AMD Radeon Pro WX 4150 vs Intel HD Graphics 615

AMD Radeon Pro WX 4150

The AMD Radeon Pro WX 4150 is a professional workstation graphics card for laptops. It was announced early 2017 and is intended for Kaby-Lake based professional notebooks. The AMD Radeon Pro (formerly known as FirePro) is the counterpart to the Quadro series from Nvidia and offers certified drivers for professional 3D applications (CAD and DCC).

The WX4150 is based on the Polaris 11 or 21 chip and offers 896 shaders like the older AMD Radeon RX 460. Due to the higher clock speed compared to the Radeon Pro 400 GPUs in the MacBook Pro (800 - 900 MHz), we suspect the use of the newer Polaris 21 chip, that is manufactured in an improved 14nm (LPP+) process and allows the chip to be clocked higher. 

For more information on the features and specifications of the Polaris architecture, visit our in depth article here.

Intel HD Graphics 615

The Intel HD Graphics 615 (GT2) is a low-end integrated graphics unit, which can be found in the Y-series of the Kaby Lake generation. This "GT2" version offers 24 Execution Units (EUs) clocked at up to 1050 MHz (depending on the CPU model). Due to its lack of dedicated graphics memory or eDRAM cache, the HD 615 has to access the main memory (2x 64bit DDR3L/LPDDR3).

Performance

The 3D performance of the HD 615 depends on the CPU model and the cooling / TDP-setting of the laptop. Furthermore, the used main memory (single channel, DDR3(L), amount) is influencing performance. On average the HD graphics 615 should be around 20 to 30 percent faster than the previous generation, the HD Graphics 615. Therefore, it may even reach the performance of the HD Graphics 520. Some low demanding games should therefore be playable with the chip.

Features

The revised video engine now supports H.265/HEVC Main10 profile in hardware with 10 bit colors. Furthermore, Googles VP9 codec can also be hardware decoded. The first models do not support HDCP 2.2 and therefore Netflix 4K. This was added with the new models in 2017 and beginning of May 2017 also the older CPU models like the m3-7Y30 are now shipped with a new S-Spec Code that supports HDCP 2.2. HDMI 2.0 however is still only supported with an external converter chip (LSPCon).

Power Consumption

The HD Graphics 615 can be found in Y processors with 4.5 W TDP (can be manipulated by the laptop manufacturers) and is therefore suited for very thin, mostly passively cooled 2-in-1 notebooks and tablets.