Ordered a "Beema" A6-6310 laptop.

[monstercameron]

That's good to hear. Someone at another site compared it with an Ivy or maybe even Haswell "U" i3 CPU (at lower clocks).

maybe comparable to the low power no frills skus like the 2995U or similar. This isnt a "beast..." so to speak.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Celeron-2955U-Notebook-Processor.98845.0.html

if anything the ssd will go a long way to making it livable. Please update this thread when you get it.

 

[Yuriman]

That's good to hear. Someone at another site compared it with an Ivy or maybe even Haswell "U" i3 CPU (at lower clocks).

In multithreaded performance, perhaps, but performance per thread is significantly lower.

I don't own one, mind you, just done extensive reading on them. I'd love to play with one.

 

[Abwx]

In multithreaded performance, perhaps, but performance per thread is significantly lower.

I don't own one, mind you, just done extensive reading on them. I'd love to play with one.

The 6310 has same ST perf in CB 11.5 as a 2955U and 58% faster in the MT test.

In integer ST it should be faster by 30% according to the X264 first pass test at NBC, on Integer MT it is 46% faster according to the second pass test.

I m sure the OP will be pleasantly surprised, moreover given the SSD as Windows should be operational in a matter of 8-10s.

 

[cbn]

I'm currently using a Dell I picked up on clearance for approx. $186, with an N2830. It's not "horrible", but it does feel a bit less snappy than my last laptop with an IB 1007U CPU. Also, has some trouble with Skype taking up 99% CPU and not running right, after I've been running for like a month continuously.

How does Skype scale with cores?

 

[cbn]

The 6310 has same ST perf in CB 11.5 as a 2955U and 58% faster in the MT test.

In integer ST it should be faster by 30% according to the X264 first pass test at NBC, on Integer MT it is 46% faster according to the second pass test.

Here is the passmark comparison:

A6-6310, 2369 MT, 833 ST

Celeron 2955U, 1458 MT, 785 ST

(Results ~parallel the CB 11.5 scores. A6-6310 is 62% faster in MT compared to 2955U).

P.S. Here is the passmark score for N2830:

N2830, 998 MT, 517 ST

 

[cbn]

Virtual Larry is this the laptop you bought?

Lenovo B50-45

http://shop.lenovo.com/gb/en/laptops/lenovo/b-series/b50-45/#tab-tech_specs

Spec'd with A6-6310, 4GB RAM, 500GB 2.5" HDD, Windows 7 Pro.

 

[cbn]

Regarding the Firefox scrolling, here are the results I got with my Athlon 5350 (using 1080p monitor):

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36863185&postcount=80

Nice, this should be really interesting! Could you do some multitasking as well? e.g. open Spotify/VLC and browse with 5 tabs open at the same time.

With VLC playing a DVD and five Firefox tabs open, scrolling the Verge Homepage with the Athlon 5350 (at full speed) is not bad. It hangs a bit with rapid scrolling (ie, grabbing the vertical scrolling bar and moving quickly up and down with the mouse), but is liveable.

With the slower mouse wheel scrolling it seems fine.

P.S. The operating system used was Windows 8.1

So not bad (with 1080p)

With a 1366 x 768 laptop screen it should be faster.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Here is the passmark comparison:

A6-6310, 2369 MT, 833 ST

Celeron 2955U, 1458 MT, 785 ST

(Results ~parallel the CB 11.5 scores. A6-6310 is 62% faster in MT compared to 2955U).

P.S. Here is the passmark score for N2830:

N2830, 998 MT, 517 ST

That's fairly significantly faster than the N2830 then, that should be great!

Virtual Larry is this the laptop you bought?
Lenovo B50-45
Spec'd with A6-6310, 4GB RAM, 500GB 2.5" HDD, Windows 7 Pro.

Yes, as far as I know, that's the one. Adorama on Ebay has them for $199.99 USD.

 

[cbn]

Yes, as far as I know, that's the one. Adorama on Ebay has them for $199.99 USD.

That was the listing I was looking at.

They had 6000 available, now they have zero available.

P.S. Pretty nice that one had Windows 7 Pro.

 

[krumme]

I have the Athlon 5350 (higher base clock than A6-6310) and here is what I got for FPS in TF2:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36794469&postcount=287

Thanx. Tf2 is hard on the cpu.

 

[krumme]

Man we could use some excavator 15w cores for this low end market. If it was 230usd so be it - it would transform the entire product and market. Hope this 28nm is dirt cheap and the high density tools make wonders.

 

[cbn]

Man we could use some excavator 15w cores for this low end market. If it was 230usd so be it - it would transform the entire product and market. Hope this 28nm is dirt cheap and the high density tools make wonders.

And in some cases with Windows 7 like the OP's laptop (for people that don't want Windows 10 with their new hardware).

 

[DrMrLordX]

Man we could use some excavator 15w cores for this low end market. If it was 230usd so be it - it would transform the entire product and market. Hope this 28nm is dirt cheap and the high density tools make wonders.

That's meant to be Carrizo-L price territory. Nobody seems willing or able to sell Carrizo at that price point . . . yet.

 

[Dresdenboy]

That's meant to be Carrizo-L price territory. Nobody seems willing or able to sell Carrizo at that price point . . . yet.

Don't forget about semiconductor economics and higher design costs of the more advanced chips.

Didn't AMD abandon the mss at any costs race?

 

[cbn]

Man we could use some excavator 15w cores for this low end market. If it was 230usd so be it - it would transform the entire product and market. Hope this 28nm is dirt cheap and the high density tools make wonders.

That's meant to be Carrizo-L price territory. Nobody seems willing or able to sell Carrizo at that price point . . . yet.

Yes, it would have to be discounted (ie, possibly near the end of the chip run) and some kind of surplus outlet sale like we see here with Adorama (on ebay).

With that mentioned, how do the 15W Carrizo compare to the 15W Beema CPU wise?

I've been trying to find Passmark scores of a 15W Carrizo (on battery) to make sure it doesn't benefit from the 20W/25W AC boost cTDP.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yes, it would have to be discounted (ie, possibly near the end of the chip run) and some kind of surplus outlet sale like we see here with Adorama (on ebay).

With that mentioned, how do the 15W Carrizo compare to the 15W Beema CPU wise?

I've been trying to find Passmark scores of a 15W Carrizo (on battery) to make sure it doesn't benefit from the 20W/25W AC boost cTDP.

That gives me an idea. Maybe AMD should flood the laptop market with cheap chips. They have so little marketshare right now in laptops, they're about to be counted out.

Edit: Do you think that these quad-core Beema laptops for $200, are below cost, or at cost, or do you think that they're still making a profit, at that price-point?

 

[cbn]

That gives me an idea. Maybe AMD should flood the laptop market with cheap chips. They have so little marketshare right now in laptops, they're about to be counted out.

+1.

That appeared to be their plan with cat cores, but I hope they do it with the big cores as well (via reduction in iGPU size).

Edit: Do you think that these quad-core Beema laptops for $200, are below cost, or at cost, or do you think that they're still making a profit, at that price-point?

The price was really good, so I am thinking surplus closeout. If a loss existed, not sure whether Adorama or Lenovo took it. If I had to guess I would say Lenovo.

With that mentioned, lets hope whatever future Zen APU is being designed competes well against any sale/closeout Broadwell/Skylake/Kabylake 2C/4T and Carrizo laptops. This not mention, whatever Intel has in store for Cannolake.

What doesn't sell today can become competition for tomorrow's latest electronics.

 

[VirtualLarry]

The price was really good, so I am thinking surplus closeout. If a loss existed, not sure whether Adorama or Lenovo took it. If I had to guess I would say Lenovo.

With that mentioned, lets hope whatever future Zen APU is being designed competes well against any sale/closeout Broadwell/Skylake/Kabylake 2C/4T and Carrizo laptops. This not mention, whatever Intel has in store for Cannolake.

What doesn't sell today can become competition for tomorrow's latest electronics.

It really kind of boggles my mind, that they had 6000 units of these to sell. It definitely sounds like a distributor closeout sale, and they picked Adorama to unload them.

Edit: Newegg has an HP REFURB with an A8-6410, for $220 after a $20 MIR.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...15-Latest-_-LaptopsNotebooks-_-34264105-S5A5C

 

[cbn]

Yeah, $200 for a laptop is cheap when we consider besides the actual processor there is battery, HDD or SSD, motherboard, operating system, memory, lcd screen, AC adapter, chassis and keyboard, etc.

So a lot of fixed cost there.

Maybe a Zen Compute Stick (using MHL like the Intel Cedar City and Falls City 2) that can plug into a re-useable lapdock type arrangement is something that could be done?

According to this MHL 2.0 has 4.5W power available and MHL 3.0 has 10W power available.

And if the SoC stays fanless (or close to fanless), I would think there is room in a 10W power budget for SO-DIMM rather than soldered down memory. This, in addition, to SSD.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Maybe a Zen Compute Stick (using MHL like the Intel Cedar City and Falls City 2) that can plug into a re-useable lapdock type arrangement is something that could be done?

According to this MHL 2.0 has 4.5W power available and MHL 3.0 has 10W power available.

And if the SoC stays fanless (or close to fanless), I would think there is room in a 10W power budget for SO-DIMM rather than soldered down memory. This, in addition, to SSD.

Is Zen going to be an SoC? I didn't think that it would scale down to that level of TDP, necessary for a Compute Stick. Heck, the Atom Z3735F is too much in the TDP dept, they throttle like a mofo.

 

[cbn]

Is Zen going to be an SoC?

The Zen APU should be a SoC, but I do hope either the die is small or AMD makes a small die variant.

P.S. Cedar City will be a compute stick based on Core M and here is a look at the Apple Mac Book PCB to get an idea on how large the logic board might be.

(Core M located on the far left outlined in red and 128GB Toshiba MLC NAND outline in yellow, below):

(8GB LPDDR3 outlined in red on the flip side of the PCB, below):

And the small heatsink for the Core M processor:

And here is a shot of the whole 12" laptop in order to judge the size of the PCB in relation to other parts:

 

[cbn]

I didn't think that it would scale down to that level of TDP, necessary for a Compute Stick. Heck, the Atom Z3735F is too much in the TDP dept, they throttle like a mofo.

I am thinking they would either use a fan (like the Intel compute stick shown below) or perhaps make the compute stick somewhat larger than what we have seen thus far. Maybe both.

And if the APU is based on a quad core design they might have to disable a core or two. Triple core would be nice.

P.S. Intel Cedar City compute stick advertises 64GB SATA, so I wonder if Intel's next compute form form might be larger than the current one due to what I presume to be the M.2 form factor also being present under the hood.

 

[dark zero]

Mmm.. Better to not to adopt the ridiculously small desing until we can go heatsinkless....

Someone bought he FitLet PC with AMD Mullins? That is expensive, however is a superb design. Really good BTW

 

[VirtualLarry]

Ok, I got my laptop(s) in. Cracked one open, booted Win7 (didn't check to make sure it was Pro though), looked for some utility to make a set of recovery discs. The only thing that I could find was CyberLink / Lenovo "OneTouch Recovery", but it just makes a system backup, it doesn't make ISOs or bootable recovery media, and it requires the restore partition to be intact to restore the recovery backup!

I resorted to having to clone the original HDD using an Apricorn SATA-Wire (USB3.0 version), and an updated copy of EZ-Gig IV cloning software, that I had put on a USB stick.

Thankfully, that worked, and the clone booted.

The Team Dark L3 240GB SATA SSD, has, I think, a Phison S8 controller. So it doesn't have the best performance.

My Dell with N2830 has a Samsung EVO 850 120GB SSD.

Some notable features:

In the "Lenovo Settings" app, you can set up a wifi hotspot. (Laptop has gigabit ethernet.)

They bundled PowerDVD 10, and even though my sub-model didn't ship with a DVD drive, the internal connector is present to add one. (I wasn't so lucky with my Dell, the internal connector wasn't there.)

 

[cbn]

How's the web browsing compared to the N2830 laptop?

Also lets us know about the Skype when you have the chance.

P.S. The recovery sounds like the system on my refurb PC from Arrow Direct. (I had to use Clonezilla to transfer to another drive). Shame MS is not including Windows 7 disks anymore.