AMD Questions

I am going in for an architecture and Industrial Design major, and I will most likely get an ultraportable (11.6" to 13").

I would like a laptop with great battery life (7 hours realistically atleast) with decent performance and graphics. That is what I heard what AMD is promising with their new "Fusion" architecture.

I am coming from an HP DM3z with the specs in my signature.

My questions go as below:

1. How much of an improvement will I get from my current computer with the new AMD Fusion architecture in late summer 2011?

2. Is the battery life on the new Fusion architecture going to be that much better than AMD's past architectures?

3. What specific platform is going to be out/ready by summer 2011, the same one that is coming out in January 2011?

 

Nobody has any solid numbers, or even anything resembling battery runtimes yet. The hardware still isn't in the wild.

 

The one that is coming in January 2011 (Brazos) will definitely be there, but there may also be a higher performance one (Llano). The answers to your questions depend on which one you are talking about.

The most powerful Brazos part has already been benchmarked (see, for example here). The GPU performance is very good for integrated graphics (better than Arrandale by about a factor of 2, similar to Sandy Bridge), but the CPU performance is awful (better than Atom, but worse than practically everything else). Based on the power draw, the battery life should be quite good; I would guess most models will reach 7 hours.

Llano is more of a mystery. First, nobody knows when exactly it is coming. The current statement from AMD is that production begins in the second quarter of 2011 which means the laptops may be out either in the summer or in the fall depending on how well it works. Second, there are no benchmarks so we don't know much about the performance or the battery life. Its CPU is similar to the current mobile Phenoms, but die-shrunk to 32nm. The battery life of these CPUs is terrible (particularly the quad-core ones; see this thread) so unless AMD has made some serious revisions, I don't expect it to go above mediocre. Performance is likewise unlikely to be anywhere in the neighborhood of the high end and probably not even mid-range. The GPU should be good though, possibly even competitive with the low-mid discreet GPUs.

 

With performance and portability/battery life equally as important to you, I think that an AMD based platform is wishful thinking with the current information known about what's coming from both Intel and AMD.

As to the performance improvement over your current notebook, both an AMD and especially an Intel based platform will be 'huge' (I'm guessing at least 5 to 6 times (or more) the performance with an Intel based system; depending on what apps we're talking about).

Your current cpu scores ~867 PassMark 'points' and a current i3 350M with 8GB RAM and an Inferno SSD inside an Asus U30Jc 'scores' 2059 'point's (almost 3x more powerful). This notebook gets me around 6+ hrs on a single charge - SB will be significantly better (or, so we're told).

Hope this helps.