18 PCWorld FEBRUARY 2021NEWS AMD’S LAPTOP RESURGENCE CONTINUES
transitioned what it calls Collaborative Power
Performance Control, a technique that
migrates CPU clock and power control to the
CPU’s own firmware, to the mobile space.
Originally, the CPPC feature was part of AMD’s
“Zen 2” desktop chips, offering minor
performance improvements for the Ryzen
3000 series (go.pcworld.com/r3rv). But, since
frequency affects power consumption, CPPC
should have a more significant effect in a Ryzen
laptop’s power usage.
Consider: Though the comparison is more
than a year old, and pitted AMD’s older Ryzen
7 3780U versus the Intel Core i7-1065G7, this
head-to-head comparison between otherwise
identical Microsoft Surface Laptop 3s (go.
pcworld.com/sl3s) was especially
compelling. Intel’s Core topped AMD’s Ryzen
by roughly 10 percent in performancebenchmarks, but absolutely whupped Ryzen
by over 40 percent in battery life.
Since then, AMD has recouped those
performance deficiencies, and then some.
But director of technical marketing Robert
Hallock said that CPPC would add two hours
to a Ryzen Mobile 5000 notebook’s battery
life, for a total of 17.5 hours of general usage
and 21 hours of video playback. (That’s based
upon a Ryzen 7 5800U notebook with a 53
watt-hour battery, playing a 1080p video and
using the MobileMark 2018 benchmark. The
screen brightness was not disclosed.)
“It’s easy to add additional performance
to an SOC. It’s much harder to deliver great
battery life alongside that. But that’s what
we’ve managed to do with Zen 3, with
seven-nanometer, and with the Ryzen 5000
series,” Hallock said.