Gadgetory

hey guys and welcome back to hardware unbox today I'm finally covering something a lot of you guys have been asking about and that's rising mobile yep I have finally managed to get my hands on one of the only rising mobile laptops in the wilds the HP Envy x-360 - look at how AMD's latest mobile silicon performs of course this isn't the first time we're seeing AMD APU Zin laptops even today you can buy a low-end notebook with the Stoney Ridge APU inside complete with all the wonders of an excavator based CPU it's at the high end that AMD has been absent for generations mostly because of their slow and inefficient CPU architecture which allowed Intel to command that mobile throne for years now with Rison and the Zen architecture everything has changed for AMD not only are their desktop parts very competitive against the latest from Intel but it's also allowed Amy to re-enter the mobile space with the set of AP use actually up for a fight thanks to these products codenamed Raven Ridge we might actually see some competition back in the ultra thin laptop market the two AP use in the risin line up for now are the risin 5 2500 you and the risin 7 2700 you both pack 4 core 8 threads CP used the same as the latest 8th gen laptop CPUs from Intel along with ddr4 2,400 memory controllers as you can see in the table clock speeds range from 2.0 or 2.2 gigahertz base up to 3.6 or 3.8 gigahertz boost right in the ballpark of KB Lake refresh the big thing to note here isn't the CPU though which admittedly is a lot faster than anything ambi has produced in the mobile space for years in fact it's the GPU where amy has a huge competitive advantage over Intel the Rison 5 2500 you were looking at today has a Vega 8 GPU with a to compute cores and a total of 512 shaders clocked up to 1100 megahertz this GPU is easily twice as fast from a pure compute perspective compared to Intel's you HD graphics 620 currently used in 8th gen parts it looks faster than RS + graphics on paper as well though Intel hasn't even begun rolling out those GPUs in quad-core ultra portable SKUs so the rise in the 7 2700 you is even faster with more compute cores at a higher clock but I have to hunt down a product with Rison 7 inside to get a better idea at how it performs here we'll be focusing just on the risin 5 2500 you the impressive aspect to the new rise in mobile parts is they crammed both that quad core rise and CPU and a powerful Vega GP into a 15 watt TDP that's the very same Teddy P as Intel's equivalent 8th gen CPUs but with the potential for extra performance pretty much sounds like a winner right before I get into some juicy benchmark data I did want to talk about the test procedure because testing with a laptop CPU apu is different and more challenging than testing a desktop component that's because laptops come as entire systems so you know it's hard to lock down variables and directly compare apples to apples aspects like the cooling solution which impacts throttling storage memory software clock speed tweaks and battery life all vary between devices and with very few rising laptops on the market right now we're pretty much relying just on data from one laptop and that might be for a while the good news though is that the HP Envy x-360 does provide a good test platform with comparable hardware to many ultra portables my review net has 16 gigabytes of ddr4 2400 in a dual channel configuration post a fast 256 gig PCIe SSD which is great for reducing bottlenecks in those areas power consumption and battery life is harder to test and I'll comment on that a bit later but for now let's get on to it the benchmarks the first couple of benchmarks for PC mark I'm gonna breeze through as this test does stress a lot of different system components nor always just the CPU and GPU however I have included here to see how a rising laptop stacks up against some of its competitors in a brief sort of fashion the workload the risin 5 2500 you either sits between the core i7 8550 you and the core i7 7500 you or it's in the mix amongst Intel's 7th gen cable ACP use Intel's 8th gen CPUs were routinely 10 to 20 percent faster in these tests which is an interesting result but we'll have to look at some more tests before we conclude anything so Cinebench is one of the strongest results for the risin 5 2500 you in the multi-threaded test the cpu is just slightly slower than the core i7 8550 you and let's not forget that the I 78550 you is a higher tier product than the risin 5 2500 you the risin 7 2700 you is clocked 5 to 10 percent higher and no doubt would beat the I 78550 you in this test if you've been following rise in desktop coverage the single turn result won't surprise you though the I 78550 you is a good 17 percent faster here interestingly on a clock for clock basis the 8550 you is clocked 11% higher here in single core workloads so read into that 17% in gap what you want encoding x264 videos is a tougher task for the risin 5 2500 you in the first pass the 8550 you is a huge 38% faster though strangely this margin is narrowed significantly in the second passed to just 3% and it gets even tougher in x265 encoding where intel's eighth generation parts hold a commanding lead the 8550 is a good 23% faster in this workload encoding the hour-long test video in an hour and a half compared to two hours for a risin Microsoft Excel is a short workload that favors high boost clocks here Rison is also slower than kb lake refresh to the tune of 27% again this isn't a hugely surprising result considering the f-550 you holds a clock speakit advantage and intel's kb lake architecture also has higher IPC as we showed in our coverage of desktop risin MATLAB but this is an interesting one because it's one of the worst results horizon in fact it's so bad I'm not quite sure what the reason for this performance Delta is the risin 5 2500 you is around twice as slow as the I 78550 you slower than the very slow skylake core m3 CPU in our charts some of the MATLAB workloads in our benchmark fare worse than others the FFT and oder ye are much more competitive but still it's not a great overall result and it leaves me just a little bit puzzled in winrar compressions multi-threaded workload again the intel core i7 8550 you have performed strongly posting a 52% lead here though this does vary by device single certain results oddly enough here are a bit better for isin reducing to a 27 percent margin I also wanted to show memory bandwidth here as the Rison 5 2500 use supports ddr4 2400 and pushes higher bandwidth in the KB like our core i7 8550 you at least in the machines i've been testing with so far clearly we are not memory bandwidth limited in the benchmarks I've just been showing though because risin 5 is still behind in a number of situations so while AMD lists the maximum boost clock of the horizon 5 2500 you as 3.6 gigahertz the CPU does not hit this clock speed under sustained workloads to keep within the TDP which is you know a common behavior on these limited mobile platforms with the core i7 8550 you we saw sustained clock speeds during Cinebench in the 2.6 to 2.7 gigahertz range on all caused despite a maximum all core turbo frequency of 3.7 gigahertz with a single thread though the 8550 you did hit that 3.7 gigahertz maximum boost frequency in a sustained workload it's a similar story with the risin 5 2500 you in fact this apu varies on a per core basis more frequently than kb lake are however I did see consistent performers around 2.7 to 3.0 gigahertz on all four cores while only on a single core the 2500 u has no problem hitting that 3.6 gigahertz maximum boost clock consistently this does give the 2500 you Hach speed advantage in multi-threaded workloads and a small disadvantage in single call loads so we've seen how the CPU performs let's move on to the big story of regarding the risin 5 2500 you the GPU the Vega 8 GPU inside this chip is a beast compared to the UHD 620 graphics in KB Lake refresh boasting around 2.5 times the raw compute power when you consider this APU features the same 15 watt TDP this is an impressive feat from the AMD team it goes to show how well their graphics architecture scales down I'll get to actual gaming in a moment but I first wanted to take a look at 3d mark I'm jumping right in the deep end here by looking at times by the most intensive 3d mark workload that's clearly way too intensive to run sense of weight on a laptop however it does give some interesting insights particularly as this test is entirely GPU limited here the Rison 5 2500 you is just over twice as fast as the Kois of an 85 50 when viewing the overall score and this improves to a 2.1 times lead in the graphics core what this shows is that in a very intensive GPU workload Rison has more than a 2x lead in the same power envelope horizon 5 2500 you also has a 2.2 X lead in firestrike though as we move down to the less intensive workloads rise ins lead starts to slip in the overall score as the tests become heavier on the CPU in skydiver we see a 1.8 to X lead for risin and in cloud gate just drops to 1.3 3x let's not forget here that we are comparing risin 5 to a core i7 either the risin 7 2700 uses a Vega 10 GPU with 640 shaders compared to 5 12 in risin 5 with the clock speed boost as well so when comparing risin 7 to core i7 we will see AMD's apu pull ahead but again we'll have to wait to actually get my hands on rising server in a test set out for proper obviously a lot of you will be interested in whether the extra GPU power rise in Mobile provides it's enough for actual gaming on these ultra portables I'll have a full X operation of rising mobile gaming coming up a bit later but I have tested a small handful of games on the envy x-360 to see what is playable so ultra portables tend to be fairly slow so I usually start by testing very old games that old but you know from around 2013 for several years these sorts of machines couldn't even hit 60fps in Tomb Raider a game from 2013 at 720p with the lowest possible settings these days though the core i7 8550 hits 93 FPS at these settings but it's the rise in 525 hundred-year that pulls ahead by 26% you can quite easily play this game at 1080p with some higher detail settings if you'd like though the other interesting title to mention here is Metro last light at 1080p medium settings this game is still utterly unplayable on the eye 78550 you pushing an average of 17 FPS on the horizon 525 hundred you though this improves to a 33 FPS average and this is a pretty intensive title so it's an impressive result and that's four percentage gains the horizon 5 2500 u is 94% faster which is a huge result in favour of AMD I was most excited though to check out the performance of civilization 6 not just because it's a more recent game but also because it's very GPU and CPU intensive on laptops as Ryerson has such a low TDP there's a fine balancing act between giving power to the CPU and GPU when both are hit hard as a result neither part can run at its maximum power however with civilization 6 we can see that although the Rison 5 2500 u is limited by its 15 watt TDP it manages to squeeze out a ton more performance than the core i7 8550 you in fact this game goes from largely unplayable to completely playable with rosen mobile thanks to an 87% performance game and at the same time the game has a faster turn rate with Rison and this is you know provides a much better experience with this apu is civilization 6 alone not intensive enough for you or how about running Metro last light and Cinebench multi-threaded at the very same time in this test which pushed the GPU and CPU at full 100% utilization the risin 5 2,500 you achieved a score of 304 in Cinebench while pushing 26.2 FPS in Metro last light the coif 78550 you hit 248 in Cinebench and 14.8 fps in Metro last light that gives the 2500 you an advantage in both realms 22.6% in cpu performance and 77% in GPU performance when both are being taxed simultaneously give each of these tasks equal weighting and the risin 5 2500 you squeeze is 45% more juice from the very same TDP which is an incredibly impressive result for a risin mobile the final game I took a brief look at is Grand Theft Auto 5 with the risin 5 2500 you can actually play this game at 1080p with the lowest detail settings complete with a 1% low of above 30fps this isn't possible at all on the i7a 550 you where the game runs under 30 FPS on average so all the benchmarks are now out of the way so let's talk a bit more about how the Rison 5 2500 year performs generally in terms of CPU performance the 2500 new is slower than the core i7 8550 you on average not a perfect apples to apples comparison I'll admit but the eye 78552 is 30.6% faster in the benchmarks were used on average skewed in favor of Intel a bit by the enormous disparity in MATLAB now the core i7 CPU here is a higher tier model but the equivalent rise in the 720 700 use only 10% faster on paper at best so it's not going to be enough to close the gap here for those following the desktop battle between ambient until these results shouldn't be a surprise Intel still holds a strong IPC lead over AMD with their current products and AMD does not have a core count advantage in their mobile parts like they do on the desktop even with clock speeds favoring AMD by up to 300 megahertz in sustained all core workloads at least in in some cases until strong kami like IPCC's it outperform rise in mobile across the board this leaves the core i7 8550 you anyway from 10 to 25% faster than the risin 5 2500 you in general when a hitting all four course and typically that margin will increase in single threaded loads as Intel gains a clock speed ascendancy but you know that's not always the case is this a bad result for Amy's rise in mobile CPU well not really as we are comparing core i7 to risin 5 here as I haven't yet tested any 8th gen Core i5 parts the gap will close a bit when pitting the core i7 up against the risin 720 700 you or when comparing a core i5 horizon 5 and while it's unlikely that AMD will take the lead in either comparison the battle should end up only 10 to 20 percent in favor of Intel and that's a great result considering amy has basically come from nowhere in the high-end mobile space it's also worth mentioning that most people will be upgrading to a rise in mobile CPU from an older dual-core Intel CPU which the Rison 5 2500 trounces with its 4 core power gains of around 50 to 80% relative to the i7 7500 you are common and that's only pitting Rison 5 up against last gen Intel silicon coming from a 4-year old laptop this CPU will blow you away but the real story here is graphics performance which is where the Rison 5 2500 you demolishes the core i7 8550 you the vega 8 GPU inside is considerably more powerful to the tune of more than 2x in extremely GPU heavy benchmarks it manages to achieve this while keeping to the same 15 watt TDP as KB Lake refresh and even when both the GPU and CPU is slammed the Rison 5 2500 you pulls ahead by a huge margin on paper the Reg 8 GPU is about 2.5 X faster than the new HD 620 in terms of raw computer though in practical gaming scenarios I saw anywhere from seventy to a hundred percent more performance out of it this is enough to make some games playable where they were not previously like a civilization 6 even at admittedly low settings as I've only had time with the HP Envy x-360 it's hard to make a definitive conclusion on how power efficient the Rison 520 five hundred you is I had started the process of battery testing the envy x-360 and results seemed as expected for this sort of laptop which is good news for rise in mobile but I do need some more data before it becomes clear whether AMD or Intel has a power lead here the main issue with rising mobile for now is availability this testing has shown in the risin five twenty five hundred you is a highly competitive apu and will be especially attractive for those that want more GPU power in an ultra portable form factor but you just don't have many options if you want a laptop with rising inside there's the HP Envy x-360 and that's basically it at the moment and to make matters worse the envy x-360 is a 15-inch laptop which is a form factor where invidious MX 150 discrete GPUs are readily available alongside kb lake cpus in similar ultra-thin designs if rising mobile is to succeed mb needs to get this chip inside 13-inch ultra portables where discrete GPUs are rarely seen if the risin 5 2500 you can hit the same levels of performance in a 13-inch chassis AMD would have a serious winner on its hands but right now there are no options and we can't test that sort of thing just yet so as we come to the end of this video my final message to AMD and laptop manufacturers is get this chip in laptops judging by the chatter around Internet there is genuine demand for ultra portables with an APU like this inside anyway I will have some more content on the rise and 520 500 you and the HP Envy x-360 coming up in the next few weeks so I guess it's back to testing for now but until then I'll catch you next time