The power management is an absolute joke (the thing has two batteries and barely lasts 2 hours total), suspend works maybe 20% of the time, and the OS actually freezes on it every now and then leaving no trace in syslog. I'd much rather get an Intel now if I had a choice.
For reference, I had a Ryzen 1800x and it had the same OS freeze issue. The latest Ryzen CPU hasn’t had any issue with 0% down time for months.
The E495 uses a newer rev of their chips and is completely usable (not as good as Intel) despite still not being on 7nm. I expect the next gen to be very competitive with Intel.
That being said, I'm really disappointed at the direction Lenovo is going by trying to make everything thin. I want a powerful laptop (compiling, light gaming) and I'm fine with some extra thickness, but I want don't want anything bigger than 14". If I want thin, I can go for the X models or the T...s models, but for some reason, the regular T line is getting thinner as well, and losing a lot of the reasons I have for getting them. I ended up with the E series because I don't want soldered RAM and I'm not paying a premium for a laptop that has much of what I want removed.
If System76 can deliver a decent Ryzen laptop (want those cores) with a good keyboard and open firmware, I'll pay. I'm happy with it being thick, provided it's not too wide (needs to fit in my bag). But all I see from System76 is mediocre laptops with open source bits, and that's just not my cup of tea.
Afaik newer generations have Intel beat on performance/watt, particularly in HT heavy applications and at least on desktop.
You're bold. :)
Security isn't even the only good reason to disable HT.
So it stands to reason those new Ryzen chips would also perform very well in laptops.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-9_3900x-vs-in...
Ryzen can be more power-efficient in e.g. a server (constant near-100% load profile) while also being less power-efficient in a laptop (constant near-idle load profile.) People who talk about the Ryzen power efficiency numbers are only talking about how it performs in the server-like test context (or, often, a gaming context, where the measurement they’re using is just “what sort of PSU do you need to power this thing at max load.”) As is evidenced by sibling posts in this thread, Ryzen doesn’t fare so well in the laptop-like test context in practice.