AMD Gets Serious About Chromebooks at CES 2019 (cnet.com) 28
An anonymous reader shares a report: AMD's early CES 2019 announcements brought us some updates on its laptop processors, which include a targeted attempt to capture some of the growing cheap Chromebook market, slightly faster mobile Ryzens and a promise to keep everyone's AMD laptop drivers up to date with the latest zero-day game-release optimizations. Sadly, the news didn't include the much-anticipated, high-performance 7-nanometer Navi GPUs or the rumored Ryzen 3000-series desktop CPUs -- hopefully, the company's just holding back that info for its CEO's keynote on Wednesday.
For the first time, AMD has gained a little bit of traction in Chromebooks with some partner announcements at CES such as the HP Chromebook 14 AMD and the Acer Chromebook 315. The announcements are in conjunction with the new A4-9120C and its sibling, the A6-9220C, which have slower CPU and GPU clock speeds than the 15-watt full-fat versions. That allows AMD to match the 6-watt target power draw of Intel's competing Celeron and Pentium models. AMD claims somewhat better performance on both Chrome OS and Android apps, which is possible given that their clock speeds are still faster despite the drop. Further reading: AMD at CES 2019: Ryzen Mobile 3000-Series Launched, 2nd Gen Mobile at 15W and 35W, and Chromebooks.
It's all about the NREs (Score:1)
CPU performance between 28 nm and 22 nm isn't significant unless you can add more units or cache (you generally don't). The main advantage is a die shrink that reduces costs. These AMD chromebooks are going to effectively use a 5 year old architecture at full cost when in low volume. If AMD sees a lot of volume, they can die shrink and crank up their own profits significantly.
NREs (Non-recurring engineering) costs are the driving factor here. AMD is playing things safe, and apparently they were successful i
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CPU performance between 28 nm and 22 nm isn't significant unless you can add more units or cache (you generally don't). The main advantage is a die shrink that reduces costs...
Additionally smaller size gives more room for either higher clock frequency or less energy usage, which (the latter) is one of the important factors for notebooks (and chromebooks in particular).
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Ignorant question,
is something without an HDMI out a good option for non-gaming?
Seems like using an APU is a better option to save in a non-gaming context.
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So what added value will AMD bring to a platform that's used mainly for casual web browsing? I doubt there are any compelling online games that will run on the Chromebook's notoriously small storage space? Ultra HD videos are out of the picture unless Google comes out with a tabloid size Chromebook (a Chromepaper?).
I'm using Web Assembly [webassembly.org] to build my C++ app for the web. It can use OpenGL, so it would benefit from being able to use the GPU for drawing. For a Windows equivalent: if you write some dot net app using XAML for the UI, it will render using DirectX to accelerate the drawing of vector based assets. It doesn't even have to be running the latest AAA microtransaction shitfest, or a 4K video, or my example app above, to benefit from having a GPU. Even regular 2D rendering of your web page will be using the GPU for
That's nice but 3700U (Score:3)
It's nice to see AMD get a foothold in the tablet market. But the 3000 series APUs, also announced today, are more important imho. For example, the 15 watt 3700U is ideal for a midrange ultrabook. With it's 10 Vega GPU cores it can handle 1080p gaming just fine, in additional to that Zen+ Ryzen goodness. I'm thinking you're going to see AMD ultrabooks at the top of bestseller lists for the first time ever.
It's good for graphic chips support on linux (Score:2)