this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Makes sense if true. Laptop market looks like shit rn from a profit perspective, if anything has to get delayed or deprioritized, a high end laptop might be it.
From what source? Laptop chips have always enjoyed higher margins than desktops. Not as much as their server line, but still.
That's only explicitly true for Intel.
The manufacturing method for Ryzen chiplet & Epyc are basically identical, with a different IOD and packaging complexity being the only real differences, so any additional production costs predominantly down to that part instead of something related to the wafer.
Yield/binning costs cancels themselves out because a CCD, the single most expensive part to design and manufacture, has all of its costs spread across the entire Epyc & Ryzen chiplet product stack. Intel doesn't have that luxury, since Xeon & Core-S are two different sets of designs.
Ryzen APUs are a fundamentally different design to all the other Ryzen/Epyc stack. So even if the mobile chips command a higher ASP than Ryzen chiplet, they also carry with them a higher manufacturing cost because it isn't subsidised by being part of the CCD production line.
If AMD can make an SoC suitable for entry and mid-range gaming laptops with no dGPU required, that could put a sizeable dent in sales of NVIDIA's smaller GPUs and potentially be more profitable for laptop OEMs (not having to pay Intel tax + NVIDIA tax).
In theory, yes. In practice, a high end APU is going to be competing with low end and prior generation/refresh CPUs/GPUs. Once those discounts are figured in, the value proposition in straight performance/$ is shot.
They would be MacBook Pro fighters that could also do gaming at high energy efficiency, but we're not close to that being a go-to for any price segment if performance is paramount. Those chips will be expensive and the laptops with them will stay expensive for quite a while.
Asus TUF A15 is $750 rn. There's usually a totally usable gaming laptop for $800 and a decent midrange one for $1100-1200.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-tuf-gaming-a16-16-165hz-gaming-laptop-fhd-amd-ryzen-7-7735hs-with-16gb-ddr5-memory-radeon-rx7600s-512gb-pcie-ssd-off-black/6535499.p?skuId=6535499