Technology Android

[dilla]

So, Intel moved next year's Cannonlake (the successor to the just announced Kaby Lake, which is basically renamed Skylake) to 14nm, due to failure in getting 10nm yields. That was supposed to be the "process" improvement generation of Intel's already terribly slow cycle, as it will still be the exact same core and the thing that was supposed to improve was just the process.
So since they know they won't be able to make it on the better process, they will still release the same cores, still call them Cannonlake and they came up with a name for the "new" process - "the new 2nd generation 14nm process", to call it an improvement.. So 2018 will be another year of "same stuff" from Intel, except even more.
They not only stopped their performance gains, prolonged their cycle to three steps last year, with any sort of architecture improvement coming in only once in three generations, but now they are also going to miss even those steps.

If the situation wasn't bad enough, I need to put in perspective that they are fucking up compared to what has been a terrible job in the first place. The tech forums are full of users of Sandy Bridge i7s - the processor that was developed in 2005, showcased in 2009 and hit the market in 2011 that.. there is no point to switch from because Intel's 2017 Kaby Lake is barely any faster, despite coming 6 years later, higher price, several chipsets (so you had to buy new motherboards twice since Sandy Bridge) and process improvements as well as moving to DDR4 Ram it is, well, mostly just more power efficient compared to the 2011 Sandy Bridge.

Meanwhile, the first AMD Zen is made on 14nm just like Intel, and hits the market in a month, while the architecture is already just so slightly better than Intel's best. Except AMD hired Samsung to move Zen to their 10nm process next year and 7nm in two years PLUS both generations are promised to come with significant architecture improvements, so by 2019 we would see a 3rd gen Zen architecture made on 7nm.

With current schedule at that time Intel would be hitting 10nm and making a ~3-5% performance increase compared to today's Kaby Lake. But since Zen is around the corner, Intel suddenly (and finally) started work on a new architecture, the successor to the "Core" architecture, that is to be finished by 2020, lol.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigerlake
It sucks when a company doesn't do shit for years and rakes the profits on the same shit until someone else comes with something better to push them to stop fucking around, and they don't even have a plan. That's a company that could be changing the world with their insane margins and all the profits after years of abusing their monopoly. Instead, they are only doing a thing when their monopoly is threatened, just to get back to their comfortable position. That was the case with the Core architecture, and that seems to be the case now with its now planned successor. I really hope they don't catch up to AMD this time around.

There were some folks upset that the 2016 MBPs did not release with Kaby Lake. Some rebutted it with Kaby not being for mobile or not having any advantage for mobile, not sure which one.

So if the architecture is more or less the same, just a different name, does that mean if someone were to buy a 2016 MBP, or any other Intel powered laptop, they won't have something that's much more powerful until 2018, or later?

 

[masta247]

I am hoping for AMD Bristol Ridge (Zen based) APUs becoming mainstream, that would mean a bump in performance and a significant bump in GPU performance on mobile. If not, then frankly as far as mobile is concerned the last time an improvement was noticeable was with Haswell in 2013 - major power efficiency improvement and a fairly significant performance improvement. Skylake was a minor bump to that last year as it is essentially a Haswell on a fully functional 14nm process with some media decoders added, but frankly you won't see a difference except of some benchmarks and GPU performance (which is still too weak for anything serious). Kaby Lake is quite useless, frankly. The full powered Kaby Lake i5s are actually a tiny bit slower than the Skylake i5 and the low cost and low power Core M Skylakes have been renamed to "low power i5 Kaby Lake" now and priced accordingly, like i5s lol.
Also, Kaby Lake was released for mobile first, as pretty much the only new thing was a bunch of decoders that could theoretically improve the battery life when decompressing some niche video formats. And yeah there's no real world advantage to them at all. The desktop parts just hit the market now, with even less point to them.

 

[dilla]

I am hoping for AMD Bristol Ridge (Zen based) APUs becoming mainstream, that would mean a bump in performance and a significant bump in GPU performance on mobile. If not, then frankly as far as mobile is concerned the last time an improvement was noticeable was with Haswell in 2013 - major power efficiency improvement and a fairly significant performance improvement. Skylake was a minor bump to that last year as it is essentially a Haswell on a fully functional 14nm process with some media decoders added, but frankly you won't see a difference except of some benchmarks and GPU performance (which is still too weak for anything serious). Kaby Lake is quite useless, frankly. The full powered Kaby Lake i5s are actually a tiny bit slower than the Skylake i5 and the low cost and low power Core M Skylakes have been renamed to "low power i5 Kaby Lake" now and priced accordingly, like i5s lol.
Also, Kaby Lake was released for mobile first, as pretty much the only new thing was a bunch of decoders that could theoretically improve the battery life when decompressing some niche video formats. And yeah there's no real world advantage to them at all. The desktop parts just hit the market now, with even less point to them.

Yeah, I ask with the interest in getting the tbMBP at some point. I wasn't planning on upgrading to the first gen of the TB models so that Apple could fix the inevitable design flaws that come about on a new tech. Whenever the next update is, hopefully this Holiday season, then I can feel comfortable buying a TB model.

It's pricey but the MBA is likely on its way out. The MacBook has a better display and is lighter than the MBA, I think. The major difference seems to be the CPU between the MBA and MB and I'm not sure which one is "better." I think the MBA still has an i5 and the MB is just something completely different. I think the Intel m3/5. And I'm not Pro user but the dual core turns me off a bit compared to the quad cores found in a completely different model, the 15" MBPs. I think the MBA has an i7 option too, but I still don't know how it compares to the m5 of the MB.

My MBP has lasted me 7 years, as I've mentioned ad nauseum. Whenever I upgrade, I expect that to last me at least 5. The issues I had with my current 13" MBP was just a HDD dying, which is expected. That was after 4 years. Knowing Apple's move to making everything non-user-friendly, I feel safe with the SSDs they use as well as the RAM. I would just have to worry about the mobo frying or something, which seems very unlikely. But that would warrant another computer, from what I understand, as the repairs are pretty expensive.

So when this new tbMBP comes out, regardless of what processor it uses, it seems like it'll be marginally better than a 2013 Skylake, which is OK, because major improvements in the tech isn't expected for another year or two. I guess SSDs capacity could be cheaper but 256 GB is more than enough for me. I just want the gimmicky TB to remain functional, regardless of how much I use it.

 

[masta247]

Coming from Skylake to anything Intel this year will not be noticeable at all. Heck, they will even benchmark the same. Most likely same with next year's Intel chips. The late 2018/2019 generation - Icelake will bring some improvement to power efficiency and 2020 is scheduled to bring a major improvement in general with a new architecture altogether. Until then, imho a Skylake device will be as fast as they get.

All current compact MacBooks have only dual core processors on the same architectures. The difference in simple terms is that the Macbook has a low power processor that aims to stick to its 1ghz-2ghz frequency range, it basically falls back to ~1ghz after a minute or so of CPU load due to lack of cooling, but what it means is that for a casual user who doesn't strain it it will run almost like a full i5, until its made to throttle with prolonged intense work; the MBA has a "full power" i5 so it comfortably maintains 2+ghz frequencies, while the i7s in MBPs have Hyperthreading, running 4 threads but with the same two cores as the MBA i5 - Basically it is just an artificial boost for multithreaded applications or to be more accurate, Intel disabled that on the i5s to differentiate the i5s and i7s - otherwise identical processors. I know it is funny, but going from the MacBook to the MBP, from Core M to the i7 you see exactly the same CPU, manufactured as the same processor, just later clocked and set up differently, and of course priced differently. If you overclock the Core M and provide a fan for cooling, you have the i5, enable hyperthreading and you got yourself an i7. They are the same product and they all cost Intel the same to make (disregarding the GPU part- since the Iris has more transistors).

Oh and as far as quad cores go, only the largerMacBook Pros have those i7s. They are much more power hungry, they heat up, throttle, are beneficial mostly for heavily threaded workloads and are still weaker at most tasks than a desktop i3. Essentially, they are something between the mobile Core and desktop Core in terms of power consumption but still perform like mobile parts. Imagine overclocking a mobile i5 to a point where its much less power efficient per clock cycle, and then multiply cores times two. They are not optimized for power, nor are best performers, they are way off the performance/power sweet spot either - best performance per Watt is achieved with Core M/dual core i5 on mobile and full quad core i5 on desktop. These "mobile quad core i7s" surely are the fastest you can currently get in a laptop though, just for me it wouldn't be worth it unless I worked really a lot with video since for most other tasks you'll do almost as good with a simple mobile i5 which have almost the same single threaded performance at a fraction of power.
For reference, the mobile quad core i7s have a TDP of 45W and have 15% higher single core performance than a dual core i5 which has a maximum TDP of 15W. That is 15% performance gain for 3 times the power at best. For absolute best case scenarios with all 8threads doing 100% work constantly (and magically not heat throttling), you will get double performance of the i5 at triple power drain. That use case is very rare outside of quick benchmarks.
For another reference, a desktop i3 would be around 65W and twice as fast as the mobile quad i7 in single core performance, while the desktop i5 would be around 90W and would run loops around the mobile i7 in single and multithreaded tasks.

I wish I could help you more to make a decision so Ill bring this up - when jumping from the Galaxy S3 to the S7 you increased performance by 1900% while decreasing power usage by around 40%: http://www.androidbenchmark.net/cpumark_chart.html
Currently in the computer world the only thing you can do to get remotely close to such perceivable performance gain is moving from HDD to SSD or formatting a very cluttered system.
For processors, Intel is not moving so you will likely not see any difference at all.
The Skylake i5 will be in the same league for perceivable performance for most tasks compared to the three times more power hungry quad core i7 - lets say 15-40% in most tasks. At the same time, jumping a generation to a new i5 would give you no more than 5% performance increase compared to the same clocked i5 of the previous generation.
Intel increased their single threaded CPU performance by mere ~15% over the last 5 years and the gains of Haswell and then Skylake were due to improved power efficiency, so you can actually get a great i5 in a 15W power envelope, or a 4.5-10W Core M, which is great efficiency that allowed ultra books to go for 10 hours on a single charge, which also goes down the drain anyway when going for the 45W i7 (a 13 inch display, which is the second most power hungry component uses ~3-10W, for reference). Still, unless you're gaming on integrated graphics, even those "progressive" generstions at best would shave a few seconds when unzipping a huge file, or open a website literally milliseconds faster. And another such gain is not coming until Icelake, scheduled for late 2018 (Unless Intel jumps the gun with something in response to Zen).

I like the MBA the most but man that screen technology is so ancient that literally even 200$ Walmart laptops have better screens. It uses an old school TN panel, of 720p resolution. That is insane in 2017 and with each refresh I am laughing that they are keeping the same screen that they introduced in 2008 and which was criticized back then already for not being IPS considering the device price range.. and that was 9 years ago!
The cheapest Asus ultraportables - the T-series (starting at ~300$) have bumped their resolutions to 1080p in lowest models and they are of course on IPS. Actually they have all been on IPS since 2013, for 300$. The last mainstream smartphone with a TN panel was made about the time Sony split up with Ericsson, back in 2011. That's how backwards the MBA is in terms of displays, it is unbelievable. Especially as otherwise I really like the MBAs. Apple is not doing anything with the line since the very first model other than replacing the CPU and once in a while SSDs. They got lucky thanks to Intel's Haswell which added new life to that laptop. But otherwise they are not doing a thing, it is a huge waste of potential due to extreme laziness. The MBA has fantastic design, including internal design - it could easily pack a full fledged Skylake i7, any Retina (IPS) display and some. The reason it doesn't is just a business decision, not technical constraints.
Heck, today a 13 inch MBP could easily fit in the Air casing. All the outdated elements could be easily replaced with much better ones in the same case and board design. It's easy, Microsoft packed much more in a much smaller body for their Surface Pros, and the SP4 still had space for improvements. I don't understand how Apple could get so lazy with their laptop lines.

 

[dilla]

...

Wow, that is a ton of information.

It's really a shame that the spectrum from the m3 to the i7 seems to be just some features "disabled" and not something like the i7 being bleeding edge and a completely different, more sophisticated tech over the i5 or m3/5. I get that we're not seeing advancements in leaps and bounds anymore and even though they're becoming more and more power efficient with minor speed boosts, it's still some thing. But to have similar performance on paper as processors from 3-5 years ago....man, that means the real-life difference that'll be noticeable is even less than that.

I was set on the tbMBP simply because of the stats on paper. But that's also relative to what I have now, which is a 2.4 Ghz C2D. Obviously any upgrade to a current model is going to be a world of a difference in performance but I can't help but feel I duped myself into thinking that the m3/m5 in the MacBook was miles behind, say, the i5 in even the basic 13" MBP.

I might have to seriously consider the MacBook again because I do not game. Like, at all. I have a guilty pleasure in a browser game called Agario (which is fucking awesome lol) but that's about it. And even if I were to pick up another game, browser-based or not, I think even the lower clock speed of an m3 or m5 processor in the Macbook would surely be able to handle it better than my current C2D could. I guess even modern games at low to medium settings would still work on a MacBook just fine, but I'm not sure. The MacBook doesn't have fans, right? So heat may become an even bigger issue on it than on my C2D?

I'm still not counting out a Windows machine, which likely would be cheaper, even if marginally, but I am too set with macOS to switch at this point. I still have fears of poor build quality on PCs and my 7 year old MBP further solidifies it in favor of Apple. And I'm just too used to the OS as well.

But say I am looking at a PC equivalent of a well-specced MacBook, what are MacBook's PC competitors? You mentioned the SP4, and I have looked in to it in the past. Same with the Surface Book. I'd probably feel more comfortable with a machine straight from Microsoft over another brand like Dell, which has also been good in my experience.

And about Apple and its laptops, when the iPad started to gain steam 6+ years ago, people predicted Apple would ignore their mobile computing options and try and force tablet computing on others through the iPad. But it seems the tablet craze has died down a good bit, especially for non-Apple OEMs. Apple did ignore their computer lineup for a while, like the MBPs taking so long to get updated last year. And the Mac Pro and Mini remaining stagnant since 2012?...13? Something like that. But maybe now with the the iPad demand also dying out, Apple refocused on computers again. It also seems that Jobs had an aversion to touch screens on a computer, otherwise I imagine Apple would have put out a similar spec machine to the Surface. Or maybe they did with the iPad Pro, but iOS blows for productivity tasks, I feel. The most I can do is read on it, be it magazines or websites. But I'm not typing a damn essay on it or doing anything that requires switching between windows on it. I think that's where the SB and SP4 shine since they rock the full, desktop OS and not the mobile crap that iOS.

EDIT: Seems like the base model MB comes with an m3 and the "upgrade" is to an m7. So I guess the 512GB model starts with an m5 and then goes to an m7?

 

[Pittsey]

Totally unrelated, but I dated the daughter of one of the Top guys at Intel a couple years ago for 6 months.

 

[masta247]

...

Well, it might be surprising, but the m3 is actually the best Core M processor. The difference is that m7 pushes its turbo frequency higher, but the tradeoff is much more heat in that state. Both chips are officially 5W, but their "turbo" mode clocks them at above 2ghz for as long as they can without reaching a high temperature, which is when they are also allowed to exceed their 5W power envelope and reach pretty much i5 levels of performance, literally.
The m7 will be somewhat faster in that state just due to purely higher turbo clock speed, but is also allowed to exceed its TDP to a much higher wattage , thus it will throttle much faster due to no fan. The m3 will "ride" its turbo mode for much longer, thus during most semi-intense use cases (such as browser games) the CPU load might not ever hit the throttling threshold at all, while it would much faster and much more likely when using the m7, which is also when it would throttle and be left at half of m3's performance - you would see performance drops and spikes, while m3 would be more well-rounded, even if just a tiny bit slower during short, burst loads. I actually have the i5 SP4 just because it was on sale and so it was cheaper than the m3 version. The m3 version performs almost as well, lasts longer on battery, pretty much never throttles even during gaming and comes without a fan which to me is a plus. I think the performance of the Macbook is nothing to be ashamed of:

As far as the PC camp, if you really like the Mac and it is convenient for you, I wouldn't switch. You might end up less happy. I learned not to try to convert people. If you don't game and your laptop usage covers what you can do with a Mac and you like how the Mac handles it, just be a content Mac user. I like how Windows does the same things that a Mac does (preference) but also need the things that I can do on Windows that I can't on a Mac. If it's just a matter of preference, just stick to a Mac. I like some of their laptops, they are pretty good tech and their prices in North America are not as insane. If there was a modern refresh to the MBA with a modern display and it was made with Windows usage in mind (or Mac suddenly started running Windows programs as well as Windows does), I would probably be using that one. These days I mostly don't like their software and how outdated the model I would be interested in is. I actually had the Haswell MBA and used it for a couple of months and missed many things about it, that's how much I liked it. It was a perfect computer to me minus the software limitations part and display.

As far as the Windows camp goes though, I think the SP5 and Surface Book 2 are around the corner. Now, I wouldn't be excited just by a CPU refresh, so the cool thing with waiting for that is that so far each generation of Surface devices improved on everything compared to the previous one and brought a completely new device with better everything. It always got a redesign, a better screen, battery life, smaller bezels, lighter device etc - consistently, with each new generation. Even though the Surface Pro 4 is a really cool device and so is the Surface Book, the new generation is around the corner and they will most likely be even better. Oh and by the way I found a bench of the i5 vs i7:

Other than the Surface line, the Dell XPS series (XPS13 and XPS15) and the Lenovo X1 (2017) are equally good and nicely designed. None of those devices are of any worse quality than any Macbooks.

Oh, and as far as seeing a huuge difference between your core 2 duo compared to Skylake/Kaby lake, I am not so sure. It would surely run cooler and last longer on battery.
Is your Macbook still on a HDD? Only if you're switching to SSD it would mean a huge difference. Otherwise just for CPU, this is the best case scenario difference over those generations (add ~5% for Skylake/Kaby Lake):

That's like.. 40-ish% faster on multithreaded benchmarks since the last C2D. Quite meaningful, but not earth shattering. The whole system will be noticeably faster though, especially combined with other components being more modern. But the truth is, for pure performance not THAT much has changed since the Core architecture started. The laptop/desktop market has been moving towards power efficiency and GPU performance while the smartphone market was doubling CPU performance each year until 2016 when it reached the peak and easy gains slowed down too.

 

[dilla]

....

My MBP has an SSD. A Crucial MX 100 256GB. So that was a huge upgrade in speed and a year after that I upped the RAM from 4 to 8 GB and that was a bit minimal improvement, but one nonetheless.

And yeah, as far as my usage goes, I don't run many unique programs. I run the usual Spotify, Mail, Firefox most of the time at my computer. I don't even do much Office work either since gone are the days of PowerPoints and writing essays/reports. I'd still value the MacBook's battery life since my current MBP is at 55% or so of its design capacity and lasts maybe 3 hours off charger. So it usually stays on my desk and not so much on my bed or when I'm sitting watching TV or something in the living room. I'd like that back.

But I imagine your job requires you to run more intensive programs and also ones that were made for Windows so I can see the compatibility issues and how that would make OSX limited. I'm surprised no one has addressed that issue, be it Apple making modifications to allow those apps to run or third party devs making an alternative or even the original devs for the program not considering a macOS variant. I get the business world is still heavy on Windows and would gear their stuff more towards them but Apple's growth in the last 5 years or so has to garner some attention from these companies to start supporting macOS in some way.

About my set up now, I'm not sure how to measure just how much of a jump a modern Mac would be over my 2010. I'd need a benchmark test that took into account my HDD replacement with an SSD and a bump from 4 to 8 GB of RAM. Then I'd use that number to compare what sites like Anandtech benchmarked for the 2016 models.

Speaking of Anandtech, since Anand himself left for Apple it seems the site has really been slacking on computer reviews. They still do hardware testing but that's for individual components, usually GPUs. I miss their phone and laptop reviews because of how in depth they were. Is there anyone that continues to deliver that quality today? Tom's Hardware? Ars Technica and The Verge still don't feel quite the same as Anandtech, even though their writing is much easier (less technical) for me to understand. They still don't have the same amount and quality of graphs and charts for comparison.

Oh and since this is the Android thread, I am still running the last beta update of Nougat on my S7. Still no word on when the US gets it for their carriers. Meanwhile, Bangladesh is enjoying it. I'm guessing it's going to much easier to push out to Exynos users while the SD users in the US just have to wait longer.

 

[dilla]

I just did a GeekBench 4 test. https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/1840440

That was just for CPU. My single core performance seems to be one of the highest ones. And dual core is...OK.

But that's just the CPU, so ideally it should fall within an expected range since that's not something that can be modified or improved, right?

I'll need to find a benchmarking tool that will take my RAM and SSD upgrade into account and see how it holds up to later models.

 

[masta247]

I just did a GeekBench 4 test. https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/1840440



That was just for CPU. My single core performance seems to be one of the highest ones. And dual core is...OK.



But that's just the CPU, so ideally it should fall within an expected range since that's not something that can be modified or improved, right?



I'll need to find a benchmarking tool that will take my RAM and SSD upgrade into account and see how it holds up to later models.

So.. my Skylake i5 in the Surface Pro 4 scores ~3300 in single core and 6200 in multicore. That's surely in large part due to its higher turbo clock, hyperthreading (4 threads vs 2 on the Core 2 Due I assume) and optimizations that the benchmark surely takes advantage of. That is a reasonable bump then.

Speaking of Anandtech, since Anand himself left for Apple it seems the site has really been slacking on computer reviews. They still do hardware testing but that's for individual components, usually GPUs. I miss their phone and laptop reviews because of how in depth they were. Is there anyone that continues to deliver that quality today? Tom's Hardware? Ars Technica and The Verge still don't feel quite the same as Anandtech, even though their writing is much easier (less technical) for me to understand. They still don't have the same amount and quality of graphs and charts for comparison.

Anandtech used to be great for tests back in the days,now it's a ghost town that you can feel is owned by a person who works at Apple.
Fortunately, there is a perfect combination, imho that grew to be better, actually. For laptops, check notebookcheck.net. Does not look like it at first glance, but open any review and you will see that they are the best tech reviews with most complete tests around at the moment. They also do some tablets and phones, but for phones consistently the best site is Gsmarena.com. Those sites not only have the best testing practices by actually running all detailed tests, but also are absolutely unbiased and present interpretations of tests in simple terms. If they give you hints in device comparisons, they are based on which phone actually did better in their tests.
So notebookcheck + gsmarena will get you covered on most complete tests and really honest reviews. The other sites that you mentioned fail at both (except Tom's hardware - that one has good tests but is very opinionated in their rather random biases), while sites such as the Verge I wouldn't even consider a tech site - it's what MTV is for music. They get a new phone, say "ooh that one is cool and shiny, the battery life feels great too, so 10/10, although *insert reviewer's current phone* is better", in a nutshell. They make reviews where they have no clue what they're talking about. Reading the Verge would fry my brain.

Not really relevant for most, but personally I also read Semiaccurate forums, which is a sort of hidden place where people from the actual hardware industry post. You have people actually from Intel, AMD, Qualcomm and others active there, and there are discussions about new tech from a VERY technical perspective, almost disconnected from any marketing and business banter to the point where some chips are referred to by their serial numbers. There are thousand-post threads arguing about very niche parts of a processor itself etc.. That's an amazing resource, but might be a little heavy and actually rarely discusses final, complete products. I find this an amazing place to see what is coming and which things I prefer from purely technical perspective. I really like understanding what my device is actually doing and being able to control it precisely (which is also why I didn't like many things about the current mobile operating systems which do so much shit without telling you about it, thinking they know better which processes to run or when to sync which data etc.).


For instance, today a verified benchmark of a sweet-spot AMD Zen processor leaked and people at SemiAccurate are going crazy. You might not have heard yet, but it's the AMD 1700x, packing 8cores (16threads) that will costs ~330$.

It was benched on an entry level micro board that doesn't even support its turbo (so at 3.4ghz instead of 4+ghz), with the cheapest RAM for some reason and it whooped the butt of Intel's fastest processor in 6 out of 8 benchmarks. For reference, said processor is Intel's only 8-core i7 which costs 1099$ and runs on their professional boards. And the Zen defeated it without turbo which will come in the final product and bump the frequencies by almost 1ghz, on a weak board and slow Ram, and at a third of the price. In fact, it is going to be 200$ cheaper than the fastest Kaby Lake - the quad core i7 7700k, while the Zen is at times twice as fast - It has slightly better single core performance than Kaby Lake AND double the cores and threads. AND that's just the sweet spot CPU, there will be a faster Zen hitting the market, priced at above 500$.
Here's one of the most relevant benchmarks that were run for pure CPU performance:

The top one is the said 330$ Zen chip at 3.4ghz (so well below the final maximum clock).
6900k is the fastest of Intel - their non-mainstream, 1099$ Octa core i7 at 3.2ghz with 3.7ghz turbo.
7700k is the fastest Kaby Lake chip, the fastest quad core i7 at freaking 4.2ghz and 4.7ghz turbo, at over 500$. It scores half of what Zen did.
The FX-8350 is the previous generation fastest AMD chip that uses over double the power of all other chips in this benchmark.

What is important for you and the mobile market here is, that this 8-core Zen uses same power as the quad core Kaby Lake i7 that got its butt handed to it. The Zen core was designed to scale perfectly to mobile devices just as Intel's Core core (lol), while mobile chipsets based on it are coming in second half of this year after their new Radeon GPU architecture - Vega comes out, to be also integrated into that chipset, which sounds insane, at least on paper.
Those mobile chipsets based on Zen and their new GPU architecture were actually already officially announced as "Raven Ridge" and a semi-custom (higher powered) variant of those was already ordered by Microsoft for the 4K Xbox Scorpio coming later this year.
A mobile chip with mobile Zen and mobile Radeon Vega GPU would mean an amazing thing for the mobile device market for performance, price but also if full Vega actually makes it into that mobile chipset, that would mean insane gains for graphics on mobile.
We shall see how it pans out, but AMD suddenly got themselves in a position of having tech superiority over Intel in CPU AND Nvidia in GPU, their products are official, with Zen coming out in less than a month and I wasn't as excited about PC tech final products as I am for those for the past 8 years or so.
In worst case, if AMD somehow fails to make enough market impact with those, it will still force Intel and Nvidia to dramatically improve and unleash their best cards asap or drop prices, because AMD will be severely eating into their market share purely by tests showing that they have the technically superior products. The situation was exactly like that years ago which led to the Core architecture release in the first place, when the best Intel had was the Pentium D which was completely dominated by actually cheaper AMD 64s for years and Intel was bleeding market share. Even though Intel is a much bigger company and they still managed to secure unfair exclusive deals with major partners for the shitty Pentiums, the end users could read and if they were in whatever position to build their own computer, they went for AMD - that led to AMD processors building their global market share to almost 40%. In response the Core architecture came, it was miles ahead of everything else and has been ruling ever since, for long years, in a technologically stagnating monopoly. But now, finally AMD will have a better one again, and Intel started work on their response. Gotta love it when the tech market becomes competitive again.

 

[dilla]

I'll give those sites a try. At least for the notebook reviews. I've always checked out GSM Arena since I started with Android. I bet some older pages in this thread have articles posted from Phone and GSM Arena, both, and that's probably what got me started with them.

It makes sense now what Intel is doing. They put blocks on AMD so that Intel can continue to be lazy and make minimal improvements while strong arming AMD out of contention. And as you've mentioned in posts before, it's not that the industry has hit a big wall that Intel is unable to get over, it's Intel trying to milk as much out of old tech by slapping a new label on something that is only marginally improved.

Once AMD releases this beast of a chipset, I bet Intel will magically have one ready to go as well. And the jumps from the most modern Intel chipset will look so much larger from what AMD has been gradually building up to and I bet Intel makes that a selling point to diminish AMD's success.

I wonder if Apple's agreement with AMD had something to do with this. Despite Macs still not being a blip on the radar compared to PCs, I bet it helps a good bit since Apple's marketing is phenomenal and shipping every Mac with an Intel processor for what seems like a decade now, has helped other OEMs to follow suit and abandon AMD.

About my benchmark, lol, I need to upgrade. There's no way to justify my 2010's performance against even a mid range model from 2014, which is still double of my MBP's.

The question for me is still MB vs tbMBP based on my needs and preferences. The MB is capped at 8 GB of RAM. Which is plenty for now but who knows in 2 years? And if it lasts as long as my MBP did, 7 years, then what will 2024 require our computers to have to remain compatible with software then?

I bet the MB gets better battery life than the MBPs, of course, but I'm also unfamiliar with how a 12" screen would feel vs a 15" screen when I am currently on a 13". And the resolution....I don't want to be lagging behind in that again. 1200x800 on my current machine leaves me wanting more when streaming video.

 

[dilla]

It's nuts to think we've come this far with Android.

http://www.streethop.com/community/index.php?threads/android.201813/page-8#post-991409

 

[S O F I]

Was in India for work for 2 weeks in January.

The iPhone is the cool phone to have although everyone has a Samsung. For now.

also, definitely shit myself if you were wondering.

 

[THEV1LL4N]

Was in India for work for 2 weeks in January.

The iPhone is the cool phone to have although everyone has a Samsung. For now.

also, definitely shit myself if you were wondering.

Xiaomi is quite popular there isn't it? And it's going to become even more popular with devices like the Redmi.

 

[dilla]

Was in India for work for 2 weeks in January.

The iPhone is the cool phone to have although everyone has a Samsung. For now.

also, definitely shit myself if you were wondering.

Did you drink the water there? I've been to India about 6 times and I think the last time I went, 2011, was the only time I didn't get sick there.

 

[dilla]

New Exynos. https://www.sammobile.com/2017/02/1...pset-could-be-the-one-powering-the-galaxy-s8/

 

[S O F I]

Xiaomi is quite popular there isn't it? And it's going to become even more popular with devices like the Redmi.

I didn't notice those. However, my experience wasn't that of a tourist who hung out with the locals. It was a business trip where I hung out with people that work for us. White collar professionals, basically.

 

[S O F I]

Did you drink the water there? I've been to India about 6 times and I think the last time I went, 2011, was the only time I didn't get sick there.

No one drinks the tap water there. That's a given. With that said, can't fully trust the bottled water either. I'd drink the exact same brand, in the exact same bottle, and one place would have it filled it to the brim and the other would have about 3/4 inch of space. How's that possible? No idea but it looks shady as fuck.

With that said, I think I got sick because my stomach lining wasn't ready. I didn't take enough probiotics. Also, I drank things like Black Label Strong and Old Monk. Probably shouldn't have. Also went to a Chinese restaurant. Probably shouldn't have done that either.

Next time, I want to hit up the beaches in Goa. Also, Rajasthan. See all the forts.

Also, my team gave me a Kurta. Finna rock that in the summer.

To make this somewhat relevant to the thread, I went through the painstaking process of obtaining a pre-paid SIM card in India. It's a BITCH! Vodafone wanted a copy of my passport and I had to show it in person, too. Went through with it but I wouldn't recommend it. So much easier in other SE Asian countries like Vietnam and Thailand. But they don't have terrorists so it's to be understood.

 

[dilla]

No one drinks the tap water there. That's a given. With that said, can't fully trust the bottled water either. I'd drink the exact same brand, in the exact same bottle, and one place would have it filled it to the brim and the other would have about 3/4 inch of space. How's that possible? No idea but it looks shady as fuck.

With that said, I think I got sick because my stomach lining wasn't ready. I didn't take enough probiotics. Also, I drank things like Black Label Strong and Old Monk. Probably shouldn't have. Also went to a Chinese restaurant. Probably shouldn't have done that either.

Next time, I want to hit up the beaches in Goa. Also, Rajasthan. See all the forts.

Also, my team gave me a Kurta. Finna rock that in the summer.

To make this somewhat relevant to the thread, I went through the painstaking process of obtaining a pre-paid SIM card in India. It's a BITCH! Vodafone wanted a copy of my passport and I had to show it in person, too. Went through with it but I wouldn't recommend it. So much easier in other SE Asian countries like Vietnam and Thailand. But they don't have terrorists so it's to be understood.

Probiotics have only been proven to work for a select few people and it wouldn't help to prevent getting sick from the water.

And yeah, about the SIM, they want a voter card or something like that. My mom went last November and had to borrow a SIM for an old iPhone we had for emergencies and she used her Sprint phone for free to text and for data. But yeah, they want some serious stuff just to get a damn SIM. The only time a carrier in the US asks for SSN or something is for contract plans. Prepaid is obviously free.

 

[masta247]

In Poland they just sell prepaid SIM cards for 2$ in kiosks. During promotions, the carriers are handing them out for free and attaching them to morning newspapers. So even the US process of getting one at Walmart while simple, felt like a Hassle. Can't imagine having to register for one but Japan had a similar process where you have to give them your data and these days I believe also be Japanese or have office job in Japan which is crazy. The workaround is getting a data only card, which is the most efficient way to work around this.

As a big news side note, the AMD Ryzen announcement really rocked the tech world. With their most expensive part being 499$ and severely outperforming the fastest Intel processor ever - their only 8 core i7 - the 6900k which costs 1050$.
Even AMD's middle of the range 399$ processor is 4% faster than that Intel's best, while the only processor they even benchmarked against Kaby Lake was their low power, lowest tier processor in this line up - the AMD 1700 which is around 40% faster than the fastest Kaby Lake processor - the i7 7700k. That is insane.

AMD had the balls to benchmark them live on stage during the announcement against Intel processors having double the ram, ran several popular benchmarks and a few games, and their gain over Intel was consistently what I mentioned above. They announced that with the Zen core they targeted a 40% performance gain over their previous generation, but ended up with over 52%. That is insane, considering Intel doing less than 5% performance increase per generation. Now Intel don't have anything close to Ryzen in performance, and their processors are literally 2 to 3 times more expensive. That seriously disrupts the market.

To make matters better, the enthusiast OEM PC makers like Alienware are picking Ryzen over Intel for their highest end builds, all consoles are running AMD and AMD announced design wins for Google's datacenter, Dell computers and some undisclosed deal for a MacBook Pro.
Then they announced that their mobile chips will come later this year with Zen CPUs AND their new Vega GPUs on one chip, with the goal to disrupt the mobile market.
Immediately after, Intel teased their 8th gen core (which is unprecedented considering 7th gen Kaby Lake was outed just a month ago) but announced that that new architecture will be data center/server first, which shows they simply don't have a response and are clinging to their highest profit margin market, trying to keep their grasps over strategic clients.

We will have at least 3 years of AMD having the best processor architecture again (since that's how long it will take for Intel's successor to the Core architecture to apparently hit the market, assuming it is significantly better), on AMD's new AM4 platform on which you will be able to always switch to their newest processors for years to come and I am REALLY hoping that Intel won't be able to get away with their shit this time considering they also lost a lengthy $1.4 billion lawsuit against AMD for unfair competitive practices for the last time the situation was like this and they fucked AMD over.
Unfortunately, AMD are still worried it might happen again:
https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/amd-fear-intel-ryzen-reprisal

There were gossips that Intel might respond with doubling the core counts on their current line up, but that would hit them financially as their Core architecture is held back by the graphics unit on chip occupying more than 50% of the die (and still being shit) leaving no space on the die, so they would have to sell such chips at a loss to compete or invest to redesign the Core processors by removing the GPU part.
More realistically they would lower the prices and sell the best they can squeeze out of their Core architecture in an unprecedented Kaby Lake refresh (which would make them more competitive but still behind) or through bribing the OEMs again into exclusivity agreements, which is more traditional for Intel.
For now, the AMD stock price went up 8-fold since last year, which is crazy huge and I hope Intel is being watched and the only way they will compete is by finally getting their shit together and making tech progress again.