AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme Proves Very Versatile For Power/Performance - Benchmarks Against The Ryzen 7 7840U
Right off the bat it was very interesting to see the AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme indeed performing so well side-by-side to the similarly spec'ed Ryzen 7 7840U laptop SoC while the Z1 Extreme was within the ROG Ally gaming handheld form factor. In the default mode of operation (balanced ACPI Platform Profile), the Z1 Extreme was midway between the 6850U and 7840U level of performance for the WireGuard Linux networking test. But when really pushing the Z1 Extreme hard in its performance-optimized mode, the Z1 Extreme ran past the 7840U.
But when running with the ACPI Platform performance profile, the Z1 Extreme was consuming up to 50 Watts and a 39 Watt average while the 7840U has a 16 Watt average power use in this benchmark and a peak of just 23 Watts.... Meanwhile the Z1 Extreme out-of-the-box had a 15 Watt average or if dropping into the power-saver mode was a 10 Watt average. With no ACPI Platform Profile for the Acer Swift Edge 16 at least under Linux and this being my only Phoenix laptop currently, I don't know if the Ryzen 7 7840U can be pushed harder if the device supported ACPI Platform Profiles. In any case the Z1 Extreme is likely binned very well and while the cTDP is rated for up to 30 Watts, consistently with the ASUS ROG Ally testing we've seen it possible to feed it 50 Watts.
With the QuantLib benchmark it was interesting that in the power-saving mode it performed slightly better than the balanced profile while again in the performance profile was able to inch past the Ryzen 7 7840U.
On a performance-per-Watt basis, the power-saver mode was looking very good.
Not that you would normally be running HPC benchmarks on the ROG Ally, with the Ryzen Z1 Extreme open to new platform designs curiosity got the best of me with some of these tests... Indeed even in cases like HPCG and NAMD, the Z1 Extreme with the performance profile was very capable of even running faster than the Ryzen 7 7840U laptop SoC.
In the demanding benchmarks with the performance profile the Z1 Extreme was consistently reporting power use up to ~50 Watts. The power-saver mode is also part of what shows the Z1 Extreme as being so robust as if desiring to conserve battery life / energy use, the Z1 Extreme can also be incredibly lean.