More Ryzen Mobile: Acer Swift 3 with 2700U and 2500U Listed, From $750
by Anton Shilov on December 19, 2017 3:30 PM EST
Back at the Ryzen Mobile launch, AMD announced three primary partners with three devices: the HP Envy x360, the Acer Swift 3, and the Lenovo Ideapad 720S. At the time, only HP had some information available, and has since pushed the Envy x360 to retail. The other two have been surprisingly quiet about their models, but today Acer steps up to the plate with lists and pricing.
Acer has, without any fanfare, added two laptops powered by AMD’s Ryzen Mobile 2500U and Ryzen Mobile 2700U processors to its product lineup. The laptops have a metallic chassis, with a 15.6” IPS panel featuring a 1920x1080 resolution. Inside are AMD’s 15 W Ryzen Mobile APUs, the Ryzen 5 2500U and the Ryzen 7 2700U, each with four cores, eight threads, and Vega 8 (512SPs) or Vega 10 (640SPs) integrated graphics respectively.
The new systems have 8 GB of DDR4 memory, and storage comes in at either a 256 GB SSD or a 512 GB SSD (no word if SATA or PCIe). For connectivity, the AMD-powered Swift 3 uses an 802.11ac Wi-Fi + Bluetooth module, three USB Type-A ports, one USB Type-C header, and an HDMI output. Finally, the notebooks are equipped with a backlit keyboard, a webcam, two speakers and a microphone. The Acer Swift 3 design is one of a typical workhorse notebook, for consumers who demand to have decent performance and portability but do not necessarily need a portable workstation or an ultrabook. Interestingly the specification sheets say that the battery is listed as 3340 mAh, which at 17.4 volts makes around 58 Wh, although the voltage of the battery is not specified.
Back at the Ryzen Mobile launch, AMD stated that the chassis for the Swift 3 was designed to dissipate 25W at maximum, so by putting a 15W APU in there, it allows for a higher XFR boost frequency, as well as boosting for longer. The launch article also listed the DRAM being in dual channel operation, up to DDR4-2133. Acer confirms neither of these points, but dual-channel would be a good choke point to alleviate for the graphics - the DDR4-2133 is below the DDR4-2400 that the Ryzen APU platform supports, however.
By today’s standards, the Ryzen Mobile-based Swift 3 units can hardly be called thin or light — the device weighs around 2.2 kilograms and is 1.87 cm thick. Acer could have lower the weight by choosing plastic over metal for the chassis, but at the cost of rigidity, look and overall user experience. Meanwhile, being ultraportable is not the purpose of the vast majority of 15.6” laptops anyway. To Acer’s credit, it’s worth pointing out that the Ryzen Mobile-based Swift 3 are slightly thinner (but a bit heavier) than HP’s Envy x360 featuring the same APUs. We currently have the Intel-based Swift 3 units in for testing, so this would be an interesting counterpoint.
Acer Swift 3 Laptops Based on AMD Ryzen Mobile APUs | ||||
SF315-41-R8PP NX.GV7AA.003 |
SF315-41-R6J9 NX.GV7AA.004 |
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Display | Diagonal | 15.6" | ||
Resolution | 1920×1080 | |||
Type | IPS | |||
CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 2500U 4 Cores with SMT (8T) 2.0 GHz Base 3.8 GHz Turbo mXFR Support 2 MB L2 + 4 MB L3 Vega 8 iGPU 15 W |
AMD Ryzen 7 2700U 4 Cores with SMT (8T) 2.2 GHz Base 3.8 GHz Turbo mXFR Support 2 MB L2 + 4 MB L3 Vega 10 iGPU 15 W |
||
Graphics | AMD Vega 8 512 stream processors 1100 MHz |
AMD Vega 10 640 stream processors 1300MHz |
||
RAM | Capacity | 8 GB | ||
Type | DDR4 (frequency unknown) | |||
Storage | 256 GB SSD | 512 GB SSD | ||
Wi-Fi | 802.11ac Wi-Fi module (unknown vendor) | |||
Bluetooth | 4.x | |||
USB | 2 × USB 3.0 Type-A 1 × USB 2.0 Type-A 1 × USB 3.0 Type-C |
|||
Other I/O | HDMI 2.0a, webcam, TRRS connector for audio, speakers, microphone, SD card reader | |||
Dimensions | Height | 18.8 mm | 0.74" | ||
Width | 370.5 mm | 14.59" | |||
Depth | 255 mm | 10.04" | |||
Weight | 2.2 kg | 4.85 lb | |||
Battery Capacity | 3320 mAh (58 Wh at 17.4V?) | |||
Price | $750 | $950 |
Acer’s Swift 3 SF315-4-series notebooks are already listed on the company’s website, so expect them to be available commercially in the coming weeks. As for pricing, Acer's Taiwan site had the Swift 3 featuring the Ryzen Mobile 2500U and a 256 GB SSD listed at $750, whereas the more advanced Swift 3 featuring the Ryzen Mobile 2700U and a 512 GB drive was listed for $950 at retail.
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33 Comments
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Samus - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Anybody in the market for a $750 Acer will be perfectly happy with 8GB, likely for the lifetime of the machine. And hopefully it is a single stick as others seem to fear, because that means a simple upgrade to 16GB and dual channel for $50.WorldWithoutMadness - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
Pick your poison, big ssd or ram.. both are mostly made by those oligopoly price fixer manufacturers.Rocket321 - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Looks like a very compelling choice for the average user who wants some decent compute and Gpu power without spending a fortune. Love that these are SSD only.DanNeely - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
8 gb of ram's going to be rather limiting though for anyone running the sort of software that makes the GPU spread its wings.Alexvrb - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Depends. There's a lot of settings you can tweak to save RAM. Since you're talking about a low-power APU, a lot of times you have to adjust settings anyway for performance reasons. I don't think 8GB of RAM is TOO terrible at 1080p (or less) with textures scaled back a notch or two. With that being said yeah 16GB would be nice. You can configure an x360 to have 16GB of RAM... I suspect Acer or someone else will offer similar configs in the near future.I'm curious to see what kind of RAM they use. Is Acer using 2133 as rumored or 2400?
quorm - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
Are they ever going to release Ryzen APUs for desktops?Ian Cutress - Tuesday, December 19, 2017 - link
'Ever Going' ? There's only been two mobile devices with APUs so far, and they'll be the target. It's only been announced for a short while anyway. There's a large amount of 2018 up ahead.haukionkannel - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
Maybe thesehttps://informaticacero.com/se-viene-amd-ryzen-3-2...
T1beriu - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
RR for desktop was not in the roadmap presented a few weeks ago. The roadmap ended with Q2 2018. I'm guessing we'll see the APUs in Q3 (July?) as we seen previous releases.FreckledTrout - Wednesday, December 20, 2017 - link
Seems reasonable. It is rather smart of AMD to not focus there first since Intel already owns the desktop APU segment since pretty much every desktop CPU they make is an APU. In their shoes I would drag my feet until they have chips on 12nm or possibly even 7nm.