I never really got the point of the Z1 non-extreme. If it enabled them to ship a device for $400 or less then it would make some sense as a Steam Deck competitor, but not when the Z1 ally was $600 and you could double the performance by going up to $700. (I know it's gone on sale for ~$450, but IMO that should have been the launch price, with sales putting it below $400.)
Honestly, the whole Z1 lineup puzzles me a bit, since it feels like just a re-badge of the regular mobile chips with some slight tuning. If AMD was going to go through the effort of making a gaming focused chip, they should lean into that with more emphasis on the GPU side, and perhaps some extra cache or more memory bandwidth. Maybe even drop a couple of CPU cores. What we got instead just feels like a cheap marketing ploy.
I'm not sure there was any special tuning or binning involved. I think Asus just bought special branding without having any influence on AMD's silicon roadmap.
All of this is weird personally.
I think it is weird that the 7840u (Z1X laptop model #) exists in the first place. It has a wildly overpowered GPU for a mobile chip of it's type and while they quote a 28W TDP, the actual max-power draw is stratospheric for a U series (well over 50 watts). To be honest, I wouldn't be shocked to find out the Z1X internally came, as a concept at least, before the 7840u. Meanwhile, the Z1 is so wildly weak in comparison. It is only 1/3 the TFlops.
Someone else already commented, but as a user of a Framework 13 with the 7840/780m, the iGPU is definitely not overpowered.
The issue is that iGPU performance has been hardly changing for probably close to a decade, meanwhile dGPU performance has significantly risen (despite using older process/nodes at some times). What we’re seeing now is a correction. The meteor lake iGPUs apparently trade blows/are very similar to the 780m.
More specific to the 780m, its performance is apparently close to a gtx1060… a midrange gpu from 2016, about 7 years ago. It’s very nice to run a decade old game like gta5 at high, but modern titles like genshin can’t even hit 30fps on medium at 1x scaling. Also, not to mention that DDR is much slower than GDDR.
So: is the gpu better than previous gens? Definitely. Is it overpowered? No, previous gens have been underpowered.
Intel GPU performance was totally stagnant from Haswell (Iris Pto 5200) until Iris XE, from 2013-2019. AMD on the other hand was steadily building up their iGPUs, allowing the APUs to work together with external GPUs, and with the 5700g (which imho was a milestone) we finally had 30fps+ for all but the most brain-dead games (alan wake i'm looking at you!)
> Intel GPU performance was totally stagnant from Haswell (Iris Pto 5200) until Iris XE, from 2013-2019. AMD on the other hand was steadily building up their iGPUs
this is what I mean by the unconscious pro-AMD bias that people regularly engage in. not only is that not true at all (Iris Pro 6200 and Iris Pro 580 both are significantly faster), but actually Crystal Well is a very interesting/prescient design in hindsight, it is the type of "playing with multi-chip modules and advanced packaging" thing people get super excited about when it's AMD.
> allowing the APUs to work together with external GPUs
nobody does that because it sucks. best-case scenario is when your dGPU is roughly similar to your iGPU performance so you get "normal" SLI scaling... ie like 50% improvement. And in any scenario where your dGPU isn't utter trash, it completely ruins framepacing/latency etc.
> and with the 5700g (which imho was a milestone) we finally had 30fps+ for all but the most brain-dead games (alan wake i'm looking at you!)
that's actually because the 5700G is still using the 2017-era vega design, which was not that advanced technologically when it was introduced. AMD dropped support a while ago but the writing was on the wall for a long time before that.
AMD should have moved 5000 series APUs to at least RDNA1 if not an early RDNA2. The feature deficit is significant, a 2017-era architecture being sold in 2023 and 2024 (already unsupported) is just not competent to handle the basic DX12 technologies involved.
Alan Wake didn't do anything wrong, AMD cheaped out on re-using a block and it doesn't have the features. Doesn't have HDMI 2.1 or 10-bit or HDMI VRR support either... and the media block is antiquated.
and if you'll remember all the way back to the heady days of 2017... AMD bet on Primitive Shaders and could never get that to work right on Vega. PS5 actually has a primitive-to-mesh translation engine that does work. RDNA1 still does better than Vega but RDNA2 is where AMD moved into feature parity with some fairly important architectural stuff that NVIDIA introduced in 2016 and 2018.
Again, people love to jerk about Vega (gosh it scales down so well!) but honestly Vega is a perfect Brutalist symbol of the decline and decay of Radeon in that era. There is no question that RDNA1 and RDNA2 are incredibly, vastly better architectures with much better DX12 feature support, much better IO and codecs and encoders, etc. Vega kinda fucking sucks and it's absurd that people still simp for it.
The "HBM means you don't have to care about VRAM size!" and other insanely, blatantly false technical marketing just sealed the deal.
But when AMD rakes-in-the-face with Vega or Fury X or RDNA3 it's "a learning experience" and maybe actually just evidence of how far ahead they are...
The 7840U is the same die as the 7940HS. AMD only did two mobile processor dies this generation; Phoenix 2 is in the Z1 and the larger Phoenix is in the Z1 Extreme, 7840U and 7940HS, among others. So they're doing a lot of product differentiation solely through adjusting power and clock limits, which is confounded by the leeway OEMs have to further adjust those limits.
I'm so so curious how much binning there is on modern chips, or whether it's 95%+ just a question of what settings are going to work for a given form factor.
Most of the various controls are sitting right there in Linux (or other OS) for power control of CPU & GPU. If cooled, could we just crank a Z1 Extreme up to a 100W core and have it be like a 7940HS? Or is there really some power binning differences?
I don't know what AMD charges for their cores. With Intel, there's been a decade of the MSRP of ~$279 for a chip, but the chips coming in a variety of different sizes across the power budgets; you'd pay the same for a tiny ultra-mobile core as you would for a desktop core. What we have now makes that look semi-ridiculous. It's the same chip. Different power budgets.
I highly highly highly encourage blowing away any thinking that a chip says it's TDP is X watts so that's what we'd get. This chip has been seen in the wild drinking vastly vastly more power if given the chance & settings to. I think my question still stands, is there any binning or real difference that would keep a Z1 Extreme from doing similarly? Or are we just bound by how much power we can put in and how much heat we can take away from the Z1 Extremes out there?
> I think it is weird that the 7840u (Z1X laptop model #) exists in the first place. It has a wildly overpowered GPU for a mobile chip of it's type...
I have a handheld with a 7840U (GPD Win Mini), and I love it. I do use it mostly for games, and I suppose if it were labeled a Z1 Extreme instead of a 7840U, I'd be just as happy with it. So I can somewhat see where you're coming from. But also I think it's becoming more common to want to run "real" (non-gaming) workloads that can leverage a GPU on devices without a discrete GPU, so I still think it makes sense as a general-purpose part. (Also, I think the Z1 was an Asus-exclusive part, at least initially, so if there wasn't a non-exclusive variant, then I'd be stuck with something inferior.)
> ...and while they quote a 28W TDP, the actual max-power draw is stratospheric for a U series (well over 50 watts).
The ideal TDP for that chip is around 18W, with diminishing returns after that. (I usually run mine at 7-13W depending on the game.) Beyond 25-30W, you get only marginal performance gains relative to the amount of additional power, so while it technically can use over 50 watts, it's clearly not designed for that and the extra performance isn't worth it when you're running on battery.
Honestly, the whole Z1 lineup puzzles me a bit, since it feels like just a re-badge of the regular mobile chips with some slight tuning. If AMD was going to go through the effort of making a gaming focused chip, they should lean into that with more emphasis on the GPU side, and perhaps some extra cache or more memory bandwidth. Maybe even drop a couple of CPU cores. What we got instead just feels like a cheap marketing ploy.