HP Rolls Out The First "Raven Ridge" Zen+Vega APU Notebook

[phoronix]

Phoronix: HP Rolls Out The First "Raven Ridge" Zen+Vega APU Notebook

AMD has announced the world's first "Raven Ridge" APU with this notebook being powered by Ryzen 5 CPU cores paired with Vega graphics...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=HP-ENVY-x360-Raven-Ridge

[Jedibeeftrix]

Memory = 1x 8GB

I sincerely hope there is a second memory slot in there for dual channel (128bit) memory access, otherwise this compute heavy APU is going to be severely bandwidth starved!

[rubdos]

Wohoo. Now waiting for the Thinkpad A285!

[oooverclocker]

That's very good news. But the question is why the AMD-version gets 1x8GiB Single Channel while the Intel equivalent seems to have a 2x4GiB Dual Channel configuration.
I don't like to judge but when you know that the Vega-Chip in the AMD-Version is very powerful when there is enough bandwidth then it looks really "strange".

Edit:

Wohoo. Now waiting for the Thinkpad A285!

I hope you are aware that this model will only have Bristol Ridge-CPUs(28nm) (Edit2: At least the A275 and the A475 do). Lenovo hasn't announced Laptops with Ryzen yet but it's pretty likely that there will be some models.
I really hope that the X1 Carbon will be covered.

[Stunts]

Woha. This is looking good, spec-wise. Let's hope the price is not pushed too far off the edge.
Jedibeeftrix , the spec sheet shows it can be served with up to 16Gb. Not sure if single or dual slot, though. But given the size of the thing, I'd bet on a dual slot.

[L_A_G]

Well that was about time... I originally thought they'd have been able to get the first machines to market by the back-to-school season seeing how they were able to show off a fully working reference machine at Computex in late May, but it seems like there were some engineering hurdles that needed to be overcome.

I wonder what delayed the launch this much? Problems with the drivers? Chip bugs forcing them to spin an additional revision? Production capacity issues caused by using the exact same production lines as their Polaris, desktop Vega and Zeppelin die Ryzen?

[Meteorhead]

I would not count on it being dual-channeled. AMD rigs are always messed up in some way to make them a really bad choice. To be honest, I think Raven Ridge in its current form is a mistake alltogether. Not placing one block of HBM on die and hooking up the HBCC controller of Vega onto it shoots the entire IGP in the knee. Zen ver1 is much faster than any Bulldozer derivate, hence it's gonna put more strain on the RAM bandwidth, something that further slows down the IGP. I think AMD is missing out on destroying Intel here.

[Adarion]

Besides the possible single channel issue* the HW looks great. I mean, how many times did you see a
* matte
* IPS
* 15" screen
* NVMe storage solution by default
* backlit keyboard (layout???!!! key haptics??!)
* ~ 10 h battery runtime
* fairly okay look (a bit business class like)
notebook with an AMD chip solution?

Please, someone kill the W10 on it, sell it without any OS and please with decent ACPI tables / no firmware mess and no nonsense chips inside (e.g. non-lm-sensors SIO/EC, not working WLAN w. Linux) and I'm game!


* where can this be found? By default there is only 1x8GiB, okay, but one could add a second one, right? And then we'd really see if it is SC or better. Of course they'll add a "nice" price tag for a second bar of memory (that is certified to be compatible).

[DanL]

No dual channel is disappointing for integrated graphics. My HP Llano-based laptop is the same way. It's got a 4GB stick and a 2GB stick. I guess 6GB sounds better than 4GB to the ignorant "Moar MB/MHz!" crowd.

[Veerappan]

Make it dual channel, and preferably 13-14", and you've got a sale.

I'm still rocking a 2009 macbook pro 13", and I just discovered yesterday that the aluminum shell on back of the screen is coming off. I'll probably epoxy it back on, but I've been waiting for raven ridge to replace it anyway.

I'm sick of being stuck with 4GB RAM and a GeForce 9400M on the binary drivers. Whatever I get will be running an AMD graphics chip, I just hope it gets decent battery life as well.