Dell Precision 7560 & Precision 7760 pre-release discussion

From what I can gather, the chips throttle constantly at 65W in a laptop chassis for a very small increase in performance - they won't be an option in these laptops. There does seem to be a significant speed gain from the 6 core 2186M to 11980HK (which should be very equivalent to the max Xeon option) - Single Core, via GeekBench 5: 1183 -> 1649, Multi-Core: 4833 -> 9254. After many generations of laptops with a percentile performance increase that you could count with the fingers on one hand, this is the most compelling upgrade in many a moon.

 

Wow, that sounds amazing. Thanks for the details. Nearly 40% faster single core means a lot to me and multi even seems better by nearly doubling. Do you know how the integrated GPU compares? The UHD P630 is more so "meh" on a 4K display... and from what I read the newer 11th gen has a good XE GPU but these seems to got cut down in the higher tier CPUs somehow...

Still wonder how great use of 500 or 800 nits are compared to my old 300 nits...

 

Right now, the only equivalent CPU that's been tested has been in an Intel testbed laptop, so these numbers are very preliminary, but I think everyone agrees this is not just the miniscule updates we've had in the past. Just looking at Cinebench R15: E-2186M (6 core)= 1099; 11980HK (8 core) = 2211, I think it's safe to say this would be a sweet upgrade. Let's take a moment to appreciate Team Red for bringing real competition to the table The Xe graphics are 32 EU and not the 96 EU version that can stand in for a low-end GPU, but it's still almost double the performance of the older integrated graphics in most cases, so it should be a noticeable difference for your use-case.

 

I don't think that AMD's competition is really responsible here. (Not that I mind, I really do love that AMD is giving Intel a run for their money.) Intel has been trying to get their 10nm iteration with a new architecture off of the ground for years. They were too aggressive with their plans and it ended up taking forever to get it mature enough to use in high-end CPUs.

I believe that the original plan after Skylake dropped was to deliver 10nm with a new architecture to most or all of their CPU segments/markets by the end of 2017. Unlike prior architecture transitions, the 10nm rollout was really slow. We had 10nm Cannon Lake in 2018 which only saw one CPU model, a Core i3 with no integrated graphics. 10nm Ice Lake appeared in 2019, and it did have a nice IPC boost (similar to what we are seeing with the new Tiger Lake CPUs) but it only went up to 28W TDP / 4 cores, not suitable for a high-end mobile workstation. We're finally seeing 10nm hit the high-end mobile CPUs with this generation but it still won't hit the desktop CPUs until perhaps late this year with the Alder Lake rollout. (They've backported the new architecture to 14nm as "Rocket Lake" as an interim step but I've been hearing that the result is not as impressive over Comet Lake as what we are seeing from these new mobile Tiger Lake H CPUs.)

This multi-year bottom-up piecemeal rollout is new... Previously I think they've always had their entire lineup transitioned over the course of a few months to a year and they would often start with the top mainstream CPUs instead of the bottom ones.

 

I think that the main reason that AMD hasn't really penetrated the mobile workstation space right now is simply that it's really steep learning curve to make these workstations. I recently purchased an Lenovo P14S AMD, which was a 14" laptop with a very nice keyboard and a full 8 cores/16 threads - a 15W CPU that performed like Intel's previous gen 45W chips. It used a Synaptics trackpad that seemed to be fighting against the system at every step - it would arbitrarily either shut off or go into a very basic mode that disallowed multi-touch. The replacement system improved things, but even then I saw some portions of this behavior, so I got a refund. It's clear to me that AMD's latest Ryzen mobile CPUs still are ahead of Intel in the performance per watt category, but it's all the other moving pieces that's the real challenge.

Fortunately, with this new generation of Intel CPUs, the dividing line is far more narrow and if the new Intel CPUs support VM memory encryption, they'll be close to feature parity with AMD's best. That makes me feel as a consumer a lot more comfortable that this laptop isn't compromising when compared to other things.

 

Huh...
I wonder how long it'll take for this to be a thing.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbre...usb-c-power-delivery-extended-power-range-epr

 

To be fair even if there would be an AMD option as CPU in the 7x60 series I dont think many would take it - at least not me. Why? Simply because of software problems that can occur. Last year we finally went to get our first PowerEdge on AMD with an 7302P Epyc (as our Veeam appliance -> 2019 on bare metal). First it looked awesome in terms of performance/price but when we had a Veeam incident and I had some time on the phone to the technican there he first asked if it was a AMD CPU in it. I said yes, and asked why. He then told me that while they support AMD there are some settings and things to be considered and we ended up talking a long time about the trouble they face in the field because of these things. In terms of virtalization its ok to go AMD but it seems that your on a beta route at bests. Especially the NUMA allocation, central hub architecture and RAM connection/ dependance of epycs is a potentila mine filed. Maybe veeam 11 is better now, but even then EPYC is out of usage for our small ESXi host collection as we like to have unified hardware (e.g: same architecture). For my x60 workstation the AMD stop came by the requirement for me to operate an SAP HANA on it in a VM (to develop/ test) and while you might be able to run it, SAP warns you not to do it and this is IMHO the problem for AMD: software of the last 10+ years is made exclusive for Intel CPUs and did just "run" on amd, too. Now in the private field this works, but when it comes to business cases together with support requirements it is a complete no-go at the moment IMHO.

And I think this is also the reason why Dell or any other worksation maker hasn't done it.

 

ISV / Software Certification is a really big thing with business that make out really huge purchase orders for these devices, and they're not going to change any time soon. The only way to solve this problem is to deliver a technically viable product for another five years, and make sure the laptop vendors deliver flawless devices - which in my experience, is not the case. That will create the market demand to make sure vendor software will be optimized for the AMD platform. In the long run, as a consumer, I don't really have a dog in this fight - I just want the best value for the money, and nothing brings that out like old fashioned market competition.

 

I hope 7560 nvidia card will be the same form factor as 7550... I would like to upgrade my 7550 with a Ampere card..
Does someone know if that will be the case ?

 

Seems likely because of the shared chassis.
No one has actually seen the GPU card yet to confirm, but we should find out within a few weeks, I'm sure that some people will be highly interested in this...