Question CPU for Surface Laptop 3.

[LikeLinus]

So I went ahead and ordered a Surface Laptop 3 with the Ryzen cpu, 16gb of ram and 512mb SSD. But I'm seeing conflicting reports about the Intel CPU and Ryzen. Microsoft is saying it's the "fastest mobile CPU/GPU on the marketing". But then some articles talk about the speed advantage of the i7 and it appears to be the better all around cpu, but maybe not as great as the Ryzen GPU. Battery life on both is said to be the same. So I'm not taking in to account the 25w vs 15w.

Plus, from what I've seen, the business version is strictly Intel. Now I'm on the fence and just wondered what everyone's opinion is.

FYI: This will not be for gaming. It's simply for light (travel editing, review and backing up 4K material and photos) video production and graphics. I currently have a MacBook Pro (2017) and a Surface Pro 4. Love them both and they are great, but I want to try the Surface Laptop 3 for fun. Love new toys, guilty as charged

The other advantage of the business machine is they go to 32GB and 1TB SSD. But my primary concern is the CPU and if I should order an Intel one just to be safe. I can always cancel one of them.

 

[Markfw]

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sto...d=_6urdconvggkfrhwjkk0sohzn0n2xglmsr9r36qm300

Anyone can order the Surface Laptop 3 with Icelake in it. MSFT must have realized the AMD part was not great

If you look at just surface 3, you can order MANY different configurations for both AMD and Intel processors.

Here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/home

Or this:

Configure Your Surface Laptop 3

 

[jpiniero]

If you look at just surface 3, you can order MANY different configurations for both AMD and Intel processors.

Here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/home

Or this:

Configure Your Surface Laptop 3

AT's article made it sound like the Icelake 15" was only available to Enterprise customers buying in bulk. But this is apparently not the case.

 

[DrMrLordX]

MSFT must have realized the AMD part was not great

It's just Picasso. Intel knew this going in, so they used it as a placeholder in their lineup until Renoir was ready.

 

[jpiniero]

It's just Picasso. Intel knew this going in, so they used it as a placeholder in their lineup until Renoir was ready.

I was thinking that maybe they picked up AMD as a second source since Intel wouldn't be able to supply them enough Icelake. I think it was a smart move, especially if AMD promised them Renoir early/first.

 

[Thunder 57]

It's just Picasso. Intel knew this going in, so they used it as a placeholder in their lineup until Renoir was ready.

I think you mean MS . I think this was done to work out any kinks that may arise to ensure a smooth Renoir launch.

 

[liahos1]

yes but by the time renoir is out tigerlake will be out/sampling. the performance delta should be just as dramatic.

 

[liahos1]

If you look at just surface 3, you can order MANY different configurations for both AMD and Intel processors.

Here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/home

Or this:

Configure Your Surface Laptop 3

Actually there were a few articles in the last two days showing you could buy an Intel Surface Laptop 3, they, like Anandtech, were working under the assumption the Intel sku was for enterprise/businesses only.

 

[Kirito]

yes but by the time renoir is out tigerlake will be out/sampling. the performance delta should be just as dramatic.

And you know this how?

 

[jpiniero]

yes but by the time renoir is out tigerlake will be out/sampling.

That's a stretch but the gap may not be too long.

 

[liahos1]

And you know this how?

because i read. not sure if this is a serious post or not.

 

[Markfw]

because i read. not sure if this is a serious post or not.

Well, I can read, but I don't know where are are reading this, and obviously others don't know either. Don't be a jerk, and link us to where you read this.

 

[liahos1]

Well, I can read, but I don't know where are are reading this, and obviously others don't know either. Don't be a jerk, and link us to where you read this.

Well what do we know?

We know that Icelake is, at least according to phoronix, 24% faster than last gen intel u parts, and 29pct better perf/watt. We also know that this is 10nm+

We know that a Surface Ryzen Laptop 3 performs significantly worse than a Surface Laptop 2 in battery life, even accounting for display differences.

There have been multiple leaks (happy to edit this post later) showing a 20% improvement in performance from Icelake to Tigerlake at iso clocks.

We know that G7 GPU is comparable or better, depending on workload, relative to a 3700u 25w tdp ryzen part.
We know that Tigerlake is purported to be 2x better on gpu performance relative to Icelake (50% higher EUs, remainder from move to Xe)

Tigerlake 2x GPU Icelake Performance vs Icelake
Tigerlake 1.2x minimum performance on CPU vs Icelake.
Tigerlake on 10nm++ vs Icelake 10nm+ - expect higher clocks and better perf/watt

What do we know about Zen 2, which presumably Renoir will be based on? We know IPC is similar to skylake derived uarch.

So from an IPC perspective:
Zen2=Skylake/Coffelake
Tigerlake = 1.18 (icelake vs coffeelake) x 1.20 (tigerlake vs icelake) = 1.416

IPC for Intel on tigerlake should be ~1.4x Renoir

We can assume clock speeds improve on 10nm++ = say 4.1ghz on the g7 to 4.5ghz on tigerlakes equivalent = 10%

We know that Ryzen 3 desktop clocks improved 200mhz all core on desktop - 4.1 to 4.3 = +5%, lets just say its 10% given TSM 7+ v/f's

So basically on the CPU front

1.416 (ipc) *1.1 (10nm++ vs 10nm clock) / (1.1 (assume 10% boost clock performance on renoir) = 1.416x

Not sure about GPU on the AMD side but would be surprised if they double performance with Renoir - so intel should still have the lead on the GPU front.

From a platform perspective, Intel is pushing 1w displays for athena. I expect that proliferate with Tigerlake skus. I haven't seen anything comparable from AMD. Total platform power should be better with Intel.

So yeah directionally, i think my point stands.

 

[Markfw]

Well what do we know?

We know that Icelake is, at least according to phoronix, 24% faster than last gen intel u parts, and 29pct better perf/watt. We also know that this is 10nm+

We know that a Surface Ryzen Laptop 3 performs significantly worse than a Surface Laptop 2 in battery life, even accounting for display differences.

There have been multiple leaks (happy to edit this post later) showing a 20% improvement in performance from Icelake to Tigerlake at iso clocks.

We know that G7 GPU is comparable or better, depending on workload, relative to a 3700u 25w tdp ryzen part.
We know that Tigerlake is purported to be 2x better on gpu performance relative to Icelake (50% higher EUs, remainder from move to Xe)

Tigerlake 2x GPU Icelake Performance vs Icelake
Tigerlake 1.2x minimum performance on CPU vs Icelake.
Tigerlake on 10nm++ vs Icelake 10nm+ - expect higher clocks and better perf/watt

What do we know about Zen 2, which presumably Renoir will be based on? We know IPC is similar to skylake derived uarch.

So from an IPC perspective:
Zen2=Skylake/Coffelake
Tigerlake = 1.18 (icelake vs coffeelake) x 1.20 (tigerlake vs icelake) = 1.416

IPC for Intel on tigerlake should be ~1.4x Renoir

We can assume clock speeds improve on 10nm++ = say 4.1ghz on the g7 to 4.5ghz on tigerlakes equivalent = 10%

We know that Ryzen 3 desktop clocks improved 200mhz all core on desktop - 4.1 to 4.3 = +5%, lets just say its 10% given TSM 7+ v/f's

So basically on the CPU front

1.416 (ipc) *1.1 (10nm++ vs 10nm clock) / (1.1 (assume 10% boost clock performance on renoir) = 1.416x

Not sure about GPU on the AMD side but would be surprised if they double performance with Renoir - so intel should still have the lead on the GPU front.

From a platform perspective, Intel is pushing 1w displays for athena. I expect that proliferate with Tigerlake skus. I haven't seen anything comparable from AMD. Total platform power should be better with Intel.

So yeah directionally, i think my point stands.

You still did not link anything, and all we know that I have read here is that Ryzen Surface 3 is not as good as the Intel chip in many areas, but in others its better,.

So again, please link where you "know" all these things.

 

[liahos1]

You still did not link anything, and all we know that I have read here is that Ryzen Surface 3 is not as good as the Intel chip in many areas, but in others its better,.

So again, please link where you "know" all these things.

I'll link tmr, but you can find it in all in the Icelake/Cannonlake thread on this very forum. will come back to you. but judging by your post history and signature, i feel I may be falling on deaf ears

 

[Markfw]

I'll link tmr, but you can find it in all in the Icelake/Cannonlake thread on this very forum. will come back to you. but judging by your post history and signature, i feel I may be falling on deaf ears

I read all the threads. I see nothing like you are saying except speculation. I don't give that much credence.

As far as my post history and sig, its all about what is fastest NOW, not speculatively in the future. I deal in facts, not conjecture. At the moment Intel has nothing to compete with Rome, HEDT or desktop, aside from gaming it wins by a few ppd.

Now based on FACTS, tell me where I am biased.

Oh, and I realized this is about laptops, which is not covered in my above statement. Yes, they are a little behind at the moment, but When Ryzen 3000 series laptops/APU hit, then I can venture an opinion there. The technology is there, just not implemented in the laptop APUs yet.

 

[Thunder 57]

...i feel I may be falling on deaf ears

Hope you didn't go out of your way to say that and just meant it as the common phrase it is.

 

[Thunder 57]

Well what do we know?

We know that Icelake is, at least according to phoronix, 24% faster than last gen intel u parts, and 29pct better perf/watt. We also know that this is 10nm+

We know that a Surface Ryzen Laptop 3 performs significantly worse than a Surface Laptop 2 in battery life, even accounting for display differences.

There have been multiple leaks (happy to edit this post later) showing a 20% improvement in performance from Icelake to Tigerlake at iso clocks.

We know that G7 GPU is comparable or better, depending on workload, relative to a 3700u 25w tdp ryzen part.
We know that Tigerlake is purported to be 2x better on gpu performance relative to Icelake (50% higher EUs, remainder from move to Xe)

Tigerlake 2x GPU Icelake Performance vs Icelake
Tigerlake 1.2x minimum performance on CPU vs Icelake.
Tigerlake on 10nm++ vs Icelake 10nm+ - expect higher clocks and better perf/watt

What do we know about Zen 2, which presumably Renoir will be based on? We know IPC is similar to skylake derived uarch.

So from an IPC perspective:
Zen2=Skylake/Coffelake
Tigerlake = 1.18 (icelake vs coffeelake) x 1.20 (tigerlake vs icelake) = 1.416

IPC for Intel on tigerlake should be ~1.4x Renoir

We can assume clock speeds improve on 10nm++ = say 4.1ghz on the g7 to 4.5ghz on tigerlakes equivalent = 10%

We know that Ryzen 3 desktop clocks improved 200mhz all core on desktop - 4.1 to 4.3 = +5%, lets just say its 10% given TSM 7+ v/f's

So basically on the CPU front

1.416 (ipc) *1.1 (10nm++ vs 10nm clock) / (1.1 (assume 10% boost clock performance on renoir) = 1.416x

Not sure about GPU on the AMD side but would be surprised if they double performance with Renoir - so intel should still have the lead on the GPU front.

From a platform perspective, Intel is pushing 1w displays for athena. I expect that proliferate with Tigerlake skus. I haven't seen anything comparable from AMD. Total platform power should be better with Intel.

So yeah directionally, i think my point stands.

There is more assumptions and speculation in there than a flat earther convention (sorry, couldn't think of anything funny ). Renoir shouldn't take too much longer to get out, and if AMD has a product that can hit better margins in mobile, they could probably speed up Zen 3 mobile to come out around the same time as Tiger Lake. AMD hasn't focused on mobile at all because they haven't had many design wins.That is changing, so maybe they will put more effort into it.

Microsoft wouldn't make this move without reason. Maybe the expect AMD to offer superior parts. Maybe they are worried about the renewed rumors of Intel shortages and wanted a second source. Either way MS thought AMD was worth putting into their premium products.

 

[jpiniero]

they could probably speed up Zen 3 mobile to come out around the same time as Tiger Lake.

Tiger Lake U is likely coming in the 1H of 2020. That might seem a quick hook on Icelake but it might be using chiplets which would obliviously be much easier to yield on 10 nm.

 

[Thunder 57]

Tiger Lake U is likely coming in the 1H of 2020. That might seem a quick hook on Icelake but it might be using chiplets which would obliviously be much easier to yield on 10 nm.

That does seem rather early, considering Ice Lake is still quite new. I was thinking early Q4 2020. Late Q3 at the earliest, with higher volumes coming later.

 

[jpiniero]

That does seem rather early, considering Ice Lake is still quite new.

Icelake does seem to be only a limited release. Like I said Intel has an incentive to bring out Tigerlake ASAP if it yields better.

 

[Arkaign]

The model numbers of Intel 10th gen and AMD's 3000 series are pretty agonizing.

Intel 10th gen is a nightmare of long confusing numbers and mixed 10nm/14nm stuff.

Ryzen may be appreciably worse. The outstanding desktop 7nm Zen2 is muddled in with last-gen Zen+ stuff, making it a little confusing on the surface to see what gen you are actually getting. Zen2 was a not inconsiderate upgrade over Zen+, and for them to share a model family is less than ideal. At least the Intel 10 vs 14nm stuff is relatively close in performance metrics, Zen2 was a watershed upgrade over Zen+.

At least Renoir/7nm mobile Zen2 will hopefully deliver on the potential for it on mobile.

 

[Thunder 57]

The model numbers of Intel 10th gen and AMD's 3000 series are pretty agonizing.

Intel 10th gen is a nightmare of long confusing numbers and mixed 10nm/14nm stuff.

Ryzen may be appreciably worse. The outstanding desktop 7nm Zen2 is muddled in with last-gen Zen+ stuff, making it a little confusing on the surface to see what gen you are actually getting. Zen2 was a not inconsiderate upgrade over Zen+, and for them to share a model family is less than ideal. At least the Intel 10 vs 14nm stuff is relatively close in performance metrics, Zen2 was a watershed upgrade over Zen+.

At least Renoir/7nm mobile Zen2 will hopefully deliver on the potential for it on mobile.

Yea, it started because Raven Ridge started it 2000 rather than 1000. To be fair, I'm pretty sure it incorporated some Zen+ features. It was another dumb AMD marketing decision though. They are fairly incompetent (GameCache!). So now we will have Zen 2 mobile 4000 series and Zen 3 desktop 4000 as well.

 

[Brunnis]

I was interested in getting the Ryzen version, but the battery figures sort of put me off. I'm actually more and more leaning towards waiting for Tiger Lake and Renoir. It seems likely that there will be a quite disproportionate performance increase from both the Intel and AMD camps within 12 months. This Broadwell laptop I'm writing on will do for another short while.

Side note: The prices for higher RAM and storage tiers on the Surface Laptop really are pretty awful. And inconsistent. Examples (using the business models):

• Going from 512GB to 1TB on the i7 model costs ~450 USD. Comparing price per GB to a Samsung PM981 drive available at retail, the price is 6x higher. As a consumer, I can buy three 1TB Samsung PM981 drives for the same price as the 512GB->1TB upgrade of the Surface Laptop.
• Regarding consistency: Upgrading the i5 model from 128GB to 1TB costs ~290 USD. Upgrading the i7 model from 256GB to 1TB, i.e. a smaller upgrade, costs 850 USD (!!!).

These are prices for the business models, which are available in some configurations not available to consumers. Just looking at Microsoft's consumer page and playing with the configurations shows some weird stuff as well:

• 128GB -> 256GB: 300 USD
• 256GB -> 512GB: 400 USD
• 512GB -> 1TB: 400 USD

I know pricing like this is pretty common for devices that are not easily upgradeable by the end user. It gets pretty absurd when you compare to devices that are upgradeable, though. Getting a good 1TB M.2 drive and 32GB of DDR4 memory is less than 300 USD in total. Makes buying one of the higher tier Surface Laptop models a really hard pill to swallow.

EDIT: Playing with the configuration tool, upgrading from 16GB to 32GB RAM seems to cost 300 USD.

 

[Abwx]

So from an IPC perspective:
Zen2=Skylake/Coffelake

3700X/3800X roughly match a 4.7GHz CFL but they still have the same IPC..?.

Actually Zen 2 has 13% better MT IPC than SKL/CFL.

CPU-Benchmark: Prozessor-Vergleich

Welche CPU für Games und Apps kaufen? ComputerBase leistet Kaufberatung mit Intel Core i-14000 und AMD Ryzen 7000(X3D) auf Basis von Tests.

www.computerbase.de

 

[Gideon]

3700X/3800X roughly match a 4.7GHz CFL but they still have the same IPC..?.

Actually Zen 2 has 13% better MT IPC than SKL/CFL.

CPU-Benchmark: Prozessor-Vergleich

Welche CPU für Games und Apps kaufen? ComputerBase leistet Kaufberatung mit Intel Core i-14000 und AMD Ryzen 7000(X3D) auf Basis von Tests.

www.computerbase.de

This! I constantly see the erroneous claim that the IPC of Zen2 and Skylake are equal.

I think this is mostly because Intel is faster in gaming, but that is almost exclusively due-to much better memory latency, not clock speed .9900K is often a tiny bit faster than Zen2 even when both are fixed @ 4Ghz.

This in turn makes people assume that the IPC is "about equal". However In the majority of production workloads (where latency is less of an issue) this is not the case and Zen2 is measurably faster per-clock.

Just look at photoshop (image below). 3800x is equal to 9900K, despite the latter having a 4.7Ghz all core boost and 5.0Ghz dual-core boost. 3800X max boost is 4.5 and the all-core boost of 3800X is something between 4.2-4.3 GHz (Based on the Techpowerup Clock analysis of 3900X), therefore it has 9-11% more IPC in all all the aggregated Photoshop tests, Pudget ran:



The same is true for a lot of other production workloads. Especially rendering and encoding where even 3700x is often neck-to-neck with 9900K, despite having all core boost somewhere between 4.0-4.2 Ghz (@ 88W power limit, mind you).

As for gaming, the saving grace for Intel is the fact thatZen2 L3 caches are not shared being 16MB x 2 instead of unified 32MB.

This doesn't matter for workloads where all cores work on a separate dataset (e.g Cinebench), in those the entire L3 cache is used pretty-much optimally already. Now, for games this is almost never the case. It's really hard to make games truly multi-threaded, and even when they are, these threads are still mostly processing draw-calls (of the same input data). Therefore for games, most of the data in those 16MB CCX L3 caches ends up being duplicated.

What it means: despite having 32MB of L3, Ryzen 3xxx still has almost the same amount of effective L3 as 9900K for games (but not for most production workloads). Zen 3 will fix it, and twice the cache will make cases like CS:GO much more common.

TL;DR
Zen2 and Skylake IPC is not equal. Zen2 is often 10-15% faster per clock in production workloads. The "Gaming IPC" (god. I hate that term) is mostly worse due to memory latency, par some anomalies like CS:GO.