SmartShift technology is one of the keys to AMD’s Ryzen 4000 Renoir family of APUs. This technology allows the CPU and GPU to change their power depending on the workload, which greatly improves performance, and this is especially interesting for consoles and laptops, where space and cooling limits have a huge impact.
However, it looks like during the rest of the year 2020 only a laptop will go the market with them, although they have promised that next year we will see more models to take advantage of.
Dell G5, the only laptop with AMD SmartShift
Frank Azor, chief architect of AMD gaming solutions confirmed this on his Twitter. According to him, as long as technology is still relatively new, their adoption rate is lower than they expected, and it has given Dell credit for being the first company to use it for their laptops, especially Dell G5 15 SE equipped with a processor AMD Ryzen 9 4900H and GPU Radeon RX 5600M.
It’s a whole new technology and in @dell credit they have jumped into it first. I explained the reasons why in an interview with @pcworld @Gordonung @BradChacos No more SmartShift laptops to come this year but the team is working hard to have more options ASAP for 2021.
– Frank Azor (@AzorFrank) June 4, 2020
Accordingly, Azor has confirmed that there will be no more laptops with AMD SmartShift during the rest of the year, although the AMD team is working so that by 2021 more models will come to support it. Given this situation, it is likely that at CES 2021 that will take place at the beginning of January, this is where the most comprehensive reference books will be used for this technology.
This news is actually a bit of a disappointment, because the key feature is eagerly awaiting the next generation of gaming notebooks. However, laptops equipped with AMD Renoir APUs have been shown to be more efficient compared to the competition, and this results in not only higher power and performance, but also better battery life and overheating.
Special features like AMD SmartShift will use the extra unused power for hardware components, that is, for example in a GPU-based game to 100% but CPU only 20%, that is 80% of CPU resources “remaining” will be automatically transferred to the GPU to optimize performance. AMD explained that we can wait until 14% increase in gaming performance, up to 12% CPC performance
For its part, AMD has already developed a custom interface in the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition where users can see how power is transferred between the GPU and the CPU of the system. Technology can drive something or both at the same time, depending on the workload and power of the line at any time. One of the reasons why there was only one laptop with SmartShift this year might be because of the drawbacks that this technology brings.
