AMD SmartShift, Dell to integrate power sharing technology into laptops

AMD SmartShift technology, enabling notebook processors and graphics cards to transfer power to each other according to need or task, is now available for the Dell G5 15 SE. Dell first announced the G5 15 SE gaming laptop at CES 2020.

AMD SmartShift technology now available on the Dell G5 15 SE

The laptop, which costs over $800, has an AMD Ryzen 5 4600H processor, AMD Radeon RX 5600M discrete graphics, 8 GB RAM, and a 256 GB M.2 PCIe SSD. The high-end model of over $1200 has a Ryzen 7 4800H, a Radeon RX 5600M, 16 GB RAM, and a 1 TB SSD.

SmartShift does not require any software to activate it, and AMD claims that this feature “gives players up to 14% more performance on average for some games”. This is because the iGPU of a Ryzen APU can support discrete graphics.

At the moment, the Dell G5 15 SE is the only laptop with this technology, although AMD has hinted that there could be more of them later this year. In March, Sony announced that the PlayStation 5 will also use SmartShift to some extent.

Nvidia has also recently announced a similar technology called Dynamic Boost, which allows Max-Q notebook GPUs to consume up to 15W more power when the CPU can be bypassed to increase performance by up to 10%. We expect Intel to have something similar for its next release with Tiger Lake, although nothing has been made official yet.