As with most
good things, this comes from Bulgaria.
Laptop.bg have finagled themselves a prototype unit of Acer's forthcoming
Aspire 5553G and taken it on a benchmarking adventure to see what it's made of. Their first impressions relate to the case, which comes in a familiar
Timeline-inspired design, including a fingerprint-loving glossy lid and Acer's particular take on the island keyboard, but they quickly move on to analyzing the quad-core
Phenom II N930 heart beating within. Sadly, this particular unit was held back in gaming by its anemic Mobility Radeon HD 4250 GPU, but the news wasn't all that flattering in CPU-isolating comparisons either. Cinebench 10 found the N930 outperforming Intel's
previous generation chips in multicore workloads, but falling behind on single-threaded tasks. AMD seems intent on pricing its latest Phenoms aggressively, and if you're not too hung up on getting great battery life these will look appealing, but we can't help feeling disappointed that Intel's
Core i7s aren't being given more to worry about. Hit the source for the full review.
posted May 10th 2010 7:36AM
4xxxx GPU ... :(
Poor AMD- kinda feel sorry for the guys... Their morale must be terrible- I'm surprised they're going to be putting out more laptops than las year- considering their silicon still isn't up to par...
@think before you react ... they are price competitive and that's really all that matters. Sure they don't have the stand-out product they did before in the Athlon days and the Pentium 4 netburst days (ewww) but they have the ATi dx11 advantage ... and that has really gone to waste on this lappy imho. CPU is plenty fast, just needed to whack in a dx11-series GPU.
I believe PhenomX4 being on-par with Core2duo is a fair call because they were developed to be in competition with each other - but the i3/i5/i7 from intel has no peer at the moment, and that's bad news for all (except intel).
Yeah tbh I usually end up springing for AMD processors that are in the same range as Intel ones usually because of how much cheaper they are. The processor can go a bit hot and when that happens the speed suffers a bit, but aside from that I'm glad I saved the cash because they usually get the job done.
@buoy I don't know if I'd really consider them price competitive because in the laptop market battery life is a big part of what makes a CPU competitive. These CPUs might perform on par with last-gen Intel parts in terms of benchmarks but they're not close to either the last gen or current generation Intel chips for battery life. The high power draw makes them better for large laptops that are basically desktop replacements, but the fact that they're not that fast kind of negates that kind of use. Which basically puts them only in budget notebooks where price is such a concern that it overrides both performance and battery life. Last gen performance isn't even that big of a deal in the mobile world-Apple manages to sell plenty of 13" Macbook Pros even though they still use Core 2 Duos, but battery life *is* a big deal with laptops. AMD really needs to get more energy efficient chips out or they'll basically end up being banished from the laptop market.
@tekdemon perhaps you're right. i'm wondering if the next die-shrink will bring amd and indeed all manufacturers back to a decent level battery-wise. 32nm may be a magical turning point (in general) for battery life to get to a "full day's work on 1 charge" scenario... we'll just have to wait and see.
looks tempting
@bob e Yep, except for the price, in my opinions. Reactions- http://j.mp/acer-553g
I was wondering what the battery life would be on the new mobile Phenom x4s, and if this review is accurate then it is disappointing indeed. But the question to ask of this laptop in particular is why? makes little sense to pair this new Phenom x4 with a thin and light laptop when Intel's CULVs offer slightly worse performance with many times the battery life. My Asus UL50 goes 6-7 hours easily on the integrated graphics and 2-3 hours with the Nvidia chip switched on. I hope this platform finds success in the mobile workstation or desktop replacement category, because it is out of place here.
It's Cache starved :) 2 MB L3 can't keep 4 cores happy :)
@karthikrg Doesn't makes _that_ much of a difference in most cases. Just look at the Athlon II reviews that don't even have an L3 cache.
Anyways, I'll get AMD but not with Acer - they've screwed me over on a laptop before. Customer service ftl.
@Schmich I don't think so. More cache misses -> Memory Latency -> Bad performance. Plus AMD's arch uses exclusive and not inclusive caching. Games and other memory intensive apps, get a HUGE benefit out of the cache. 0.5 KB per core no longer cuts it, when the competition offers a minimum of 1.5 MB (and upto 2 MB) per core, with a much better micro-arch.
I'd still get it.
Groovy
Acer have made some pretty nice stuff in the past to be fair to them, gotta respect them for that but am I the only one who thinks their laptop chassis continually look cheap?
I can't help but think they just dug in the parts bin and put some generic looking case in varying shades of grey around some hardware?
One of these days AMD will start producing laptop CPUs that rival Intel on power consumption. Until then I will continue to avoid AMD CPUs in my laptops.
Cheap is nice, but if it won't last me through a plane trip, train/bus ride and I have to continue looking for a power outlet then it defeats the purpose of buying a laptop for me.
Sexy machine. Sexy specs. Sexy price? Let's hope. I need a new laptop.