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 ESTPlatform Power
Performance aside, the other side of the coin is battery life. AMD made big gains in battery life with the Ryzen 3000 series, somewhat addressing the power requirements of the platform and getting rid of some of the excessive idle power draw, but they are still using DDR4 on their mobile platform, which puts them at a disadvantage right out of the gate. Intel has made very good gains in battery life over the last several generations, and the move to 10 nm for Ice Lake also brought along LPDDR4X support. Most of the previous generation laptops stuck with LPDDR3, unless the manufacturer needed more than 16 GB of RAM, where they’d be forced to switch to DDR4. Finally adding LPDDR4X support is something that Intel has needed to do for a while, and ironically Intel’s flagship Core product line lagged behind their low-cost Atom lineup which did support LPDDR4.
Web Battery Life
The Ryzen 7 3780U powered Surface Laptop 3 was slightly under the Ryzen 5 device we tested at launch, but still in the same range. The AMD system isn’t helped very much by Microsoft only offering a 46 Wh nominal battery capacity, which is rather undersized for a 15-inch laptop. The Ice Lake device, as we’ve seen before, was much more efficient under load, offering a sizeable battery life lead.
Idle Power
One of AMD’s biggest challenges was to get their laptop SoC into a premium device, and with the Surface Laptop 3 they have succeeded. Microsoft has shown themselves as being adept at squeezing battery life out of devices, with low-power displays, and good internal components to minimize power draw. Here Intel has held a considerable advantage over the last couple of years, and the move to 10 nm should, in theory, help as well.
To test the idle power draw of both systems, the battery discharge rate was monitored with the screens fixed in at 5.35 nits, to minimize the power draw of the display on the result. Normally we’d prefer to have the display completely off for this test, but Microsoft’s power plan on the Surface Laptop actively turns off the laptop when the display times out.
The Ice Lake system was able to go all the way down to right around 2 Watts of power draw – and sometimes slightly under – with as low as 1.7 Watts seen. We’ve seen under 1 Watt of draw on an 8th generation Core Y series processor, and around 1.5 Watts on the same generation U series, so considering the display is not completely off on the Surface Laptop, the 2-Watt draw is quite reasonable.
The Picasso system was not quite as efficient, drawing 3 Watts at idle. This is in-line with the results we’ve seen on other Picasso systems and explains the lower battery life results on the AMD system. AMD made big gains moving from Raven Ridge to Picasso, but I’m sure the team is looking forward to the 7 nm Zen 2 coming to their laptops, which we hope will address this further.
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Zoolook - Saturday, December 21, 2019 - link
LP memory uses half size channels compared to regular DDR among other things, if you haven't designed your controller for it, it won't work, and since LP memory has only been used in the mobile sector earlier there was no reason for AMD to design the controller with that in mind.Extra transistors that could be used better elsewhere.
RSAUser - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Remember this is Zen gen 1, when they still had the RAM frequency scaling issue vs infinity fabric.sorten - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Whoa, nice surprise for a Friday morning! Thanks for the review.Results are about what I expected, and I guess this was the risk for AMD pushing out their previous gen APU for a high profile product. I hope they get the Zen 2 APUs into products soon.
coder543 - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Microsoft really should have waited until mobile Zen 2.sing_electric - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Honestly, I have no earthly clue why MS makes most of the choices it does with its hardware products. They launched the Surface Studio with a Maxwell GPU right after Pascal came out... then waited 2 years until after Turing was out to update the machine with the Pascal GPUs they should have had at launch. For a machine that is theoretically for "creators" (though, let's be honest, is probably mostly found on the desk of the boss of whoever is actually doing the creating).They did the same thing with the ARM-based Surface Pro X with a custom chip based on the already-year-old Qualcomm 8cx. Honestly, the bigger surprise is that the updated Surface Pro series actually uses current-gen Intel chips soon after they launched.
tipoo - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Bet the Studio 3 comes out right before Ampere too. I agree, sometimes it seems like they're deliberately making themselves a bit less appealing not to piss off their partners.TheinsanegamerN - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
And miss all the holiday sales?Here is the issue: AMD's mantra is "wait until X", but when "X" arrives, it is outclassed by the competition, or comes out after the major holiday season. The rest of the world doesnt run on AMD's schedule, and this only hurts AMD. If MS didnt want to use zen+, the consumer model would have simply gone with ice lake.
Zen 2 APUs should have come out when the rest of zen 2 did.
Meteor2 - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
For sure, but they don't have the money to do the development concurrently. Something had to give.lmcd - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
More like they don't have the money to hold CPU releases for GPU integrationChiplet arch should fix this and let AMD integrate within the same cycle -- this should, in theory, be the last cycle or second-to-last cycle where AMD ships a previous-generation "APU."
RSAUser - Friday, December 13, 2019 - link
Don't think it was the money for mobile Zen 2, more likely lack of available wafers from TSMC, rather supply Desktop as enthusiast and gamers will then market the product while cashing in profits from Epyc.