The Dell XPS 15 would utterly dominate the market if it had 7 nm AMD Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 9 options

[Shsvshjans]

I agree, it gets more complicated, too. It's not just the reference platform design, it's BOM, engineers being sent around to help with design, marketing, firmware, etc.

BOM/Engineering Assistance: Ever rely on a datasheet while laying out a larger PCB? There are plenty of gaps and incorrect information for everything that isn't a basic 7400 glue logic IC. This is where accumulated experience or direct assistance can help. Even Intel documents contain enough errata, as do Nvidia datasheets. AMD holds theirs as top secret information, so maybe they are the only company in the world that has perfect documentation the first time around (e.g, for a new platform). Some companies such as the Raspberry Pi foundation, just leave out information and changes, claiming it's not important to know (IMO, to hide their mistakes and to maintain a false visage of industrial readiness and validation).

Marketing: Fancy brochures are fine and all, but how many OEM/ODMs actually know what their customers want? How many just copy Apple, cost cut, and hope it all works out? They keep coming back to Intel control, because the alternative is actually trying to be a leader. Takes courage. I used to laugh at that Apple quote, I now cry at what has happened. Apple was right, it does take courage, and most of the market is teeming with cowards (IMO, of course).

Firmware: How many companies make a mess of basic BIOS updates? Now you expect them to develop the software platform as well? Have you seen AMD's attitude towards software? They had to be screeched at twice to prevent them from dropping 400 series MB support, and they tried to blame OEMs in a childish attempt to shirk their duties (graphics drivers for laptops). Now imagine the OEMs trying to make basic UEFI updates with AMD being their supporting partner. Nevermind the rest of the software platform that drives a laptop.

TL;DR, some silly person is going to read this as being anti-AMD, so I must be literally ______ or some nonsense. :D

Uh... Intel and AMD don't make the PCBs for laptops. That's not how that works. The PCB is made by the manufacturer of the laptop in question. The fact that you think Intel has anything to do with the design of the laptop chassis shows how little you actually know about laptops in general.

AMD got involved in the design process because they wanted to ensure the products launched with their APUs were made with as much quality as the Intel parts. Basically they worked with ASUS first exclusively to produce a top quality item to showcase what their latest processors could do. The main reason why Dell doesn't go with AMD options is most likely due to what Intel has done in the past, and I have zero reason to assume otherwise.

Switching to AMD would require a new motherboard... that's it. Dell can manage that just fine.

You're wrong.  Intel designs reference boards that many PC makers use as they are, and many others simply modify.  Also the component integration starts at the CPU, including things like thunderbolt, wifi, and smaller package sizes for the chips than AMD.  All of this design at the processor saves PCB space. 

Have you seen the reference Tigerlake PCB?  It shows something that can't be done with an AMD processor yet.  Expect the next XPS 13 to have a motherboard that looks almost exactly like this.

I'm happy to see that Zen processors are fundamentally better, but it will take more time and money to cover all of Intel's advantages.

You are actually one of the first people I see using their brain on this situation. The others are just like children crying for AMD. There are many technical and financial reasons why oems don't invest more in amd platforms and you wrote very good points.

[Grinnie Jax]

Excellent question. I suggest to simply stop buying XPS, Razer, etc. until they start making better Ryzen laptops. We have power to stop that nonsense. I got HP Elitebook & Envy on Ryzens partly to support that move by HP.

#RyzenLaptopsMatter

[bééla]

It's actually quite simple no one, literally No One expected that the ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs will be this good. Everyone expected it will be way better than last year's and will catch up to intel's 9th gen...but this is not the case. They are really really good CPUs. And now every OEM realised that so belive me, they will release ryzen powered laptops. Probably not this year, because believe or not it is not so simple to design a laptop with brand new PCB, with new processor design, new drivers, firmware...So don't worry, you jut have to wait a year and you'll have an even BETTER laptop with 5th gen ryzen mobile CPU and new GPUs.

PS.: I would reccomend you to wait a year anyway, because next year we will have the first 10nm+ Tiger-Lake-H series CPUs. I do belive they'l perform way better than this year's boring 10th gen Comet-Lake-H. Maybe will not be as strong as the next gen ryzen 5000 mobile CPUs, but who knows....So don't worry, everyone will have a much much much better laptop than this year.

[Alex544]

please no

Dell XPS 15 is literally known for its poor thermal performance. It'll only make Renoir look bad.

[Padmakara]

It's not like that. OEMs new from November that ryzen 4000 is 30% faster than the intel 9-10th gen. You don't need years to design and build a laptop, it's not a spaceship, but they didn't want to risk it, thinking everybody knows amd laptop cpus are low end and people won't be interested. Also is a question to meditate why asus destroys there amd laptop of a15, blocking the air flow in the vents. Many youtubers showed if you open them, the temps of  the cpu/gpu  are much better. And why only bad panels, you can have a much better one for 40$, ot let people choose what display they want. No ,they put one with 60srgb, and destroy the air flow, temps.
Only the one to buy untill present is the Dell g5se with 5600m gpu which is between 2060-2070mq for as low as 890$ and ok display with 100srgb.
Also is an agreement behind the close doors  between intel and nvidia to not pair high end gpus with Ryzen.
But slowly slowly they will put more amd cpus in laptops because they saw people want it.

[Padmakara]

please no

Dell XPS 15 is literally known for its poor thermal performance. It'll only make Renoir look bad.

Yes we should let the Dell team who designed the XPS 15 to stay in their ignorance to bake some food on the laptop and throttle the cpu, almost nobody to buy it and not to have a nice design with extraordinary performance with ryzen, otherwise it will sell like hot cakes.

[toven]

Asus Lenovo MSI release Renoir laptops very quick, why can't Dell do that?

[Sterlinger]

Dell simply did not do it last year when it came to design the new models. So, maybe they have learned and next year they will offer a XPS with AMD...

[The Captain]

I get such a kick watching consumers guessing about what happens behind the scenes at the OEMs in new product development. I actually have worked as a product manage at several large OEMs on the server side and can tell you that there are many factors at play when developing a new product. Its far from the cut and dry decision making you think it should be.

These factors include (but are not limited too) historical sales data, market trend data (IDC), customer feedback, vendor roadmaps (Intel/AMD/etc.), budgets, manpower, vendor NRE payments (meetcomp), and probably the biggest influencer - Politics. 

OEMs are typically always short on manpower resources and budgets, so this has a lot to do with how many projects (new products) get developed because it takes a lot of resources and time to design a new platform. Now that isn't to say that the ODM/JDM doesn't help, they do. But they are in most cases only part of the equation. Budget/money is another huge factor. There typically is never enough so many OEM count on the vendor (like Intel) to absorb some of the development cost (meetcomp). This practice was started for the most part by Intel years ago to get more design wins from it's competitors. AMD somewhat follows this practice today, but given Intels huge financial resources they typically have much more to spend. So if your an OEM looking to get funding for a project, who do you think management is first going to turn too?

Yup, the good old Bank of Big Blue (Intel).

Also don't rule out lack of vision. Many OEMs suffer from what.Professor Clayton Christensen of MIT in the "The innovators dilemma" wrote about years ago about the problems that large OEM have with being able to see disruptive new markets opportunities due to their historical customer successes. They simply couldn't see the what was coming before them or it represented to little return in value and  risk compared to maintaining the status quo, they avoided it. I've seen this myself time and time again.

Management also gets addicted to Intel's money and it takes a low risk path because its worked before in the past, the "no one ever gets fired for buying IBM" syndrome.

Problem is that when a disruptor (AMD) enters an established market, large OEMs are typically last to jump due to the perceived risk involved. This gives smaller players a big advantage to grow their market share. You see this being played out with AMD's Ryzen products. ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and other small players jumped quickly to bring cutting edge products to market fast, where as large OEMs HP, Dell, Lenovo are just now beginning to role out a few (mostly lower end - low risk) products while flooding the marketing with 10th Gen Intel products. Why? Easy, its playing it safe. They know the Intel products will sell and they have the historical data to prove it. They got meetcomp $$$ to make them. Product refresh cycles are easier and often quicker to bring to market. So lots of new Intel products.

So why didn't they build equivalent  AMD Ryzen products?

There are a number of reasons which can include the additional engineering effort to adding a new CPU architecture (Firmware, service, sales training, etc), lack of vendor  funds (NRE meetcomp) to aid development, lack of historical customer data (We don't know how this would sell), internal political resistance (yes, there can be bias), desire to remain single vendor, product cannibalization, playing a wait-and-see (will AMD burn out or are they hear to stay?), etc.  So it's difficult as a product manager to simply say "build it and they will come", in fact most product managers are no more than product influencers, they lack any of the decision making power; that comes from upper management and finance.

So, its not so simple.

There are many things at play and what may seem obvious to the consumer, isn't always obvious to the OEM. But you have the ultimate buying power. That speaks loudly. Using it to sway the OEMs by purchasing the kinds of products and service you want to see will eventually sink in (or they go out of business). If that means giving the smaller guys like ASUS/MSI/etc.  your money before the big guys, so be it. Eventually the HP/Dells/Lenovos will figure it out.

[Aaron]

Typo: You say,

We've shown that the cooling solution of the XPS 15 can struggle keeping up with the 45 Core i9-9980HK, but the 35 W Ryzen 7 4800HS would work wonders without needing to sacrifice performance or heavily modify the existing fans or heat pipes.

I think you mean the i9-9980HK is 45 W TDP.

[Reece A]

Whilst amd are killing it, they definitely need a couple of years of stability. Also, I didn't think any of the amd chips were tb3 enabled. That basically renders the new design redundant.

[Arioch]

I cannot grasp how Dell laptops can be popular.

There policy of prohibiting standard modern drivers is so crippling.

My relatives had two Dell laptops with the same Wi-Fi card. And one of them could barely connect to a router standing 5 metres away with nothing but air between them. Because of drivers. Two years later Dell finally patched newer drivers to be accepted by another laptop too, and Wi-Fi started to work. But before that they had crippled hardware with Dell thoroughly blocking any way of fixing it. I know Dell makes good monitor, but for anything that may need drivers one better run from Dell like a plague...

[Seed out]

Just one and only one design with smartshift from Dell you already know they are milking Intel. While other OEMS launch dozen of renoir design. crazy to think AMD can grow faster without DELL. hopefully they die show no love to them

[dimickh]

So many intel fanboys here, they definitely getting paid for this ;D
All these guys shilling for good "Intel support" have you ever seen a Dell laptop? Xps line has constant issues with new BIOS-es, wifi-drivers, random wakeups from sleep mode, is this a mystic quality of the Intel software and design support?

This was the case 4 years ago when I was choosing among several ultrabooks, and have the same problems now + overheating and 300-cycles battery in newer models.

These notebooks are a joke, their managers or regularly do stupid decisions like the removal of the non-glossy screen version in previous generations, I wonder why people(who do the research, of course, and not just choosing the first thin laptop they see in the store) still buy them.

It's actually quite simple no one, literally No One expected that the ryzen 4000 mobile CPUs will be this good.

Desktop zen2 CPUs were already much more power-efficient than Intel at the same time, don't talk nonsense, that's was pretty obvious.

[Andrea]

The biggest problem at the moment with Ryzen mobile CPU is that there is no support for Thunderbolt 3 (I'm guessing Intel doesn't allow AMD to get the certification).
That is going to change with the arrival of USB 4 at the end of the year, so maybe the 2021 XPS will have Ryzen CPU.