Info Tech Earlier this week, we covered Anandtech’s exhaustive evaluation of multiple laptops powered by AMD’s Carrizo APU. The results were ugly for reasons that had little to do with AMD — while Carrizo’s performance is limited, OEMs are packing it into boxes at price points far above what AMD initially intended, and the resulting systems do not compare well against their Intel counterparts.
New data from Anandtech shows that the Lenovo AMD Y700 preproduction model they tested differed from the shipping version in a significant way. The preproduction system only contained a single channel memory interface, while the shipping version has a dual-channel interface. The consumer version of the laptop should therefore be 5-15% faster in bandwidth-sensitive benchmarks.
This will improve the Y700’s performance relative to its Intel counterpart, but it doesn’t fundamentally alter any of the conclusions we reached in our previous story. Here’s why.
Product availability and price
Of the four Carrizo systems that Anandtech tested, only two of them — the HP systems — can actually be found on HP’s own website. Both the Toshiba Satellite E45DW-C4210 and Lenovo’s AMD-powered Y700 are nowhere to be found. All the Y700 models at Lenovo.com are Intel-powered.
Think about that for a moment. I’m not saying no one goes to Best Buy when they need a new laptop, but if you want to know something about a manufacturer’s product lines, the first place to look is on the manufacturer’s website. By not listing their Carrizo offerings, both Toshiba and Lenovo limit the number of customers that might see an AMD system or consider buying one.
Next, there’s the price point issue. Two of the four Carrizo systems (the Toshiba E45DW and the HP Pavilion 17z-g100) are between $500 and $600. Neither is particularly well-built, though the Pavilion seems a bit better in that regard. Neither system ships with a dual-channel memory configuration as standard, though again, at least HP gives you the option to add a DIMM (the Satellite has just one SO-DIMM slot). The price point comparisons against Intel are somewhat better on these two systems, but neither shines particularly well against their Intel counterparts, and neither reflects the $130 or so discount that HP and Toshiba are supposedly getting on AMD parts as compared to Intel chips.
As for price points on the other two systems, let’s examine that in (yet) more detail.
Comparison shopping
One concern raised by some readers was whether or not we were using appropriate comparison points for our AMD versus Intel hardware. That’s a fair question, and it’s theother reason why we vastly prefer to source product pricing from manufacturers. It’s impossible to track the deals and sales that companies might be offering at any given moment, or to parse the differences in models offered to specific retailers versus the mainstream versions. When Best Buy has more than 200 different Lenovo-branded systems on sale, the issue is obvious.
The AMD Lenovo Y700 is a perfect example of this problem. According to Best Buy, the Y700 — by which I mean the AMD system prominently identified as a “Y700″– is a $918 system. According to Lenovo’s UK website, it’s a $972 system after exchange rates are calculated. But here’s the thing — they aren’t the same PC. The UK version of the AMD Y700 has an FX-8800P at 2.1GHz. The system Best Buy prominently refers to as a Y700 uses an A10 with an unlabeled base clock.
Best Buy offers the same system that the UK branch of Lenovo is selling. They just don’t label it the same way.