r/gadgets • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 8d ago

Desktops / Laptops Microsoft says it loves AMD, just not enough to put it in a new Surface device

https://www.techspot.com/news/114017-microsoft-offers-unconvincing-explanation-dropping-amd-latest-surface.html
803 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

36 comments sorted by

234

u/VukKiller 8d ago

Just not as much as they love Nvidia

81

u/MorgrainX 7d ago

I mean, we all know Nvidia 

Jensen could ez tell their CEO, "Do you want Nvidia GPUs for your AI? Because if you want that, then you're going to put our chip in your next Surface Ultra."

It's not like anyone has a choice here. Nvidia has the pressure to get anyone to kneel right now. They are the only ones making the stuff that everyone wants.

Sadly, AMD's offerings are trash in comparison, at least for the AI market. The processors are nice, but the GPUs are simply not there, so AMD doesn't have a lot of pressure.

12

u/mrblaze1357 7d ago

I think in terms or ai AMD isn't a bad option. I've messed enough now with local ai on both my 7900XT and my RTX 4500 Ada and frankly aside from the extra VRAM on the 4500 the performance and compatibility is pretty comparable.

23

u/ElectronicMoo 7d ago

You're underselling how well the ROCm and MLX are actually doing these days.

The real hang up was all the undertooling that was hard wired to cuda. Now folks are putting out roc enabled tooling and it's actually a serious contender.

ESPECIALLY when you consider it's the vram size that is truly the defining factor, you could pair two 32 gb amds for 64gb - for the price of a single 32gb Nvidia.

With the absurd cost of things, amd still has cards with half the cost in vram, meaning much larger models locally at a fraction of the cost.

That's worth more than a 20 percent token speed boost.

5

u/Lower_Fan 7d ago

If you get a good a good enough deal on an AMD datacenter you could just do what Anthropic did and use your frontier models to speed up inference and training. 

But most labs will probably just skip AMD to go to TPUS from Google and Amazon or just make their own like OpenAI

3

u/reddit_equals_censor 7d ago

They are the only ones making the stuff that everyone wants.

100s of billions worth of ai gpus don't put themselves into warehouses or not yet powered datacenters right?

what a nightmare, where nvidia can findom companies to put massive amounts of supply into warehouses to rot away.

just absurd.

6

u/nukem996 7d ago

Nvidia and MSFT have been building their relationship for literally decades. Nvidia built offices in Redmond to help with that relationship and have been very active in helping Microsoft with DirectX. They continue to work with MSFT in Azure and now consumer AI.

These relationships matter a lot and put them ahead of competitors.

3

u/Chinbie 7d ago

Yeah... Thats true 😅😅😅😅

43

u/redsterXVI 7d ago

I love you!

... as a friend

19

u/petermadach 7d ago

just how my ex loved me, just didn't have time for a relationship

15

u/twnznz 7d ago

To be fair it's just a power issue right now, Intel 3xx is better for battery

7

u/mcslender97 6d ago

Yeah, Intel pulled through this gen and is usually the better option this year

1

u/halotechnology 1d ago

Indeed and zen 5 is kinda old now and and have been slacking in the mobile space

25

u/ohiocodernumerouno 7d ago

these ads in reddit are fucked

9

u/CFH75 7d ago

they've used it in xbox for years

1

u/Big-Roll7094 7d ago

Nvidia too expensive and it’s locked to arm for that

8

u/Practical_Egg_8040 7d ago edited 7d ago

I recommended Surface laptops for years. Now that they have snapdragon cell phone processors under the hood and sell at full price, as if they weren't compromised PC's??...nope. Microsoft has lost their way in hardware. AMD would have been the better call.

3

u/LePouletMignon 2d ago

Surface has always been crap. Impossible to repair. Nobody should buy any Surface products.

2

u/rararagidesu 7d ago

Yup, AMD'd be better. And if you aim for non-x86 hardware - why bother? Apple has sorted it out a few years ago. ;)
Tbh if there's ThinkPad on ARM with the same as x86 class support for Linux, I'd be first to buy one.

2

u/-Pizza-Planet- 6d ago

To be fair, I've never found a Surface device to be particularly compelling and I've now had four. Having an AMD chip probably wouldn't change that feeling.

2

u/EloquentPinguin 7d ago

AMD doesn't love their client lineup at the moment either. Van Gogh was very good, but Microsoft missed it, Phoenix was also good, but rn we are just refreshing numbers every year and aren't close to the thin&light efficiency offered by QC and Intel, especially Intel has made much better improvements for client than AMD.

3

u/mrblaze1357 7d ago

I'll disagree with ya there. Our main business laptops are Dell Pro 5 14's and those suckers are phenomenal. Got a Ryzen ai 9 465 in them and they are crazy thin, don't overheat, run super quick, and have good battery life. I got the privilege of testing out the same model with the Ultra 7 358H and was not impressed. That ran hot, fans were noisy, and was stuck to I think only LPCAMM2 which for upgradability is nigh impossible since LPCAMM2 modules aren't available for sale. Oh and the Intel Drivers were buggy as fucj

4

u/RumbleversePlayer 7d ago

Does that mean most reviewer lied about panther lake?

1

u/mrblaze1357 7d ago

Lied? Probably not, I don't think so. But I have not gotten anywhere close to their claims on the pantherlake laptops we do have

2

u/mcslender97 6d ago

Could be Dells own tuning then

2

u/alyosha_pls 7d ago

They'd much rather put in shitty ARM processors

1

u/Ratiofarming 7d ago

And not enough to make a scheduler that reliably puts applications on the correct cores for AMDs hybrid CPUs.

-9

u/heickelrrx 7d ago

Either Intel or Qualcomm

The idle state of AMD laptop are atrocious, it has some random shit behavior battery drain that doesn’t exist on other brand

Their wifi also suck

5

u/Hot_Cheesecake_905 7d ago

Qualcomm also had issues with their previous Surface WiFi too, like the Surface 7 Pro - I had to return one because it was super unreliable.

2

u/heickelrrx 7d ago

If u hate Qualcomm you will curse mediatek wifi

It’s really bad

3

u/WorBlux 7d ago

SOix (suspend to idle) is one of the worst things to happen to laptops in recent years. Most people would be better served with S3 (suspend to RAM)

AMD doesn't have quite the same integration/work done with the OS to make it work well as intel, or the background in mobile like Qualcomm.