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 ESTFinal Words
Two laptops. Two platforms. It is rare to have a chance to see a manufacturer offer such equal footing to both AMD and Intel by outfitting a premium laptop with processors from both. It represents a rare opportunity to get to test the latest processors from AMD and Intel in a laptop in such an apples-to-apples fashion.
In the laptop space, design, cooling, and a manufacturers requirements can play a big part in how a particular chip performs, thanks to adjustable power level settings, surface temperature adjustments, and more. We have seen the lowest tier CPU outperform the highest tier CPU just by the virtue of a better cooling system, so to have processors from AMD and Intel, both of which launched in 2019, in the same chassis is a wonderful opportunity.
There aren’t too many ways to sugar coat the results of this showdown though. AMD’s Picasso platform, featuring its Zen+ cores and coupled with a Vega iGPU, has been a tremendous improvement for AMD. But Intel’s Ice Lake platform runs circles around it. Sunny Cove cores coupled with the larger Gen 11 graphics have proven to be too much to handle.
On the CPU side, no one should be too surprised by the results. We've already seen on the desktop that AMD’s Zen+ cores were competitive, but slightly slower than the previous Skylake platform; and the new Sunny Cove microarchitecture from Intel is a big step forward in terms of IPC for Intel. On purely CPU based tasks, Ice Lake really stretched its legs, and 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. Zen+ is outclassed here, and that showed in the benchmark results, and especially in the benchmark time. On our 8-thread SPEC 2017 run, the Ice Lake platform finished just a hair over two hours ahead of Picasso.
But things fare better for AMD on the GPU side of matters. Even though Intel has certainly closed the gap with Ice Lake's iGPU, AMD seems to continue to hold an advantage, especially on the 11 Compute Unit Ryzen Surface Edition processor found in the Surface Laptop 3. Intel has dedicated a lot more die area to the GPU and the results put them almost on equal footing with the Vega based GPU on Picasso. On the more complex GPU tasks, AMD tends to have a slight lead, and AMD’s low-level driver support also seems to benefit them on DirectX 12 based tasks. But, Ice Lake’s GPU is helped by the much quicker CPU it is coupled to, so depending on the specific test it can be even quicker.
Ice Lake does all of this with much better power efficiency as well. Overall battery life is quite a bit longer, and idle power draw is notably lower as well. Case in point: at minimum screen brightness, the Ice Lake system was pretty much only sipping power, drawing around 1.7 Watts, versus the 3.0 Watts for the AMD system.
It was fantastic to see AMD get a design win in a premium laptop this year, and the Surface Laptop 3 is going to turn a lot of heads over the next year. AMD has long needed a top-tier partner to really help its mobile efforts shine, and they now have that strong partner in Microsoft, with the two of them in a great place to make things even better for future designs. Overall AMD has made tremendous gains in their laptop chips with the Ryzen launch, but the company has been focusing more on the desktop and server space, especially with the Zen 2 launch earlier this year. For AMD, the move to Zen 2 in the laptop space can’t come soon enough, and will hopefully bring much closer power parity to Intel’s offerings as well.
Meanwhile for Intel, Ice Lake has been years in the making, and, after a long delay, it is finally here. After digging into the platform in-depth, it’s clear that Ice Lake is an incredibly strong offering from Intel. The CPU performance gains are significant, particularly because they were made in the face of a CPU frequency deficit. But the biggest gains were on the GPU side, where Intel’s Gen 11 GT2 in its full 64 Execution Unit configuration is likely the biggest single increase in GPU performance since they started integrating GPUs. It pulls very close to AMD’s Vega, closing the gap in performance to almost zero.
2019 has been a big year in the laptop space, with both Intel and AMD bringing new tools to the game. 2020 should be just as exciting, and if we’re lucky, we’ll get another chance to do this all over again.
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Cliff34 - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - link
I agree. AMD won't be able to compete w Intel until AMD focuses on building cpus for laptops.generalako - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
Ehhh, Sunny Cove's successor will bring an equal IPC increase, from what Intel has stated.AMD has themselves to blame. Why tf would you delay the architecture of both GPU and CPU and process node as well like that? I mean, the money lost from doing that, as OEMs will have little reason to move away from Intel's superior products, outweighs the money "saved" from this delay, no? Not like a Zen 2 APU won't come anyway, so why not do it before rather than after?
If AMD are smart they'll jump one architecture ahead. Starting with Zen 4 in 1.5 year's time, they should be smart enough to jump straight from Zen 2 APU to Zen 4.
Korguz - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
generalako " Ehhh, Sunny Cove's successor will bring an equal IPC increase, from what Intel has stated. " and you believe intel ???cheshirster - Tuesday, December 31, 2019 - link
"Sunny Cove's successor will bring an equal IPC increase, from what Intel has stated"They never stated that.
Qasar - Wednesday, January 1, 2020 - link
heh... yea right.. until its proven, just another lie from intel to keep their investors and shareholders happy....azazel1024 - Monday, December 16, 2019 - link
I don't think it is just the IPC boost. The two chips in the comparison here had memory bandwidth differences of 80%!Simply looking at a few of the SPEC INT tests, that was very clear that if AMD even on Zen had similar memory bandwidth to the Ice Lake chip, it likely would have been spitting distance. GPU workloads are also very heavily memory bandwidth constrained and AMD's Vega here was slightly ahead of Intel. If it had 80% higher memory bandwidth it probably would have been 20-30% faster in many of those games/benchmarks.
Even some of the not heavily memory constrained workloads like Handbrake, faster memory does improve performance. That 80% memory bandwidth difference may well have been a 5-8% performance hit to AMD.
BUT AMD shipped it with only DDR4-2400 support. It is the chip they brought to the fight.
If their Zen 2 manages to both have lower platform power (doesn't need to be parity with Intel or better, but 10% better would go a huge long way towards making it less of a decision for a lot of people), brings its 15% better IPC and if it keeps its clock speeds AND manages to bring DDR4L-3000/DDR4x-3760 or whatever compatibility and suspect Intel is done for in the laptop space.
That should give AMD several more wins in CPU performance, bring it to parity or near parity in most of the others leaving Intel with only a few wins in that. For GPU performance, AMD wouldn't even really need to update the iGPU. Just give it that extra bandwidth and Zen 2 CPU behind it and it likely would be kicking Intel's butt by 20-40%. Upgraded on top of having that, yes please.
qap - Saturday, December 14, 2019 - link
I don't think it is about IPC or CPU power anymore. Yes, AMD is slower, but not in a way that would bother me. It is more about power management that is and always was sore spot of AMD in notebooks.And no - 7nm is not the solution unfortunately. It may help under load, but under standby it can actually hurt battery life (leakage is higher). Most improvements in battery life are done by architectural changes (more specialized units, powering down unused parts etc).
nico_mach - Tuesday, December 17, 2019 - link
Well, this driver is still under development and in the first test, they were running cooler than Intel, so likely there is tuning to be done, still. They just haven't done much laptop work in recent years. They're going to be behind on more than the hardware, which is why Microsoft's involvement is really promising, really. Of course they still have some minor hardware matters to sort out, as you point out.Rezurecta - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Do you think a lot of help came from the sizeable memory speed differences? Do you think it benefitted cpu or gpu more? Is there a way to underclock the Intel memory so you can see the differences that the memory brings?Thank you.
ikjadoon - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
It's perplexing: AMD created an entirely new SKU for Microsoft (the AMD RYZEN™ 7 3780U Microsoft Surface® Edition Processor), but AMD still left this CU 11-equipped iGPU at the barebones 2400 MHz speed.Why not rate this MS-only SKU at 2933MHz or 3200MHz? My only thought: high-speed DDR4 was just going to exacerbate AMD's already-too-large power consumption.