I in fact can... each time AMD has promised thermals will be controlled in their mobile and each time they have failed to deliver.
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2017 MacBook Pro - to feature AMD's Ryzen?
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I in fact can... each time AMD has promised thermals will be controlled in their mobile and each time they have failed to deliver.
Matters not. AMD has done a phenomenal job with Zen, as they did with the Phenom cores back in the day. But no gains have ever translated into mobile. I have no reason to suspect so, even with such gains.
Hell, even the ATI/GPU side of things are starting to catch on the thermal issues on mobility.
Of course it matters. It means the CPU does not need to run as often at full throttle.
Same thing was said when we went to lower production nodes of AMD CPUs... and still they were hot. Look, I am basing myself on AMD's history here. If Zen does work out, then good; however, a switch to AMD CPUs would not happen this generation given the recoding of OS X to support both AMD and Intel.
The previous architecture was a dog, and all they did was reimplement it more efficiently when they moved to 28nm.
That sets no bad expectations whatsoever for Ryzen.
Not for Ryzen but yes for AMD as a company. Like I said, everytime they shrink to mobile, everything they do goes to hell.
Mobile APUs don't get shrunk, they get cut down and clocked lower.
And their GPUs are more powerful than Intel's.
CPUs, not APUs... AMD's APUs were great when they came out due to the ATI infused GPU side they had; crushed Intel's crap.
CPUs on the mobile side get shrunk and in turn (in theory) get cooler. Just like the Intel variants of i7 and i5. But AMD has always sucked at shrinking it down to the mobile space. The process node change should help these changes in mobile... which it does for Intel....
They don't get shrunk. It is the same core and process for a generation. The ULV parts can be different.
And I think neither AMD nor Intel make mobile CPUs.
Oh but they do make mobile CPUs... recall, the laptop market is dubbed as mobile for desktop to laptop CPU purposes. In this case, the mobile CPUs are made reduced in transistor count which in turn reduces heat produced and obviously results in performance hits. That should still translate into performance gains vs last generation CPUs due to archiectural changes or process node shrinkage. However, Intel has done this beautifully... AMD has not.
And yes, CPUs get a shrink when they undergo a process node change. However, many times it is not seen as more transistors are packed, thus increasing heat vs performance ratio. AMD has sucked at this for a while in the mobile/laptop targets which is why my skepticism on the Ryzen scaling down.
The mobile APUs are not the same as the desktop APUs, as I said they are cut down (designed with less GPU cores for example), but the design is not shrunk for a generation.
When a design is shrunk, it usually applies to both the desktop and mobile GPUs.
FX CPUs stopped to be developed, but the design was improved and shrunk for newer APUs (both desktop and mobile versions).
And in the latest 28nm generation AMD has actually 2 similar mobile designs: a mainstream APU and a budget APU. The specific budget APU core was replaced by the high performance core some generations back, leaving the small core only for custom designs (ie., console).
Now it seems this small core has been improved and shrunk again for the next Xbox.
Zen is a new design implemented in Globalfoundries' smallest process. The APUs will consist of 1 CCX (like probably Ryzen 3) plus a GPU of the 14nm generation. It will not be shrunk with respect to desktop.
The budget mobile APUs will probably not be Zen yet for some time. There's room for them to be shrunk from their current design, but maybe AMD estimates it's not worth it.