When AMD, with the last generation of Ryzen mobile processors, made the sale of the more economical “HS” series conditional on the manufacturer installing it exclusively in a notebook that meets AMD’s basic quality requirements, it turned out to be a step in the right direction. Customers have received a certain guarantee of quality and manufacturers have a higher interest in these product lines.
Further activities in this direction are therefore a logical evolution, but within the AMD portfolio we can talk about a revolution, because there are more qualitative requirements and they are not very banal. This time, these quality efforts are not related to a specific product line, but are linked to the AMD Advantage (more precisely Design Framework) label, which targets primarily gaming and high-performance laptops.
The requirements that AMD places on such laptops include:
Combination of Ryzen processor and Radeon graphics core. It is not an end in itself, there are other (for the manufacturer) requirements / (for the customer) advantages:
The first is support for SmartShift, a common TDP for CPU and GPU, where part of its power budget can be provided to the graphics core when the processor is low, and vice versa.
Then there is Smart Access Memory; thus, direct CPU access to all graphics memory. Although this technology is basically cross-platform and can be run on the Nvidia GPU, for example, it has limited support in the drivers to only a few specific games, while the default state of AMD is “implicitly enabled”.
Additional requirements apply to the display. Brightness of at least 300 nits is required, support for 144Hz refresh rate and finally FreeSync.
There are also minimum requirements for cooling quality so that the processor and graphics core do not overwhelm unnecessarily and at the same time do not overheat. Power circuits and batteries must also achieve certain qualities so that the notebook can run on battery power for as long as possible and at the same time charge at a reasonable speed.
AMD Advantage will offer products announced starting in the first half of June. The first swallow is the Asus ROG Strix G15, on which AMD and Asus have tried to show what performance can be achieved in a laptop of otherwise relatively conservative dimensions with decent quality.
Reviews of this model have already appeared online, so in the form of a small tasting we can try some results from the review of Anandtech, specifically on the performance of the processor:
To perform a graphics card:
To last the battery:
And for charging speed:
More details in the Anandtech review (link in sources). Looking at the charts, keep in mind that the tested Asus is a 15.6 ″ notebook weighing 2.28 kg, while, for example, the Clevo with Core i9-9900K / GeForce RTX 2080, which achieves similar performance in some tests, is almost four-kilo. In some graphs, the notebook with the Intel Core i9-11980HK processor (Tiger Lake) is Intel ‘s reference platform, the weight of which Intel did not boast. The average weight of reported notebook models with this processor is already lower (probably due to the 10nm generation process Tiger Lake) and amounts to 2.75 kg.
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