.

The Intel model's performance is near identical to what we’ve measured back in August on Intel’s development platform: we again see the chip being able to keep up with even Intel’s best performing desktop solutions which are running at far higher frequencies and larger power draw.

The Ryzen 7 3780U isn’t quite able to showcase a similar positioning, as it’s notably further behind the Ryzen 9 3950X with the newer Zen2 microarchitecture and faster memory configuration.

The situation in the floating-point suite is very similar, with the Core i7-1065G7 taking a quite considerable lead over the Ryzen 7 3780U. The 519.lbm results here are interesting due to the fact that AMD’s platform is behind by a factor greater than 2x – the test is memory bandwidth and subsystem limited so it’s possibly a bigger bottleneck on the slower DDR4-2400 memory that the system has to make due with. Intel’s LPDDR4X-3733 is able to well keep up with the desktop platforms in such situations.

But even in less memory intensive workloads such as 511.povray, AMD’s IPC disadvantage is too great and even with a theoretical higher peak frequency of 500MHz, the Zen+ based design is too far behind Intel’s new microarchitecture.

The overall SPEC2017 ST scores are pretty one-sided, with the Intel variant of the Surface Laptop 3 being ahead by 37% in the integer suite, and 46% in the floating-point suite. We hadn’t really expected the AMD system to be able to keep up with the Intel CPU, but these results really just expose the technological differences between the two designs. AMD’s Zen2 and LPDDR4X APUs can’t come early enough, as this is a gap that the company needs to close as soon as possible if it wants to compete in high-end laptop designs.

Multi-Threaded Performance: Continued Intel Advantage

While it’s clear that Intel has a large single-threaded performance advantage, we wanted to also see the competitive situation in a multi-threaded/multi-process comparison between the two chips. In the Rate-N test configuration of SPEC, we’re launching 8 instances on both platforms to fully saturate the system and have two processes per physical CPU.

In the MT tests, the AMD system ran at frequencies between 2.9-3.35GHz, whilst the Intel platform ran between 2.6-3.5GHz, depending on workload. TDP, or better said, peak power consumption, plays a bigger role in these tests as the 4-6 hours runtime of the test means we’re really stressing the cooling solutions of the laptops. Intel’s chip here is allowed to draw up to 44W for short durations before it falls down to a sustained 25W. We weren’t able to accurately measure the power draw for the AMD platform but we do note that it looks like under prolonged stress the CPU was around 10°C colder than the Intel variant, with ~70°C at 2.9GHz for the Ryzen system versus 80°C at 2.6GHz for the Intel system, which could point out to a lower sustained power draw for the AMD system.

 

In the integer suite, we mostly seeing the Intel system being ahead, but this time around AMD also manages to win a few tests. The tests where AMD fared best were workloads which have a higher execution characterization, compared to more strictly memory-bound tests such as mcf or omnetpp, where Intel has a clear lead in. Intel’s lead in 502.gcc is pretty massive as well as surprising – I hadn’t expected such a gap, but then again, it’s quite in line with what we saw in the ST results.

In the floating-point suite AMD loses the few advantages that it had, and falls further behind the Intel platform. The FP suite is a lot more memory bound, and Picasso’s memory subsystem here just can’t keep up. The 519.lbm and 554.roms results are particularly shocking as they’re essentially almost no faster than the single-threaded results – the system here is utterly bottlenecked and can’t even scale up in performance over multiple cores.

The overall results for the Rate-8 tests across all physical and logical cores of both the Ice Lake and Picasso systems see a similar performance discrepancy as showcased in the ST results: The Intel Core i7-1065G7 is ahead by 13.9% in the integer suite and a massive 45.6% in the FP suite. The one bottleneck that’s seemingly holding back the AMD system the most is its memory subsystem, and workloads which particularly stress this part of the CPU microarchitectures are the tests in which the Ryzen system fared by far the worst.

All in all, Intel’s process node, microarchitectural IPC, and memory technology lead in the Ice Lake solution is seemingly just too much for the Picasso chip to be able to compete with. Let’s move on to our standard test suite benchmarks and see if the we can correlate similar results in other workloads…

System Performance

Moving on from SPEC to some of our more traditional laptop tests, I’ve taken the opportunity to add some new tests to the suite, which we’ll include on all laptops going forward. While SPEC is a fantastic set of tests to probe the limits of a platform, not everyone is going to run a workload that runs at nearly 100% CPU utilization for such a long time on a laptop. The 8-Thread tests took 4.5 hours to complete on Ice Lake, and 6.5 hours to complete on Picasso, which is likely not something most people would turn to a thin and light laptop for, so it’s important to see how both platforms perform on shorter tests where they can leverage their peak boost frequencies for a higher percentage of the duration.

PCMark 10

PCMark 10 consists of several real-world tests, including web, video conferencing, spreadsheets, writing, and more. There are several GPU tests as well, including rendering, and some gaming. The suite also measures application start-up, and all aspects of the system’s performance factor into the score.

Intel’s CPU performance lead shows clearly here again, with significant leads in both the Essentials and Productivity tests, although AMD’s strong GPU pulls the Ryzen system very close on the Digital Content Creation tasks. But that is not enough to turn the tide, and the Ice Lake platform carries this win.

Cinebench R20

Looking at the latest version of Cinebench tells a similar story as to what we’ve seen so far. Ice Lake’s significant IPC lead pulls it way ahead. On the multi-threaded test, the AMD platform does close the gap somewhat, which is similar to the SPEC rate 8 results.

7-Zip

Checking out the popular 7-Zip file compression tool, the results are in-line with what we see in the desktop space. Intel generally has a lead on the compression side, but AMD claws back at decompression. It is a rare win on the CPU side for AMD here.

Handbrake

Transcoding is a popular task, and Handbrake is one of the most popular tools. For this test, a 1080p movie is converted to 720p using the x264 encoder. Once again, Ice Lake offers significantly more performance when transcoding in software.

Handbrake also supports various hardware encoders, such as Intel’s QuickSync, which provides significantly quicker transcodes at the same settings – albeit at larger file sizes and slightly lower quality compared to the software transcode, according to the Handbrake documentation. QuickSync has been very popular, and has been around quite a while. AMD also offers hardware encoding and decoding with their Video Core Next platform. Handbrake does support AMD’s Video Coding Engine (VCE) but the Surface Laptop 3 does not offer this as an option in Handbrake, so it was not able to be tested. As this is the only current Ryzen mobile APU we’ve tested, it may be a driver issue specific to the Surface branded processor.

x264

Our previous transcoding test, x264, was also run. Here we see that once again Ice Lake has a significant performance advantage, as it did with Handbrake software encoding.

Web Tests

All of our web tests were run with the current version of Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 1909. Web results are highly impacted by the underlying scripting engine, and Microsoft is going to be moving Edge from the EdgeHTML rendering engine to the Chromium open-source project that powers Google Chrome. When they make this change, expected early in 2020, we’ll revamp our suite with new tests.

Intel has aggressively pushed their frequency ramping with Speed Shift, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of Speed Shift is web scripting, since the tasks tend to be very short. AMD is addressing this in Zen 2 with Collaborative Power Performance Control 2, or CPPC2, which is not as elegant of a name as Speed Shift, but promises to drop Zen’s frequency ramping from ~30 ms to ~1 to 2 ms, and will be a welcome addition on our web tests.

GPU Performance - Vega vs Iris

After many tests, it is very clear that Intel’s Ice Lake platform offers a significantly faster CPU, and the results were unsurprising. Although the Ryzen Mobile 3000 platform did launch in 2019, it already struggled on CPU tests against the older Skylake core processors. But on the GPU side, Intel is the one that needs to play catch-up. Previous to Ice Lake, Intel’s standard GT2 GPU platform, found on almost all U-Series 15-Watt processors, offered 24 execution units of their Gen 9.5 GPU. AMD squeezed their Vega GPU architecture into their Ryzen SoC, which could easily double the performance of the Gen 9.5 GT2 GPU.

Ice Lake is Intel’s first real attempt to make a powerful iGPU a standard feature for their CPUs, although it is only a first step. But the new Gen 11 architecture brings some improvements such as more advanced tile-based rendering, variable rate shading, and of course the LPDDR4X-3733 memory adding significant bandwidth, greatly helping the GPU. The biggest change though is just how much die space Intel has dedicated to graphics, jumping from 24 EUs on a full GT2 to 64 EUs on a full GT2 part such as the Core i7-1065G7. And, following in AMD’s footsteps again, Intel is offering cut-down GPUs on lower-spec processors. It’s confused their already confusing processor naming, but the lowest-spec Core announced so far still has 32 EUs, meaning it is still better than the previous gen even at the “G1” level.

AMD has some tricks up their sleeves as well. For the Surface Laptop 3, Microsoft requested a slightly more powerful configuration for their Surface-branded processor. While the CPU side matches the same specifications as the non-Surface CPUs, Microsoft's processor SKUs add an extra GPU Compute Unit to both its Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7, bringing them to 9 and 11 respectively. So the Surface Laptop 3 should be the best possible showcase for GPU performance on the 3000 series Ryzen mobile APU.

Before the results, let’s go over the driver situation. The Intel system ships with an updated driver over what we used on the Dell XPS 13 2-in-1, which resolves the 3DMark issues we saw on that laptop. The driver is from 2019-11-06 and is version 26.20.100.7463. The AMD platform’s driver is from 2019-10-07 and is version 26.20.12027.5004. Unfortunately, the AMD driver can’t be updated from AMD directly, and instead will be released by Microsoft. The current driver has some quirks, so an updated driver is needed for usability, but it did not prevent any GPU workloads from being run. But, the AMD system would only output 1280x720 where we normally test at 1366x768, and attempts to output to an external monitor were thwarted by the buggy driver, so be aware that in most of the gaming tests, the AMD system was outputting at a slightly lower resolution.

Let’s see how the do starting with some synthetics, and then moving to some real-world games.

3DMark

3DMark offers several tests of varying complexity, from Fire Strike as the most demanding, to Ice Storm Unlimited, which can be run on tablets. Here the Ice Lake platform pulls ahead, with better CPU performance helping quite a bit, although the Ice Lake’s Iris Plus graphics is also able to outperform Vega 11 as well.

GFXBench

Kishonti’s latest GFXBench suite added DirectX 12 tests to the fold, making it far more relevant than the older OpenGL versions available on the desktop previously. AMD’s previous work in low-level drivers when they developed Mantle has provided the groundwork for DX12 as well, with Vega 11 offering slightly better results than Iris Plus in this test.

Tomb Raider

Running at our value settings, Tomb Raider was easily playable on both systems, with framerates approaching 100 FPS. The Ice Lake platform performed better on this test.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

The second installment in the Tomb Raider series offers much more demanding visuals, and both systems struggle to play it at our value settings. The DirectX 12 title performs slightly better on Vega, and with some additional settings tweaks, the game would be playable, which is not something you could have said on an integrated GPU previous to Ryzen and Ice Lake.

Strange Brigade

A new title we’re bringing to our laptop suite is Strange Brigade, which scales down nicely on integrated graphics. This game also supports DirectX 12, and as tends to be the pattern, performs very well on Vega 11.

F1 2017

Back with a DirectX 11 title, we see that Intel has again closed the gap, and this game tends to be somewhat CPU bottlenecked as well, so the Sunny Cove cores likely help out here too, but once again Vega 11 wins, if only by a nose.

F1 2019

Codemasters updated the underlying EGO engine to support DirectX 12, which was utilized on this test. Despite that, the Vega 11 GPU is a bit slower than the Iris Plus in this test.

Far Cry 5

Both systems are within striking distance of being playable, which is somewhat remarkable since the Far Cry series is one of the most popular AAA first-person shooters. The Vega 11 GPU was slightly ahead, which is somewhat surprising as this game tends to be CPU bound, but clearly at this low of a GPU limit that hasn’t come into play yet.

Benchmark Analysis: Boost Behavior

Let’s dig into some of the testing to see how the systems responded during the benchmarks. We re-ran several of the tests while simultaneously monitoring the processor frequency, temperature, and power. Unfortunately for our comparison, the power polling results provided by our monitoring tools don’t seem to monitor the same power draw. The Intel power numbers are for the SoC package, but the AMD power numbers appear to be just the CPU cores, which is an unfortunate byproduct of testing two different platforms.

PCMark 10

PCMark 10 is a benchmark platform that attempts to simulate real-world tasks by running a variety of workflow, and the results were perhaps the most interesting of any of the benchmarks. There is a major discrepancy in how the AMD CPU behaved compared to the Intel. The Ice Lake platform kept the CPU frequency at a minimum of 3.5 GHz, with bursts to 3.9 GHz when under load. The Picasso processor was very aggressively switching from low frequency to high frequency, and was rarely indicating that it was over 3.0 GHz, but clearly demonstrating its higher peak frequency of 4.0 GHz in several locations. Both systems were fairly even in terms of CPU temperature, and Intel’s aggressive turbo levels were evident with peak power levels of 40 Watts for brief moments. The Ice Lake platform finished the benchmark about 200 seconds quicker than the Picasso system.

Cinebench R20 Single-Thread

We see somewhat similar results when only a single CPU core is loaded with the Picasso CPU frequency varying quite a bit. There’s also an average higher temperature on the AMD platform during this workload, and once again Ice Lake finishes the rendering quite a bit sooner thanks to its stronger CPU cores.

Cinebench R20 Multi-Thread

With all cores loaded the graph is considerably altered. Here the AMD processor is able to maintain a much higher frequency across its cores for much longer, while Intel's chip is only able to maintain 3.5 GHz for about 30 seconds before it runs out of headroom, dropping the cores down to around 2.6 GHz. But despite the lower frequency, the much higher IPC on Sunny Cove allows the Ice Lake platform to finish quite a bit sooner.

Platform Power

Performance aside, the other side of the coin is battery life. AMD made big gains in battery life with the Ryzen 3000 series, somewhat addressing the power requirements of the platform and getting rid of some of the excessive idle power draw, but they are still using DDR4 on their mobile platform, which puts them at a disadvantage right out of the gate. Intel has made very good gains in battery life over the last several generations, and the move to 10 nm for Ice Lake also brought along LPDDR4X support. Most of the previous generation laptops stuck with LPDDR3, unless the manufacturer needed more than 16 GB of RAM, where they’d be forced to switch to DDR4. Finally adding LPDDR4X support is something that Intel has needed to do for a while, and ironically Intel’s flagship Core product line lagged behind their low-cost Atom lineup which did support LPDDR4.

Web Battery Life

The Ryzen 7 3780U powered Surface Laptop 3 was slightly under the Ryzen 5 device we tested at launch, but still in the same range. The AMD system isn’t helped very much by Microsoft only offering a 46 Wh nominal battery capacity, which is rather undersized for a 15-inch laptop. The Ice Lake device, as we’ve seen before, was much more efficient under load, offering a sizeable battery life lead.

Idle Power

One of AMD’s biggest challenges was to get their laptop SoC into a premium device, and with the Surface Laptop 3 they have succeeded. Microsoft has shown themselves as being adept at squeezing battery life out of devices, with low-power displays, and good internal components to minimize power draw. Here Intel has held a considerable advantage over the last couple of years, and the move to 10 nm should, in theory, help as well.

To test the idle power draw of both systems, the battery discharge rate was monitored with the screens fixed in at 5.35 nits, to minimize the power draw of the display on the result. Normally we’d prefer to have the display completely off for this test, but Microsoft’s power plan on the Surface Laptop actively turns off the laptop when the display times out.

The Ice Lake system was able to go all the way down to right around 2 Watts of power draw – and sometimes slightly under – with as low as 1.7 Watts seen. We’ve seen under 1 Watt of draw on an 8th generation Core Y series processor, and around 1.5 Watts on the same generation U series, so considering the display is not completely off on the Surface Laptop, the 2-Watt draw is quite reasonable.

The Picasso system was not quite as efficient, drawing 3 Watts at idle. This is in-line with the results we’ve seen on other Picasso systems and explains the lower battery life results on the AMD system. AMD made big gains moving from Raven Ridge to Picasso, but I’m sure the team is looking forward to the 7 nm Zen 2 coming to their laptops, which we hope will address this further.

Final Words

Two laptops. Two platforms. It is rare to have a chance to see a manufacturer offer such equal footing to both AMD and Intel by outfitting a premium laptop with processors from both. It represents a rare opportunity to get to test the latest processors from AMD and Intel in a laptop in such an apples-to-apples fashion.

In the laptop space, design, cooling, and a manufacturers requirements can play a big part in how a particular chip performs, thanks to adjustable power level settings, surface temperature adjustments, and more. We have seen the lowest tier CPU outperform the highest tier CPU just by the virtue of a better cooling system, so to have processors from AMD and Intel, both of which launched in 2019, in the same chassis is a wonderful opportunity.

There aren’t too many ways to sugar coat the results of this showdown though. AMD’s Picasso platform, featuring its Zen+ cores and coupled with a Vega iGPU, has been a tremendous improvement for AMD. But Intel’s Ice Lake platform runs circles around it. Sunny Cove cores coupled with the larger Gen 11 graphics have proven to be too much to handle.

On the CPU side, no one should be too surprised by the results. We've already seen on the desktop that AMD’s Zen+ cores were competitive, but slightly slower than the previous Skylake platform; and the new Sunny Cove microarchitecture from Intel is a big step forward in terms of IPC for Intel. On purely CPU based tasks, Ice Lake really stretched its legs, and despite this being a 3.9 GHz chip, in single-threaded SPEC 2017, it managed to come very close to a 5.0 GHz Core i9-9900K with a massively higher TDP. Zen+ is outclassed here, and that showed in the benchmark results, and especially in the benchmark time. On our 8-thread SPEC 2017 run, the Ice Lake platform finished just a hair over two hours ahead of Picasso.

But things fare better for AMD on the GPU side of matters. Even though Intel has certainly closed the gap with Ice Lake's iGPU, AMD seems to continue to hold an advantage, especially on the 11 Compute Unit Ryzen Surface Edition processor found in the Surface Laptop 3. Intel has dedicated a lot more die area to the GPU and the results put them almost on equal footing with the Vega based GPU on Picasso. On the more complex GPU tasks, AMD tends to have a slight lead, and AMD’s low-level driver support also seems to benefit them on DirectX 12 based tasks. But, Ice Lake’s GPU is helped by the much quicker CPU it is coupled to, so depending on the specific test it can be even quicker.

Ice Lake does all of this with much better power efficiency as well. Overall battery life is quite a bit longer, and idle power draw is notably lower as well. Case in point: at minimum screen brightness, the Ice Lake system was pretty much only sipping power, drawing around 1.7 Watts, versus the 3.0 Watts for the AMD system.

It was fantastic to see AMD get a design win in a premium laptop this year, and the Surface Laptop 3 is going to turn a lot of heads over the next year. AMD has long needed a top-tier partner to really help its mobile efforts shine, and they now have that strong partner in Microsoft, with the two of them in a great place to make things even better for future designs. Overall AMD has made tremendous gains in their laptop chips with the Ryzen launch, but the company has been focusing more on the desktop and server space, especially with the Zen 2 launch earlier this year. For AMD, the move to Zen 2 in the laptop space can’t come soon enough, and will hopefully bring much closer power parity to Intel’s offerings as well.

Meanwhile for Intel, Ice Lake has been years in the making, and, after a long delay, it is finally here. After digging into the platform in-depth, it’s clear that Ice Lake is an incredibly strong offering from Intel. The CPU performance gains are significant, particularly because they were made in the face of a CPU frequency deficit. But the biggest gains were on the GPU side, where Intel’s Gen 11 GT2 in its full 64 Execution Unit configuration is likely the biggest single increase in GPU performance since they started integrating GPUs. It pulls very close to AMD’s Vega, closing the gap in performance to almost zero.

2019 has been a big year in the laptop space, with both Intel and AMD bringing new tools to the game. 2020 should be just as exciting, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get another chance to do this all over again.