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Comment by dhimes | Hacker News Reader

I am in the market for a new rig- looks like I'll be going with AMD.

same. i _was_ looking at getting an HP Spectre x360 with the i7 8550U. Now, I'm going to look explicitly at laptops with Ryzen chips. I think the Spectre might have a Ryzen model, but don't know.

AMD is severely behind on the Laptop space.

In the Desktop space, I can definitely recommend AMD. But Laptops are totally Intel right now.

There are AMD Laptops, but they are hard to recommend. Most are low-end offerings at best (laptop manufacturers don't put the high-end stuff with AMD). As long as high-end HP / Dell / Lenovo / Asus / Acer / Apple / Microsoft Surface are all Intel-based, you're basically forced to use an Intel Laptop.

Desktops... you can build your own. And even if you couldn't, there are a ton of custom computer builders out there making great AMD Desktop rigs.

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With that being said, AMD laptops are competitive in the $500 to $750 space. Low-end to mid-tier laptops... the ones with poor mouse controls, driver issues, bad keyboards, low-end screens and such.

But hey, they're cheap.

Its not really AMD's fault. But in any case, its hard for me to find a good AMD laptop. So... that's just how it is.

the new HP Envy x360 13z doesn't look bad.

Kind of waiting to see what the Lenovo ThinkPad A285 looks like, as well.

The HP Envy x360 has a noticeably worse screen though. Its definitely not the same class or caliber as the Spectre x360.

That's what I'm talking about: most laptop manufacturers offer a "premium" Intel laptop. But then they have a lower-quality AMD one on the side.

Nothing AMD has done wrong per se, just laptop manufacturers refuse to sell AMD on the high-end.

Check out the Huawei Matebook D with Ryzen if you want an amazingly built laptop for a great price. Might change your mind, it's the best 600 dollar laptop out there.

i actually thought about that one too. If they had a 16GB version, I'd totally go for it. Entirely the reason I'm leaning towards an HP Envy x360 13z instead.

Is Intel not still leading in per-core performance? That's what I'll decide my next cpu on, since I care more about use cases like emulation/games (many games don't use multiple threads or use them effectively)

The problem is now it will depend on which patch(es) your CPU may have. Many online benchmarks and reviews of Intel CPUs vs AMD may be old, or run without patches applied / security modes enabled. If I order an Intel CPU now, I am not sure what microcode version I'll be getting to be honest. As a result, those benchmarks that show Intel edge out AMD a bit on some games may actually be inverted depending on these factors.

Going with AMD at this point is simpler, better for security, and if you care about this sort of thing -- rewards more honest and less consumer-predatory behavior. I've always gone with Intel my whole life, but given these many incidents with Intel, combined with their really poor public responses to it, I will now be switching to an AMD user for all future PC builds.

They're neck and neck at this point, within a few percentage points. Zen 2 should close that gap to negligible hopefully.

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