AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 laptop processors | Hacker News Reader

AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 laptop processors

arstechnica.com

155 pointst4h435 comments

So Anandtech has this to say about Thunderbolt 3 support:

"Display support for the CPUs allows for two 4K monitors through DisplayPort over Type-C, an additional 4K monitor if Thunderbolt is used, and a fourth monitor if USB 4.0 used. AMD has designed Renoir to not need additional chips to detect which way a Type-C is connected – that is all handled on die. With the display and USB support, the processor allows for concurrent USB 3.2 and DisplayPort use, with the peak DP v1.4 8.1G HBR3 standard in play using display stream compression (DSC)."

Which begs the question what does in-built mean? The Showcase Notebook Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 does not include USB 4 or Thunderbolt 3 so these modes will probably need additional chips.

...i want this 8-core chip with 32GB of LPDDR4X in a 13" Notebook that has 2 Thunderbolt 3 Ports and a matte Full-HD Touchscreen.

No, you want the next generation, for the same reason: Thunderbolt is now officially dead, it has been absorbed into the official USB4 standard.

There is very unclear support for existing Thunderbolt-over-Type-C devices under USB4, and it is likely your devices will stop working.

Please wait until USB4 and USB4-based solutions start shipping before you start adopting it, else you're going to be stuck with a bunch of devices that are no longer being supported, or cannot be cross-supported across Thunderbolt 3 and USB4 variants.

I already have a bunch of TB3 Docks in our company, so ditching them would really be painful and a reason to stick to Intel.

Intel's own version of their USB4 controller might not support it either.

Absolutely nobody I know has been able to get a straight answer out of anyone; not Intel, not the USB IF, not other members of the USB IF, on if existing Thunderbolt 3 devices will work on USB4 hosts.

And it will be a complete and absolute shitshow if it doesn't, because Type-C has swindled us into thinking Type-C is just Type-C.

Refer to my comment above.

>Thunderbolt is now officially dead

There is, actually Thunderbolt 4. It is in no way dead. To what extend this is different to TB3 is unclear yet.

>it has been absorbed into the official USB4 standard.

Not Strictly true. TB is not a mandatory part of USB 4 standard. Which means you will likely have lots of USB 4 controller without TB support. ( Cause It will be cheaper )

>There is very unclear support for existing Thunderbolt-over-Type-C devices under USB4

It will work as long as your USB4 has support and certified with TB. You will have to use a TB cable ( which you should have if you are already using it ) instead of any USB-C cable.

How exactly will TB certification works without involving Intel is still unclear.

It'd just be nice if integrators like lenovo wouldn't nerf things like displays. It looks like their lineup for AMD mobile graphics is going to be significantly different than the Intel counterparts.

For real! What's up with the lack of 2-in-1 AMD x13? I have an artist friend who needs a new laptop and I'm telling him to wait for Ryzen 4000 laptops. Am I supposed to tell him to get a gaming laptop or something?

These recent Intel laptops often have really dicey real-time performance because of how aggressively their clock speeds are controlled.

For someone who does mixed multimedia work, a Ryzen 4000 2-in-1 would be amazing. All those cores are perfect for real-time audio work, rendering and 3d stuff.

The announced Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 might tick the right boxes.

Oh wow, that one is so close! Just needs some more memory...

edit: at first I read that this would have 8 GB RAM, but now I'm reading that you can get up to 16 GB, which I think would be adequate for some basic multimedia work.

edit 2: wait I'm confused, according to the announcement, the AMD version is set at 8 GB of RAM.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/coming-soon/IdeaPad-Slim-7-14AR...

Agreed! I got a MacBook for work, and the Retina display is incredible. I want a Linux AMD laptop with a 2k/4k display. My E485 with 2700U and 1080p matte will have to do for personal work, for now.

The XPS line is great for this if you have the $$$ and are OK with an Intel chip. I wish they shipped AMD.

I'm not sure if my next laptop purchase is going to be an AMD one because I haven't got enough data yet, specs, benchmarks, etc. But I know one thing for sure, I will exclude from my shortlist any OEM that does not have a serious AMD based lineup. If they only have 1-2 models, or only in the low cost segment just to tick a box, I will be looking at other brands.

I can't help but remember Intel's practices in the past. So I'll vote with my wallet and go with OEMs that give both Intel and AMD an equal chance. Hopefully if enough people do that OEMs will find any backroom dealings less attractive.

In my case, I'm in the need of a new laptop this year, and I'm explicitly waiting for an AMD Ryzen.

I don't even care about the performance to be honest, I'm sure it will be adequate and I simply don't want Intel anymore.

With all the mitigations applied, I've lost the performance gain of the last two Intel laptop generations I had.

The integrated intel gpu is ok performance-wise, but being on linux I'm also tired of their development model: there's a fresh new driver/engine being developed every year, and it always buggy. It's true that intel always gets the latest kernel features first, but by the time is stable and it _works_, it gets deprecated in favor of a new buggy one. Way to go!

I've been using top-of-the-line lenovo laptops for a decade now. This has been the same every year, year after year, and I'm tired.

Where can I read more about these kernel / driver related regressions of each revision?

These are deaths by a 1000 papercuts, caused by a combination of kernel/kms drivers, xorg & dri. Reporting these bugs is an issue by itself, since it's really non-trivial to understand where some of these problems are and how to report them.

One example I like to give is how for the better part of 2018, xorg+kms with (if I remember correctly) broadwell was new, caused random tearing issues that required to use the legacy i915 driver. The i915 had also other issues at the same time, causing blits in xrender to copy dirty areas of memory. Different issues popped up depending if you were daring enough to switch the dri version, glamour and kernel version.

This got eventually resolved.. but by the time I switched to haswell. Things got better on the kms front, until I realized I couldn't rotate the screen anymore. When this got resolved, the driver couldn't restore the screen after dpms blanking... This one is fixed on skylake, but on haswell still isn't.

... and so on and so forth. All this was on the lenovo x1 carbon (various versions), then on the x1 yoga (1st, and I'm now on the 3rd version).

I would suggest to get another Thinkpad as other brands may not not be tweaked to Thinkpad loyal customers. For me, I always find my Thinkpad is quiet and cool during heavy workload.

As for Ryzen, I just bought their budget laptop, E485 (with Ryzen 2200u+SSD+FHD screen) last year. I was waiting patiently for Thinkpad deal to come, it was worth to wait, as my aging SL410 was still working. It has been matching my expectation so far: affordable, snappy enough, and good battery.

As for Thinkpad models, I find that their budget ones are sufficient for my startup and personal usage, as I do not use enterprise-level features, like those in T series (that I used during my corporate lives).

Although thinkpads work fine, I attribute this due to the number of developers using them, definitely not because Lenovo is spending ANY money to make it work. This is not how it's supposed to be working. There are a few big issues that are making me reconsider them entirely.

You cannot buy a Lenovo without a Windows license. This is minor considering the price I'm usually going for, but since I don't use it at all, I consider it a microsoft tax.

Their "computrace" bios feature is still there in every new laptop.

With skylake, the last edition of the Yoga and X1 Carbon couldn't do S3 sleep by default anymore. For no other reason than to force windows use S2Idle. It requires a quite annoying work-around on linux to force S3, and only ~6 months ago we finally got a bios patch to re-enable S3...

The temperature throttling defaults are different from linux to windows, causing linux to throttle much more aggressively than needed on skylake. This is also caused by some bios issue which you can work-around with msr registers, but again... why?

I overall like the hardware. I'm quite fond of the built-in wacom pen too. I have minor quibs about the keyboard (QC issues) and screen (all TP I had in the last 5 years tend to develop bright spots in the backlight), but overall it's hard to find something similar. The dell XPS developer line is the only alternative I would be considering, and mostly due to their linux offering.

They mention Linux at least once in the article. That's always good to see.

Patches for Renoir based APU's appeared in kernel 5.4[0]. Looks like by the time these launch they will have out of the box Linux support which is huge compared to how Raven Ridge launched.

[0]:https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Reno...

And 5.4 is a LTS kernel. They were just in time apparently.

A better article here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22599598

All the current articles are terrible, because none of them have independent benchmarks. Apparently, no-one got review units in time because of all the disruption, but AMD went ahead with dropping the embargo anyway.

It's a laptop chip. Due to thermal throttling variability and all the ergonomic factors, reviews only make sense in the context of a whole retail laptop you can buy. You aren't going to buy a laptop and then choose your chip separately.

This is a really good point. Modern CPUs remind me of home internet with maximum speeds advertised even though pragmatically it isn't anywhere close to what people will get. Laptops, Intel NUCs, AMD desktop APUs, etc. all take a huge amount of BIOS tweaking at least to make them run hotter before they throttle, use less power, and possibly disable temporary clock speed boosts that heat up the CPU too much and make it throttle. Anything in a small enclosure seems to be an exercise in optimizing heat.

More airflow, lower max clocks and higher throttling temperatures make a massive difference on the set ups I've worked with.

> but AMD went ahead with dropping the embargo anyway.

Isn't it more like AMD dropped the embargo (partially) because Lenovo, ASUS and others wanted to get their devices out?

my laptop is a couple years old at this point, but I've been extremely happy with my ryzen 2500U HP Envy 15z.

when i replace this eventually, I'll be looking at AMD again, more than likely. Really solid.

None of these battery benchmarks seem to normalize for work per unit time. 2.0 hours of cinebench rendering on one cpu and 2.5 hours on another cpu can't really be compared unless you know how many frames were rendered.

Is there any chance Dell releases and AMD XPS 13?

I would be very interested in this as well but I fear Intel and Dell have some kind of exclusivity agreement for our beloved product line. In the meantime we'll all just switch to Zen2 ThinkPads.

Awesome, Moore's law is back on track

Except they're actually not. I would love to buy one, but there is no one laptop with 4000 series in shops here, in EU.

Yes the whole supply chain is somewhat having a bumpy time, it will get there in the end.

But had a quick look from the UK and plenty here for next day delivery.

Even some fancy ones like: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zephyrus-GA401IV-GeForce-Graphics-W...

So technically they are available in the EU, just a slowly transitioning supply due to logistical human malware factors comming into play.

For the laptop you linked it says: This item will be released on April 16, 2020. Which considering human malware may be May+

Oh yes, defo saw maybe that or another one next day delivery - but may be case of bad listening and got corrected.

Did try look for the other listing I saw but not showing now, so hmmm.

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