Linus Tech Tips
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2020
11:42 · 2.4M views · Mar 30, 2020
Linus Tech Tips reviews AMD's Ryzen 9 4900HS mobile CPU in the ASUS ROG Zephyrus G14 laptop, calling it a landmark product. It highlights strong performance against Intel along with good efficiency and battery life.
HN people cite it as a review showing Zen 2's efficiency and performance advantage over Intel in laptops.
5 comments from Hacker News
Have you considered an Asus Zephyrus G14? It comes with a Ryzen 9 4900HS and Linus (Tech Tips) seemed very impressed with it: this video
> Games are traditionally single threaded and hard to parallelize. On my 3900X I've seen even single player action titles utilize 16+ threads with overall CPU utilization reaching peaks of 80-90 %. Yes, it maybe be hard to parallelize game engines, but all major ones heavily use multiple cores. A bunch of years ago (4-5) people would recommend an i3-K dual core for gaming, because you could overclock it to 5+ GHz on air. That was sufficient for many titles back then. (And these i3s would sometimes give you higher FPS compared to the more expensive quad-core options). But a CPU like that is far too weak for newer titles. > You still can't beat intel at the high end. Both in terms of heat and performance. If you have a task that doesn't parallelize well, you can't beat intel. In terms of heat, that is, performance per Watt, Intel's high end is quite a bit worse than AMD's. It is true however that you can get slightly higher single-threaded performance out of Intel's highest-end CPUs, but not because they are more efficient (- AMD is better both perf/W and IPC-wise), but just by raw, unadulterated clock speed, pushing them to 5+ GHz. And that causes them to burn a lot of power. Zen 2 has consistently ~10-15 % higher performance clock-for-clock compared to Intel's best while achieving approximately 60-80 % higher perf/W. This LTT review captures the massive advantage Zen 2 has in efficiency: this video
> I haven't found many machines built on those. It's a shame. The 4900HS just came out, so I assume we'll be seeing more of them! (LTT: this video )
The LTT review [0] also had good things to say about the battery life. This CPU seems very power-efficient when compared to a 9980HK. [0] this video
LinusTechTips recently took a look at a gaming laptop with the same APU and were super impressed with its Intel-scorching performance: this video