The Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 Showdown: AMD's Ryzen Picasso vs. Intel's Ice Lake
by Brett Howse & Andrei Frumusanu on December 13, 2019 8:30 AM ESTSystem Performance
Moving on from SPEC to some of our more traditional laptop tests, I’ve taken the opportunity to add some new tests to the suite, which we’ll include on all laptops going forward. While SPEC is a fantastic set of tests to probe the limits of a platform, not everyone is going to run a workload that runs at nearly 100% CPU utilization for such a long time on a laptop. The 8-Thread tests took 4.5 hours to complete on Ice Lake, and 6.5 hours to complete on Picasso, which is likely not something most people would turn to a thin and light laptop for, so it’s important to see how both platforms perform on shorter tests where they can leverage their peak boost frequencies for a higher percentage of the duration.
PCMark 10
PCMark 10 consists of several real-world tests, including web, video conferencing, spreadsheets, writing, and more. There are several GPU tests as well, including rendering, and some gaming. The suite also measures application start-up, and all aspects of the system’s performance factor into the score.
Intel’s CPU performance lead shows clearly here again, with significant leads in both the Essentials and Productivity tests, although AMD’s strong GPU pulls the Ryzen system very close on the Digital Content Creation tasks. But that is not enough to turn the tide, and the Ice Lake platform carries this win.
Cinebench R20
Looking at the latest version of Cinebench tells a similar story as to what we’ve seen so far. Ice Lake’s significant IPC lead pulls it way ahead. On the multi-threaded test, the AMD platform does close the gap somewhat, which is similar to the SPEC rate 8 results.
7-Zip
Checking out the popular 7-Zip file compression tool, the results are in-line with what we see in the desktop space. Intel generally has a lead on the compression side, but AMD claws back at decompression. It is a rare win on the CPU side for AMD here.
Handbrake
Transcoding is a popular task, and Handbrake is one of the most popular tools. For this test, a 1080p movie is converted to 720p using the x264 encoder. Once again, Ice Lake offers significantly more performance when transcoding in software.
Handbrake also supports various hardware encoders, such as Intel’s QuickSync, which provides significantly quicker transcodes at the same settings – albeit at larger file sizes and slightly lower quality compared to the software transcode, according to the Handbrake documentation. QuickSync has been very popular, and has been around quite a while. AMD also offers hardware encoding and decoding with their Video Core Next platform. Handbrake does support AMD’s Video Coding Engine (VCE) but the Surface Laptop 3 does not offer this as an option in Handbrake, so it was not able to be tested. As this is the only current Ryzen mobile APU we’ve tested, it may be a driver issue specific to the Surface branded processor.
x264
Our previous transcoding test, x264, was also run. Here we see that once again Ice Lake has a significant performance advantage, as it did with Handbrake software encoding.
Web Tests
All of our web tests were run with the current version of Microsoft Edge in Windows 10 1909. Web results are highly impacted by the underlying scripting engine, and Microsoft is going to be moving Edge from the EdgeHTML rendering engine to the Chromium open-source project that powers Google Chrome. When they make this change, expected early in 2020, we’ll revamp our suite with new tests.
Intel has aggressively pushed their frequency ramping with Speed Shift, and one of the biggest beneficiaries of Speed Shift is web scripting, since the tasks tend to be very short. AMD is addressing this in Zen 2 with Collaborative Power Performance Control 2, or CPPC2, which is not as elegant of a name as Speed Shift, but promises to drop Zen’s frequency ramping from ~30 ms to ~1 to 2 ms, and will be a welcome addition on our web tests.
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Andrei Frumusanu - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Correct. Between 3-5 hours each ST and MT.Fataliity - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
"despite this being a 3.9 GHz chip, in single-threaded SPEC 2017, it managed to come very close to a 5.0 GHz Core i9-9900K with a massively higher TDP"This statement is contradictory. "Single-Threaded" Spec, then "Massively higher tdp" 9900k is 8 cores. which reflects the TDP. Single-Thread is one core, which is completely different. If you scale up the frequency / wattage graph, a Ice Lake 3.5GHz at 8 cores would be about 100 watts. Which im pretty sure is really close to a 9900k off the top of my head. Except this is at 3.5 and 9900k is hitting 5GHz.
tipoo - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Shame AMD didn't have 7nm Zen 2 for mobile ready in time for this. Maybe that's when the partnership will make more sense, until then I wish the consumer 15" was also Ice Lake.s.yu - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
The difference is too great. This is almost an i3 to i7 comparison, while the price difference is confusingly little. Though the Intel version could be hard to acquire, whoever's interested in this model should aim for the Intel version, even through unofficial channels.eastcoast_pete - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Interesting! Guess Chipzilla is (still) king of the hill in mobile; quite impressive, as this IL i7 even comes close to desktop i7 speeds. AMD really needs to get 7 nm Zen2 or Zen2+ into mobile APUs pronto - they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Now is the time, before chipzilla gets their manufacturing problems worked out!MBarton - Monday, December 30, 2019 - link
Less impressive when you consider the amount of money and number of defective CPU's required by Intel fabs to get to this point. When you factor in how much money Intel has dumped into their 10nm process over the last decade the money they're making off of 10 nm is sad.Consumer1 - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Interesting to me is the slow speed of the memory with the Ryzen. Ryzen does better with faster memory. To bad we can't equalize the memory to see the effect.Dustin Sklavos - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
I would never in a million years accuse AnandTech writers of being shills.That said, you guys didn't notice the Ice Lake CPU was being allowed to peak and sustain a solid 8W higher than the Ryzen CPU was?
Yes, even with the higher ceiling on Ice Lake, it's able to bring its idle draw down way lower than Ryzen's, so the bursty nature of garden variety on-battery web surfing is going to heavily favor Ice Lake.
But plugged in, full bore benchmarks, the Ice Lake unit is at a clear advantage for power budget and that's concerning. It's not really as fair a fight when the Ryzen is being kneecapped, and while I don't think it would change the overall results, I *do* think the CPU tests wouldn't be the bloodbath that they are, and the GPU tests (and especially gaming tests) would be a clearer cut win for AMD.
Brett Howse - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - link
I mentioned this in the text but the data logging tool is monitoring CPU core power on Ryzen and SoC package power on Core so the data isn't 100% comparable just due to what each company exposes to be monitored. If you look at the CPU temperatures on the Cinebench R20 test as an example the CPU temperatures are very similar so I don't think the power budget is as far off as you'd think, although Intel is pretty aggressive with boost.Fataliity - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - link
Zen+ APU is also a 216mm die vs Intel's 125mm die. So it has double the surface area, which should mean almost double the heat dissipation (maybe less). So Intel's numbers being twice as high in power draw actually makes sense when you consider the area that is dissipating the heat.