Opinions - AMD's never had a better chance to ruffle Intel's notebook feathers

[HEXUS]

Why I think that AMD's Zacate chip presages good times for the Austin outfit.

Read more.

[Biscuit]

Great read thanks!

[jimbouk]

It was a good read I agree, but it sounds very familiar. Whilst an AMD fanboy on the desktop market they just haven't been able to produce a decent laptop chip for too long. Every new iteration has promised 'Intel beating' performance and battery life, can they actually achieve it this time round?

[Jedibeeftrix]

"AMD's Zacate has pretty much all the technical goodness to be a good CPU/GPU fit for a $500-plus (£350) laptop, I believe. I'm also adamant that dual-core Bobcat will give Intel's Atom a good whipping"

This is pretty much my thoughts too:

http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/20...roke-the-atom/
http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/20...but-with-what/

[kingpotnoodle]

AMD's Zacate has pretty much all the technical goodness to be a good CPU/GPU fit for a $500-plus (£350) laptop, I believe. I'm also adamant that dual-core Bobcat will give Intel's Atom a good whipping - the chip that powers most of the Intel-based netbooks priced at under $500 - and it should be good enough to challenge the more-potent CULV portion of Intel's line-up.

I suspect as with other AMD efforts battery life will be worse than Atom whilst graphics and multimedia will be much better. May also be a bit better CPU than Atom as well, good for AMD but will the system price go down as low as Atom?

I doubt Bobcat will do more than compete with older Core 2 CULV, I can't see it beating out the Nehalem CULV (see Alienware M11x) on anything other than graphics performance in games, battery life will hopefully be at least similar.

I just bought a Dell M101z based on latest Athlon Neo and 880M, CPU performance is good enough and the graphics can cope with some games, it's a well balanced system (great keyboard and well built, the good Dells are) but the battery life could be a better.

[Biscuit]

I think its a bad idea to assume anything at this stage. Whilst there is a good chance you will be correct, we have been suprised by AMD in the past and i see no real reason why they cant do it again.

[kalniel]

Notebook.. or netbook?

[scaryjim]

I suspect as with other AMD efforts battery life will be worse than Atom whilst graphics and multimedia will be much better.

9W versions should be comparable on battery life, I'd've thought, although it depends on the accompanying chipset of course. Bottom line is that we won't know until it's stuck in a retail product and benchmarked. But there's certainly reason to be excited about the future of mobile computing: at the very least AMD should be more competitive with new designs and architectures coming in the next 12 months

EDIT: reading that back, I got a horrendous sense of deja vu about the phrase "at the very least AMD should be more competitive..."

[DanceswithUnix]

I got the impression the difference in battery life was largely down to power gating idle parts of the chip, and AMD now seem to have that.

Llano looks like quite a monster, 4 CPU cores and 400 streams is still a pretty high end rig for most people, and yet Zacate seems the more interesting product. I can see me wanting one in a netbook, it seems ideal for an itx format motherboard for fileservers and media boxes where the Atom is just a little under-powered.

[usxhe190]

Hope AMD comes up with something good this time. Intel has been too dominant in the netbook, notebook market for too long.

They need to make sure their CPUs run cool and power efficient (not just power) - these are very important on any netbook or notebook.

[scaryjim]

Llano looks like quite a monster, 4 CPU cores and 400 streams is still a pretty high end rig for most people ...

Indeed, it is essential an Athlon II X4 and a 5570 in one chip! I've also seen a few references to its target TDP being 2.5W to 25W with clock speeds over 3GHz! Part of me thinks that can't possible be right though...

[Biscuit]

Indeed, it is essential an Athlon II X4 and a 5570 in one chip! I've also seen a few references to its target TDP being 2.5W to 25W with clock speeds over 3GHz! Part of me thinks that can't possible be right though...

Yeah that does seem pretty damn ambitious!

[this_is_gav]

Notebook.. or netbook?

AMD have already blurred that line fantastically with the Ferrari One and HP DV2... ok, technically netbooks, but only because of the size and lack of optical drive. Without benchmarking, you wouldn't know.

I presume Intel have a competing product, but when I was looking there wasn't anything even remotely close for similar value.

[TaintedShirt]

excellent read, really hope this comes to pass.

[Jimbo75]

Indeed, it is essential an Athlon II X4 and a 5570 in one chip! I've also seen a few references to its target TDP being 2.5W to 25W with clock speeds over 3GHz! Part of me thinks that can't possible be right though...

Llano cpu cores are targeted at 2.5w to 25w. That's the range of the cpu so expect single cores at low frequencies to be closer to the 2.5w thing and high frequency cores to be closer to 25w.

There is no obvious reason why Llano wouldn't be the same or better as Sandy Bridge in terms of frequency and watts. If intel can put 4 SB cores @ 3.4ghz and their graphics into 65w for example, Llano can do the same.

I would assume Llano would be less competitive in highly threaded applications due to no HT, but thats it. Graphically it's a no-contest with AMD's gpu being far superior.

[mateau]

From what I have read on this forum and many other's including the AMD subversion of IDF, Zacate is not designed at all to compete with Sandy Bridge even though it just very well might in some market segments.

No, instead Zacate was designed to be an ATOM SMASHER. Zacate renders Atom obsolete. Every use for ATOM can now be done with Zacate with better graphics faster speed, HD TV and DX11. That is a huge market.

Hey people buy motebooks and netbooks not for workstation performance but for communications, convenience and entertainment, especially while traveling. Raw computing power is not generally a consideration in the $500.00 market. Desktop replacements are something else again.

Now AMD tested against Intel i5 as a performance reference using Intel graphics. Because most folks can identify with that specification.

Now if Zacate ate the Core i5's lunch then no ATOM bus enabled gpu system will even come close. Most folks can also understand the David vs Goliath reference.

We also know that AMD has a huge portfolio of very successful graphics designs and a world class gpu design team. Intel does not.

This spring promises to be even more interesting than the first release of the first 1 gigaherz by AMD.

I am rooting for the underdog, AMD. Even though one could point out that both Intel and Nvidia are underdogs!!!