Asus ROG Strix GL702ZC (Ryzen, Polaris, FreeSync) laptop demoed

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The Strix GL702ZC is the first ever AMD CPU powered laptop from Asus ROG.

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Read more.

The keyboard could be bigger and the tracking pad completely removed in my opinion. Add an optional touchscreen instead. But the hardware seems like a good combination.

Looks pretty good and specs are pretty nice, looking forward to seeing Intel vs AMD competition in the luxury brand of gaming.

Like the concept of Ryzen in laptops, but not sold on Polaris in laptops. Especially the biggest Polaris they have. Bring on thorough testing, huh?

If it works then this could be the start of something nice for AMD, getting in on the laptop GPU protection racket NVidia runs.

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Originally Posted by Ozaron

Like the concept of Ryzen in laptops, but not sold on Polaris in laptops. Especially the biggest Polaris they have. Bring on thorough testing, huh?

If it works then this could be the start of something nice for AMD, getting in on the laptop GPU protection racket NVidia runs.

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Is it actually the biggest Polaris they have though? Or is it like the old days where the "Mobility Radeon 9800" is actually close to a desktop 9600? Cause I don't see them cutting down a 150W+ RX 580 to 65W through clock throttling alone.

Looks like the CPU is at least a full desktop CPU and not a lower model upmarketed because mobile.

[Edit]
wccftech claims it's a 65W RX 580 with 2304 stream processors that boosts "beyond 1200Mhz". If so holy carp, that's a full desktop chip, that's been cut from 150W to 65W by cutting 20% off the clockspeed. Not sure if I should be amazed how much they've improved the efficiency, or how desperately hard they must have been driving it before. Or how inaccurate the information is.

Looks like you've answered your own questions? It does seem a bit crazy that they could pull it off, but the general consensus is that the last couple of generations of AMD GPUs come out of the factory with a voltage as high as they can safely push it for maximum yield and greatest clock speeds. It doesn't surprise me, therefore, that efficiency is easy to gain. But 2304 SPs in a laptop sounds... warm. And loud.

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Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

... wccftech claims it's a 65W RX 580 with 2304 stream processors that boosts "beyond 1200Mhz". If so holy carp, that's a full desktop chip, that's been cut from 150W to 65W by cutting 20% off the clockspeed. ...

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Note that "boosts beyond" does not mean it's going to sustain that kind of clock speed ;)

When Polaris first came out CAT posted a voltage curve in one of the discussion threads that showed that up to ~ 900MHz Polaris only needs ~ 0.8v. If they've cherry picked the best low-voltage silicon for these parts they might get up to ~ 1GHz with similar voltage, I'd guess, and I'd expect that to be roughly where these will clock in regular usage. I'd also guess that they'll have reduced the GDDR5 clock as well - pushing GDDR5 @ 8Gbps take quite a bit of power, and if you're clocking the cores ~ 25% lower you can probably afford to drop the RAM speeds as well, which will save some power. Basically, the desktop parts are run at the ragged edge to get the maximum possible performance, and what they'll put in the laptops is parts tuned for the best possible energy efficiency. Should still be pretty damn impressive, though, imo ;)

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Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

..., that's been cut from 150W to 65W by cutting 20% off the clockspeed. Not sure if I should be amazed how much they've improved the efficiency, or how desperately hard they must have been driving it before. Or how inaccurate the information is.

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Power savings are thanks to dropping the voltage, so I guess they needed a lot of volts to get that last 20% of performance out of the chip.

Edit: which is what Jim said, I really should refresh my browser before posting :D

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

Note that "boosts beyond" does not mean it's going to sustain that kind of clock speed ;)

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Indeed, but the full desktop RX 580 "only" boosts to 1400-1450 or so, so even 1201 boost would be less than 20% off. It may be the delta between base and boost speeds is bigger on the mobile part, as it tends to be for mobile CPUs.

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Originally Posted by scaryjim

When Polaris first came out CAT posted a voltage curve in one of the discussion threads that showed that up to ~ 900MHz Polaris only needs ~ 0.8v. If they've cherry picked the best low-voltage silicon for these parts they might get up to ~ 1GHz with similar voltage, I'd guess, and I'd expect that to be roughly where these will clock in regular usage. I'd also guess that they'll have reduced the GDDR5 clock as well - pushing GDDR5 @ 8Gbps take quite a bit of power, and if you're clocking the cores ~ 25% lower you can probably afford to drop the RAM speeds as well, which will save some power. Basically, the desktop parts are run at the ragged edge to get the maximum possible performance, and what they'll put in the laptops is parts tuned for the best possible energy efficiency. Should still be pretty damn impressive, though, imo ;)

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I admit I wasn't paying much attention when Polaris came out as I'd just bought my shiny new GTX 970 not that long prior.

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Originally Posted by DanceswithUnix

Power savings are thanks to dropping the voltage, so I guess they needed a lot of volts to get that last 20% of performance out of the chip.

Edit: which is what Jim said, I really should refresh my browser before posting :D

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Teehee! Yes, I got the impression they were running the desktop chips at basically the edge of how far they could push them, but the implication they pushed them to the part of the curve where the additional 20% performance cost 250% more power would still be a bit surprising.