[ComputerBase] AMD's Copilot solutions: The $799 notebooks will come with "Krackan" in early 2025 (German)
Posted by Noble00_@reddit | hardware | View on Reddit | 59 comments
HTwoN@reddit
Reminder that Strix launched a month ago. And we had people here claimed "AMD will have ample supply this time". LoL.
SherbertExisting3509@reddit
This is why it's good to own your own leading edge fabs. AMD can never produce microchips on the same scale that intel can because they're competing in a bidding war with intel, nvidia, apple ete for 4nm/3nm wafer allocation
Like AMD CEO Jerry Sanders said, "Real men have fabs"
DerpSenpai@reddit
Intel Lunar Lake will have better availability than Strix Point and that is sad
TwelveSilverSwords@reddit
Lunar Lake just got announced. Talk about Snapdragon X Elite...
SherbertExisting3509@reddit
While the Snapdragon X elite has exceptional battery life (and I welcome more competition) unfortunate it's clearly a first gen product. Many X86 programs don't work with the translation layer and there's very few native ARM64 programs. Their igpu is also far inferior to strix point and lunar lake
I think the real killer is the lack of AVX2 support (due to the chip only supporting 128bit SIMD units)
TwelveSilverSwords@reddit
You can't support AVX2 on an ARM CPU, because AVX2 is an x86 extension. What can be done is emulating AVX2 on ARM CPUs, which is what I suppose you meant to say.
And no, having 128b SIMD units isn't the reason why X Elite can't emulate AVX2. We have to wait until Microsoft Build the AVX2 emulation feature into the Prism translation layer.
Apple CPUs also have only 128b SIMD, but they can emulate AVX2 fine when using the Game Porting Toolkit.
Strazdas1@reddit
But what is done right now is that windows on ARM silently drops AVX2 instructions leading to software using it crashing.
DerpSenpai@reddit
That's the point. Lunar Lake was just announced and it already has better availability than AMD Strix Point. The Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite also has better availability right now too yes
dj_antares@reddit
Exactly, owning the fabs while losing billions not using it will speed up production a lot.
Look at Lunar Lake, I bet it'll have unlimited supply because Intel made them in their own fabs.
TrustMeBro™.
Vb_33@reddit
Xeons and Panther lake tho
steve09089@reddit
While Lunar Lake isn’t made in Intel’s fabs, I do think the supply will be healthy since it won’t be competing with Xeons for silicon
Vb_33@reddit
Based
trololololo2137@reddit
to be fair there is a strix point asus in a store near me, I still haven't seen a phoenix laptop in a store to this date
Quatro_Leches@reddit
asus is the only brand available with them right now. which is bs, why launch on one brand? nobody does that literally nobody.
Gwennifer@reddit
Probably not AMD's choice. ASUS is still a huge company despite all the spinoffs, and doing all the work designing & integrating Strix Point isn't that big of a task for them. I think the only SI comparable in size is Lenovo and they don't do as much bootstrap/custom work.
trololololo2137@reddit
AMD hates money, they manage to lose even when having a better product
RedTuesdayMusic@reddit
I badly need the 890M in a laptop without dGPU and they managed to hand 1 of 2 companies I boycott timed exclusivity, fuck AMD man
DerpSenpai@reddit
AMD has good share of available laptops in stores where I live but it's all Zen 3 or older... Very few premium wins and Zen 4
trololololo2137@reddit
Exactly, shelves are full of zen2/zen3 and literally nothing based on zen 4. I was very surprised to actually see a zen 5 laptop irl so soon here
Qaxar@reddit
The crazy part is that Chinese/Hong Kong mini pc manufacturers seem to have an abundance of AMD chips and always the latest ones.
Ghostsonplanets@reddit
They did have ample supply compared to Phoenix launch. Besides, Strix is just the high-end line of Zen 5 Mobility. So it make sense that it doesn't has the volume that Kraken should have.
996forever@reddit
Name 1 non asus option out.
Noble00_@reddit (OP)
While we know 'Krackan/Kraken Point' was stirring in the rumour mill, this section of the article talking about the general atmosphere in IFA 2024 surrounding AMD and it's OEM partners was interesting:
AMD has shown improvement in the client sector, but still seems at a loss for greater share due to the reasons above.
Real-Human-1985@reddit
AMD needs to bite the bullet and quite desktop GPU's for a while. Every extra allocation for laptops simply matters more.
Strazdas1@reddit
They already did. RDNA 4 will be low-mid end only.
SherbertExisting3509@reddit
Honesly I'm shocked that Intel Arc for all it's first gen teething issues and bugginess still somehow had a tensor core equivalent (XMX hardware instructions) and upscaling equal in quality to DLSS2 and better than FSR3
Battlemage (Xe2) and Celestial (Xe3) look to be killer GPU's if they're priced correctly.
What's great is that Celestial (Xe3) is set to be the igpu for Panther Lake (successor to lunar lake) sometime in 2025 so Battlemage is going to be a relatively short lived product since celestial would likely be released soon after Panther Lake
bosoxs202@reddit
Have there been leaks for a Xe3 discrete GPU? I feel like with Intel’s financials as of late, something might have to give if Xe2 doesn’t sell too well and isn’t area efficient.
SherbertExisting3509@reddit
They still have Altera and Mobileye to sell off to raise money for fab capital expansion and other operating expenses (along with intel likely canning 20A so they don't have to spend money to ramp up production in favor of 18A)
ET3D@reddit
This was my thought about quite a few of AMD's product decisions. AMD just doesn't have the production capacity to address EPYC, server GPUs, Ryzen desktop, RDNA and Ryzen Mobile fully. These products all compete with each other.
The rumour that AMD is going to use Samsung is interesting for this reason.
sdkgierjgioperjki0@reddit
Why are they competing with each other? Sure during covid there was shortage of TSMC N7/N5 but not anymore and for a long time as I understand it. They just don't want to take the risk and produce a bunch of chips they aren't confident will sell. They would rather do stock buybacks.
8milenewbie@reddit
Wait a minute... So this article is saying that the lack of AMD chips in laptops in 2024 is not the result of some spooky Intel backroom deals (that they can somehow afford in the face of recent failures) and is instead caused by AMD not collaborating with OEMs enough?
Gwennifer@reddit
For me, I take this with a grain of salt, especially with the comment about 'fast chips' as Ryzen mobile has been outperforming Intel's mobile offerings at least as far as performance is concerned for a gen or two.
Intel absolutely provides a mountain of OEM support in the form of reference designs & support teams. MSI's laptops are largely reference designs and commercial off the shelf parts with very little integration work. It's not a coincidence that when there's an integrated product they're on their own for like the MSI Claw that they kind of flounder around.
Most of these mini PC's are only so compact or have the features they do because of Intel's NUC-sized board designs. Wendell kind of avoids comparing it to the Ryzen box because it's literally not comparable in terms of product features. You can see that the Ryzen box he hefts in some frames has all the connectors along the very bottom edge of the device so you have to lift the whole thing up to connect anything, and good luck with thick plugs... and no fancy speakers or dust filter because the board has to be built taller with more expensive components to get around not having Intel's design framework.
AMD simply has not had the resources nor volume to give out so much free engineering. It doesn't really make sense to spend tens of millions of dollars a year doing this kind of product support when the chip you're doing that work for may only ship 100m worth of revenue ever.
The inflection point for AMD will be if they choose to grow into Intel's role and make using their chip such a breeze that picking who to go with is just a question of which chip/board fits easiest into your desired power/footprint.
Qaxar@reddit
AMD seems like it has the opposite problem of Intel. They're led by engineers that put R&D and engineering above everything else and neglect a bunch other very important stuff. Even then it's only hardware part they emphasize. Their software is woefully inadequate.
PainterRude1394@reddit
I think AMD largely just got lucky that intel missed so hard with their fabs. As soon as Intel closed the node gap by using tsmc suddenly all their CPUs are very competitive again.
Qaxar@reddit
Intel is still getting their ass whopped on server chips. On the consumer laptop side, we'll have to see how Kraken Point does against Lunar Lake since Strix Point seems to be on a completely different performance level (8 threads vs 24 threads). So I wouldn't declare Intel on par just yet.
PainterRude1394@reddit
Intel's server chips aren't using tsmc and still have a wide node gap.
Lunar lake chips in these new laptops all point to better battery life and performance than AMDs competition.
Leaks for arrow lake built on tsmc also show intel closing the efficiency gap while remaining competitive performance wise.
It looks like it was mostly just tsmc this whole time.
the_dude_that_faps@reddit
I don't think that's fair. Take Ice Lake Xeons. While those didn't use TSMC, N7FF and Intel 7 were contemporary and broadly comparable. Both were DUV, for example, and Intel used that process for those Xeons while AMD used N7FF for Epyc Milan (Zen 3). AMD still wiped the floor with Intel regardless of efficiency, because AMD's design just scaled better. This is despite Zen 3 being weaker than Sunny Cove.
AMD hasn't had to have the strongest core to be competitive with Intel and I think this will remain to be the case. I mean, efficiency aside, Zen 4 is slower than Raptor Lake core for core.
Of course, I'm hoping that Intel's TSMC designs rattle the AMD's cage enough that they actually fear losing their market gains. We'll see I guess. But I don't think that Intel was as handicapped by their process as people like to comment. For all the disadvantages Intel's process has, the fact that CPU and process node are so coupled means that they can play to their strengths. Granite Rapids will absolutely be competitive with Zen 5 Epyc despite being Intel 3.
Qaxar@reddit
On the consumer side, I maybe accept that nose plays a big part given they're not far apart performance wise. The gap on server is huge. Nose alone cannot account for that.
On the consumer side, Lunar Lake is more efficient but not as performant as Strix Point. Check actual reviews, not Intel's slides. Even then, Lunar Lake has the node advantage (TSMC 4nm vs 3nm).
Also, leaks are absolutely meaningless. Won't bother addressing that.
We'll see if it was just a node thing soon enough. Kraken Point is the equivalent of Lunar Lake even though it's on a lesser node.
WHY_DO_I_SHOUT@reddit
That's by design. Lunar Lake is meant for a lower product segment. Intel's competitor to Strix Point will be Arrow Lake.
PainterRude1394@reddit
Yep, it really looks like it was largely just the node gap helping AMD. Lunar lake is a strong signal of this as are arrow lake leaks. We'll have even more confirmation of this once arrow lake is released.
zetruz@reddit
That's waaaayyy oversimplifying it. Yes, Intel missing so hard was a HUGE bonus for AMD that is difficult to overstate, but you did somehow manage to do so. Just look at what AMD did with chiplets, and you'll see just how much AMD themselves brought to the table.
Exist50@reddit
ARL/LNL are poor for Intel's own financials. But PTL should put more pressure on AMD.
the_dude_that_faps@reddit
AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.
DerpSenpai@reddit
Incompetence above all. Not even a product issue
buttplugs4life4me@reddit
Not necessarily. Ordering wafer capacity from TSMC is in the billions of dollars, and ordering it for a comparatively flimsy segment like laptops and notebooks, rather than for a "bulk order" segment like HPC, is much more risky.
Of course we can only speculate what the true reason is, but I think a lot of people at AMD are still justifiable reluctant after they almost went bankrupt and had to bet the entire company on a single architecture (Zen)
Exist50@reddit
Huh? That's a very high volume market.
GenericUser1983@reddit
High volume but low margins. If you are selling a product with say a 50% margin and oops, turns out you ordered too many, you have room to drop the price while still making some profit at least. Low margin products are a lot less forgiving in that regard.
Exist50@reddit
No, the client market has healthy margins. Literally single-handedly keeping Intel afloat right now.
shalol@reddit
If anything they should be getting superior mobile marketshare with on the lower TDP/efficiency, rather than desktop presence.
Go figure…
asdf4455@reddit
The laptop market is just so different to desktops. Intel invested heavily into building out partner programs where they effectively subsidize the development of new laptop models for OEMs/ODMs. It’s why there’s so many laptop models that are intel exclusive even tho an AMD chip would just have been objectively better. 11th gen mobile really showed just how valuable that is. Even when the top of the line 1165G7 was being put into 2000 dollar laptops that were losing to 400 dollar laptops with a Ryzen 5 5500U in a ton of benchmarks, Intel was still pretty much the only option for any of the premium laptop designs since Intel pretty much co developed them. Desktops don’t have this problem because at the end of the day, almost every desktop is the same and pretty simple.
Ghostsonplanets@reddit
That's really great. Hopefully they fix the availability issues.
Also, I wonder if they mean Kraken 352 or 444 for $799 devices.
SherbertExisting3509@reddit
That's only if they have enough allocation left over to sell those chips since AMD will dedicate as much TSMC 4nm/3nm allocation as they can to high margin EPYC parts.
When intel starts to compete again in the server market with granite rapids and reduces AMD's profit margins then they'll decide to put more wafers towards consumer chips (like a worldwide 7600X3D release, Strix Point or Kracken.)
DerpSenpai@reddit
Kinda BS because they can simply get more wafers from TSMC if they wanted. They aren't exactly poor
SherbertExisting3509@reddit
Nvidia is outbidding AMD on buying wafers from TSMC because Nvidia is making bank from AI and they want to order as many chips as they can. AMD is forced to make do with Nvidia and Apple's leftovers
DerpSenpai@reddit
And what's the excuse for Mediatek and Qualcomm to have better priority on wafers than AMD too?
SherbertExisting3509@reddit
Qualcomm and Mediatek sell mobile phone chips which are much higher volume than pc and maybe even server chips.
Dependent_Big_3793@reddit
it chip smaller than strix point that may achieve lunar lake/m3 level battery life but it cheap a lot
reddit_equals_censor@reddit
copilot is worth bullshit branding, that focuses mostly around spying on customers at a whole new level,
BUT 800 us dollar full big core laptops, that we can expect all are connected to the same l3 cache and hopefully with ecc and camm2 support would be amazing.
no_f-s_given@reddit
who gives a fuck about Copilot? desperation move to bring relevance to Win11.