Opinion: AMD’s new notebook processor will put Intel on notice
Published: Oct 23, 2017 12:28 p.m. ET
HP will be a flagship partner at launch, creating a big splash
Bloomberg News/Landov
In the past, only budget-priced, low-quality notebooks were shipped using AMD hardware, which left consumers feeling as if they owned a second-rate product. But no more.
By
RYAN
SHROUT
ANALYST
As the winter buying seasons ramps up, AMD is readying a major notebook processor release that will be competitive with Intel for the first time in nearly a decade.
With recent leaks of upcoming configurations coming from major system builders like HP HPQ, +0.45% and performance data that indicate a big increase compared with previous AMD AMD, -0.14% offerings, the mobile AMD chip will force both Intel INTC, +0.12% and Nvidia NVDA, +0.07% to make adjustments to product lines and positioning.
Big backer
The importance of having a tier-one vendor like HP as a flagship partner at launch cannot be overstated. Gaining high-quality design wins for AMD accelerated processing units (APUs) have been the biggest hurdle for the company to overcome.
In the past, only budget-priced, low-quality notebooks were shipped using AMD hardware, which left consumers feeling as if they owned a second-rate product. Having flagship designs from HP, Dell, Lenovo and others will provide a platform in which the AMD Ryzen Mobile parts have the ability to stand out from Intel’s processor platform while still offering the best-quality screens, keyboards, connectivity and even form factors.
Performance boost
The product, code named “Raven Ridge,” is built around the same successful Zen architecture that was first released to the consumer PC market as Ryzen. That architecture resulted in the largest jump in performance for the processor vendor in more than a decade and brought its product portfolio back into contention for high-performance use. But those chips included only the components for a primary system processor, not the graphics compute capability required for a modern PC. As a result, all Ryzen consumer desktop computers were required to have a separate, discrete graphics card.
Ryzen Mobile, as it will be called, takes advantage of AMD’s unique ability to offer both a high-performance processor and a high-performance graphics product, and combine them on to a single chip. While Intel does build a graphics product into its Core series of processors, analysts and the media understand that its performance levels fall well behind AMD’s graphics in gaming, compute and even some video-playback usage.
AMD’s advantage
Even though AMD’s primary processor design is slightly slower than Intel’s architecture on its seventh- and eighth-generation Core processors, and AMD’s graphics performance is slower than the best that Nvidia offers, it is the ability to combine both into a single product that gives AMD an advantage. The result is a single chip offering that includes high-quality CPU and graphics performance — something no one else can currently provide. AMD coined this product the APU, accelerated processing unit.
Notebooks based on the Ryzen Mobile APU will offer competitive processor performance in both single and highly threaded workloads (video encoding, photo processing), and complement that with a graphics technology that can offer mainstream gaming performance. This obviously puts pressure on Intel, as it has maintained a stronghold on the notebook market for many years, thanks to a previous lack of processor performance improvements from AMD’s engineering team.
But it also will affect Nvidia as many of the system builders, like HP, Dell and Acer, often pair a discrete mobile graphics chip with the Intel Core series processor to balance performance in gaming and other accelerated tasks. Those supplemental graphics chips will likely be unneeded in many instances and, thus, potential sales of low-power products like the Nvidia GeForce MX150 would decrease.
Market share
Depending on the quality of initial system designs, which look promising from the leaked HP information, AMD has the chance to make its first serious move into the notebook PC market in the better part of a decade. APUs have always offered benefits to consumers in theory, but without competent and competitive technology for both the standard processor and graphics products, Intel was able to maintain its dominance.
The revitalization of the processor architecture with Zen, and the continued graphics capability of Vega, have given AMD yet another opportunity to take back market and mind share from its longtime rivals.
Ryan Shrout is the founder and lead analyst at Shrout Research, and the owner of PC Perspective. Follow him on Twitter @ryanshrout.
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