What happened to Lenovo's line of AMD processor laptops?

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imzjustplayin

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I don't understand what has happened in the last few months but I went to the Lenovo website yesterday and I saw that you can't buy a single laptop with an AMD processor anymore! I thought trinity was a decent product but I can see that Lenovo has decided to dump their AMD laptops and now once again exclusively sell Intel based laptops. In fact, it almost seems like the inventory for AMD based laptops is drying up with nothing new in the pipeline. Did Lenovo get spooked by AMD dropping to a $1.6 per share back in October 2012? I mean I thought the Trinity Based laptops were competitive on the midrange to low end for Intel in terms of processing speed but blew Intel out of the water in terms of graphics acceleration. Are the AMD laptops having issues with Windows 8 or something? I noticed right after the Introduction of Windows 8, the supply of AMD laptops seems to be drying up with what's left on the shelves from months ago being all that's remaining.
 
Richland has been shipping to OEMs and Kabini isn't far behind, due to enter OEMs doors en masse come April-ish.

This is probably a case of Lenovo clearing their stock and awaiting these new chips with newer designs. I don't think they're expecting Richland to hit it out of the park, but Kabini is going to make for an excellent little X-series laptop. Quad core SoC at 15W TDP sounds awesome.

I'm expecting to get myself a little Kabini notebook if I can find a decent model sometime in the summer.

Supposed Richland/Kabini benchmarks. Not sure if fake or not, but Kabini is looking like a very very good little cheap chip. I can't remember the last time AMD had a chip that I was actually excited to see, but Kabini looks to be that kinda chip. Tiny little SoC with just enough power for a very efficient little laptop :D The E-350 was great, so if they can improve on it like they claim they have, I reckon OEMs will be lining up at their door step.
 
pelo said:
Not sure if fake or not, but Kabini is looking like a very very good little cheap chip. I can't remember the last time AMD had a chip that I was actually excited to see, but Kabini looks to be that kinda chip. Tiny little SoC with just enough power for a very efficient little laptop :D The E-350 was great, so if they can improve on it like they claim they have, I reckon OEMs will be lining up at their door step.
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Yeah it is exciting Kabini looks like it will be a very nice upgrade from E-350. Even Temash is pulling me towards buying a tablet even tho I'm not looking forward to windows 8.
 
Temash and Kabini both look to be well positioned with respect to their competition.

Kabini is facing off against expensive and power hungry Intel ULV chips in the sub-20W segment. To make matters worse for Intel, those chips aren't SoCs and require a chipset as well. They're certainly going to be better performing with respect to CPU performance, but also 2-5x+ the price tag. The 25W Kabini is actually really close to a 17W ULV+chipset when it comes to overall TDP; somewhere around 21-22W for the ULV and 25W for the Kabini chip. There are also models at 19W, 15W and lower.

Temash is up against the A15-based ARM SoCs and Clover Trail. It's going to mop the floor with the Clover Trail in GPU performance, but it's going to be interesting to see how it performs against Qualcomm's latest and greatest Snapdragon 600 and 800 SoCs. I believe both of those also include baseband, something that Temash/Kabini lack.

AMD has free reign in the cheap 10W-25W segment. Temash is going to be going up against the ARMy, and that's something that I don't think they'll win. Perf-per-watt is going to kick them in the ass in the sub-5W segment. Android and iOS and their applications perform much better on weak ARM cores than does a weak x86 core in legacy and Win8 environments.

As to Win8, yea, I agree :p I'll just install Linux on it. Hopefully we see some decent kernel support from day one. It's going to be used as a development-on-the-go machine anyway.

If those numbers above are true, AMD might as well cancel any big cores they've got brewing. The current Jaguar core iteration is exponentially better with respect to perf-per-watt than Bulldozer will ever hope to be.

-edit**

What's funny is that Intel was in much the same dilemma when they released their unenvied Pentium4. Their mobile chip, Pentium-M, designed for low power purposes ended up being the better architecture and faster than their big desktop architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if AMD opts to run with the Jaguar cores and improves them over the next coming years. With a bit of widening of the FPUs to 256bit per-core and widening the front end and improving the decoder, we'll probably see something that's as fast, or faster than the Bulldozer architecture.
 
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You have to realize performance per watt does not scale with clock speed. Low power designs are not necessarily going to have higher performance per watt than high power designs at the high clock speeds the high power designs run at.
 
Tsumi said:
You have to realize performance per watt does not scale with clock speed. Low power designs are not necessarily going to have higher performance per watt than high power designs at the high clock speeds the high power designs run at.
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Well, given that Kabini/Temash are directed at the sub-35W level and Piledriver/Bulldozer was designed around the 35W/45W level, it's not a big jump. I know that performance doesn't necessarily scale linearly with TDP (in fact, it rarely ever does), but the fact that Kabini will probably be butting up against AMD's Piledriver APUs at 35W certainly says a great deal regarding Kabini's perf-per-watt.

35W>45W is certainly reasonable, but you're right that anything higher isn't necessarily going to do them any good. It might not even be designed to be all that scalable. For instance, Ivy Bridge doesn't show tremendous performance gains going from 35W to 77W. Even though the TDP is doubled the CPU and GPU performance moves ~30%?. AMD's Trinity is in the same boat here. And both of those were designed to be scalable upwards yet they still suck it up :p
 
I think the X131e still has an AMD option. The Thinkpad Edge 535 also has an AMD option.
 
Hopefully they are just waiting for richland chips, because below $500 i dont like any new intel offerings.

I decided not to wait and picked up a refurb dell inspiron 17r with ivy bridge i7 + geforce 650m for $480 (i cant say i regret it either)

The 650m is weaker then i expected but im pretty sure its still more powerful then richland.
 
When I bought my laptop a couple months ago, while I had Intel on my mind, I did look at the AMD offerings. I wanted something more geared towards processing strength since I use my laptop for programming and virtualbox. I also wanted efficiency for battery life.

The problem I found was that at the very low end ($200-$300) there wasn't much of a choice. And at $400-$600 the A6 and A10 didn't feel priced competitively. And above that price range AMD just can't compete, since you're getting into well built full feature machines.

What I found locally is that the A6 and A10 laptops were priced HIGHER then similar Intel laptops. You may have gotten better graphics, but the processor was certainly lagged behind and there wasn't any advantage on power rating. So I felt they should have been equal. I didn't feel that I should pay a premium for AMD. Some of it may be due to volume, or sweetheart deals that Intel gives manufacturers. I don't know.
 
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