I hope AMD doesn't slow down on the performance side with their 3rd generation of Zen.
I want to get a new laptop next year and I hope it comes with a good mobile Ryzen processor with Thunderbolt support.
I want to get a new laptop next year and I hope it comes with a good mobile Ryzen processor with Thunderbolt support.
Zen 2 combined with much better than intel integrated GPU is likely going to make a very nice dent in marketshare, unless Intel pulls a rabbit out of their hat.
If someone comes out with a laptop CPU that can't boost up to those thermal limits, it means the chip's undersized and that vendor will probably need a different microarchitecture for the desktop or server markets.
More efficient design will give better perf.
There have been some ultrabook-style designs that offered inadequate cooling even for fairly normal use cases, but that's a separate issue. Mainstream laptops will be designed around mainstream workloads, and heavier workloads will push them to their limits. Better cooling doesn't come free, and if it doesn't benefit mainstream workloads it's unreasonable to expect mainstream laptops to put more emphasis on cooling capabilities.
Web developers work hard to change this. Browsing without an adblocker and with Javascript enabled is often enough.
In many laptops, thanks to bad thermals I'd be better off with a 4 core where the thermals can keep up. That's where the 7nm stuff could really bring advantages.
I've been able to load up my desktop six core plenty using e.g Docker and a bunch of microservices. It has a fairly decent 360mm AIO water cooler so stays pinned at max perf. Had a bad cooler before, though, and it really impacted perf and stability.
If OEMs optimize for that use case, I suspect that a more efficient CPU will simply mean that they cut even more corners on the cooling, not that the thermals will actually be significantly better.
HP thinned the ZBook series by turning everything upside down and having the bottom be just a dumb panel instead of the main frame.
Sadly they, once again, used a standard, barely capable heatsink. It will run for days loaded, but it will go over 90 degrees and even throttle, which is unacceptable imo.
Yes, the upper cover with the fins up should be designed to match perfectly with the lower one when mounted with the fins facing down. Cuts should be arranged so that the bottom cover rubber feet wouldn't prevent perfect surface contact. It would become a fairly large heatsink in which the size and combined thickness would likely be enough to counteract the small fins size and absence of fans. Battery/disk/memory covers on the bottom side would be accessible by removing the additional cover.
I'm driving four displays at work with Windows 10 (two 21.5' 1080p monitors, my laptop flipped open, and an iPad Pro 12.9 connected via USB C running Duet Display) and my idle desktop CPU utilization hovers around 15-20%. Having Outlook and Chrome open gets it into the mid 30s. This is a four core i7 Dell Latitude 7490 with 16GB memory and an NVMe drive that I was given in May 2019.
Yes, all the OS/applications I'm using are resource hogs but I'm not even doing software development - this is all business analyst work. Seeing that the general trend of applications/OS will continue to be resource hogs, let's hope that six core thermal chassis design for 14' ultrabooks is figured out in the next two or three years.
Games are a mainstream workload that will cause most laptops to throttle.
"Better cooling doesn't come free"
You could make the heatsink in a Macbook out of Pure Silver, and it would barely move the price.
Meanwhile aluminium costs $1.7 per kilo.
A friend from a laptop engineering company has worked on this exact problem recently. Chinese OEMs are all trying to squeeze 35-45w chips into small chassis now.
To my big surprise, doing so in even thin bezel 13 inch models is not that big of a deal actually. Big OEMs simply were never bothered enough to try that before.
From what I heard from a man close to Intel process crowd is that Intel will simply slap a 7nm marketing designation on their current 10nm process when they finally get it going.
They will then change design rules to deliver enough density change, comparable to a node shrink without any change in the process.
10nm products have "shipped" and put up a solid fight: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15092/the-dell-xps-13-7390-2i... It shows good performance and strong efficiency.
10nm desktop & server parts seem entirely MIA and dead. But it seems that Intel is able to at least struggle out small laptop parts on the process.
That said, AMD becoming a worthy competitor on the market again is awesome.
I recently bought a Thinkpad E495 with a Ryzen 3700u and thermals are just fine. The surface barely heats up under sustained load. The E series is more budget, though. But the T495 (14") or X395 are of higher build quality (and price) and also have Ryzen 3x00u CPUs.
Linux support is excellent. Openbsd is good but doesn't support this generation of wireless cards yet, which is quite inconvenient; next version perhaps.
I've only ever really dealt wit nVidia and Intel graphics, and highly prefer intel due to tearing fixes.
I'm not a gamer, but do need at least basic hardware acceleration for X rendering etc.
I've been running Debian Testing on 2400G since 04/2018, where I had to put firmware and compile the kernel with the config changes to enable the support, but it was already in kernel tree nonetheless. It's out-of-the-box since 07/2018, way before the release happened.
Likely specific support for 3700u was introduced at some point between these two kernels.
AIUI 5.4 is meant to become the next LTS, so it won't be an issue going forward.
Have you had any issues you suspect may be driver / gfx related?
The point is that AMD releases detailed documentation for every GPU they sell, and thus it's very easy for mesa to support their hardware; AMD themselves also contribute code to Mesa, of course. This is in contrast to NVIDIA, which even uses encryption and signatures to twart nouveau efforts. I avoid NVIDIA entirely, for this reason.
I haven't had issues so far. Life has been good, same as with the vega 64 on my workstation.
If you get tearing, try:
xrandr --output eDP --set TearFree on
The new Thinkpad E595 looks decentish and ships with Ryzen, as opposed to the previous model (E590) which shipped with Intel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB#USB4
Obviously, not every device need to use every feature. I'm talking about the port on the computer.
All USB Type-C connectors all have a pair of USB 2.0 wires in them. You can still be a USB 2.0 device and talk on those USB 2.0 pairs on USB3 (and presumably USB4) just fine with just a little bit of care (get your resistors correct on the CC lines, for example).
If you want some features of USB3 or USB4, then things get a little more complicated. For example, if you want to be able to draw slightly higher power (900mA or 1.5A), then you need to have some active circuitry on the CC lines (One of these is about 70 cents: https://www.ti.com/product/TUSB320HAI) and you have to respond properly when the system tells you to draw less power even though you don't need to use the full-blown USB3 communication pairs.
If, however, you want USB3 or USB4 speed or very high power, then you need a full-blown controller chip and you incur all the grief that demands. Of course, if you actually need a couple Gbps, you're in the realm of doing serious signal integrity analysis anyway, and you're probably not going to balk at the $3-$5 required for a true controller chip to handle it all.