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Comment by snvzz | Hacker News Reader

Once they offer AMD options. Until then, there's no way.

Same, but I don't care much about Team Blue vs Red. The Intel-driven power saving fiasco of the latest generation of Framework laptops is enough to keep me away.

I should not have to add weird kernel parameters or modules for my laptop not to burn through its battery during sleep.

I'm out of the loop, what was the fiasco?

These may help:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Core-i5-beats-Core-i7-Alder-La...

https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-desktop-cpus-more-powe...

Basically the P CPUs are much faster than U in previous generations but are also much more power hungry. The battery life is noticably shorter on laptops with a CPU like i5-1240P. And they produce a LOT of heat. I think one CPU option for framework laptop is i5-1240P.

I see so many people thinking AMD is a better option. I see only downsides besides better price point. Why do you prefer it over Intel?

An option that's not Intel.

I was an AMD fan in the 90s, they were more enthusiast and gamer friendly, overclocking was easier, and they were generally just less enthusiast-hostile than Intel.

In the 2000's AMD all but disappeared, and with the Core2 and eventually i3/i5/i7 series, Intel was the only option, so people like me bought Intel, we had no choice.

But the second AMD came back with (Ry)Zen, I ditched Intel in a heartbeat; after years of their complacence, shitty upgrades, constantly changing sockets and ridiculous prices, there was finally a "better" option again.

This is great for everyone because it's forcing Intel to wake up, more competition and better prices, and hopefully better products from Intel.

> In the 2000's AMD all but disappeared

Say again???

In the early 2000's, AMD's Athlon trounced anything Intel had to offer and would for years.

This followed soon after with the Opteron, where AMD single-handedly switched "x86" over to 64-bit essentially overnight while Intel failed to shove Itanium and a number of other ill-fated ventures down the market's throat.

If anything, the 2000's were AMD's golden years, admittedly mostly made possible by Intel's own incompetence at the time.

I haven't bought an Intel CPU in over 15 years but I also don't think that AMD will do that much better if they are left without sufficient competition. We already saw them dropping non-pro Threadrippers, leaving an entire segment with only sidegrades. Hopefully Intel will be able to compete going forward.

>I was an AMD fan in the 90s

We are talking Amx86 to K6-3, always the worse budged/upgrade option. Nobody chose AMD for performance, overclocking or enthusiast friendliness. Price advantage evaporated in 1998 with the release of Intel Celeron https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/p_cpu.ht... ~120 yen to $1

Celeron 300A MHz 10,440 ~$90

K6-2/300 10,850 ~100

https://akiba-pc.watch.impress.co.jp/hotline/981226/newitem....

ZIDA BXi98-ATX (440BX,ATX,AGP1,PCI4,PCI/ISA1,ISA1,DIMM3) 15,800 ~$140

FIC PA2013 (MVP3,ATX,2MB,AGP1,PCI3,PCI/ISA1,ISA1,DIMM3) 2MB cache 13,800 ~$130

First K6-3 to show up in Japan was K6-III/400 at hilarious 35,500 yen aka $295!! in March 1999. Athlon shipped very late in 1999 with barely 4 months left. K6-3+ on the other hand was April 2000 at $140-180, almost twice the price of faster Celerons and Durons.

>In the 2000's AMD all but disappeared

Did you mean to say AMD started leading x86 CPU race by taking performance crown and being first to 1GHz? https://www.zdnet.com/article/its-official-amd-hits-1000mhz-... Intel wasnt happy and in turn shipped 1.13-GHz Pentium III just to recall them all due to instability https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-recalls-1-13ghz-pentium-... Faster processors, first dual core, first 64bit. First half of 2000 was when AMD started shining, only to be cut down by Intel bribing scandal - MCP (Meet Comp Program) in exchange for strict no AMD commitments. DELL, HP, pretty much all mayors took Intel $, $6 billion in kick-backs.

I might have been a little off with my timing, but assume I meant the ends of those decades and it fits perfectly.

AMD is a better option due to better price per performance per watt, mainly. There's also the added advantage of voting with your wallet against a stagnating former near-monopoly that abused its market position (they were fined for paying OEMs to only advertise Intel-based devices, but weirdly to this day Dell still continues to put Intel based devices much more prominently than AMD ones).

Regarding Thunderbolt 4, I use my Thunderbolt monitor with my fully AMD-based Asus ROG Zephyrus which is only "USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C" compatible and everything works. But i can understand that it can be a crapshoot on cheaper laptops, but isn't that the same on Intel-based cheaper laptops? If they're cheap, they probably cheaped out on getting the Thunderbolt certification.

All else being equal, it's nice to do what little I can to support a competitive CPU market.

What downsides do you see?

I begrudgingly switched to Intel some time ago because of Thunderbolt 4 and AMD's lack of support for Thunderbolt in general, especially in budget-friendly lines (around $1000 USD in my case). There were also weird virtualization issues with AMD compared to Intel.

Now it's getting better, so I'd consider it for my next laptop, but for those who dock a ton of peripherals and monitors, I recommend strict Thunderbolt 4 compliance - which again, I hope more AMD-powered machines can bring to bear.

You can always get an AMD machine with a separate thunderbolt controller.

I am a dev with the need to virtualize ALOT. My main driver is also a Linux based system. I had to use a ThinkPad T14 2021 (maxed out AMD version) before I switch employees. It was a horrible experience:

* virtualization issues left and right. Everything was working but weird behavior from time to time. Like random performance degradation, rare crashes and mostly compatibility issues with experimental stuff (e.g. Integrated gpu pass through was not possible with AMDs at the time)

* battery life sucked (ironically this should be an Intel Issue)

* standby was not working as expected

* no support for Display Link

* Thunderbolt 4 (huge issue for me)

Now I am on the Framework i7 11 Gen and all the issues are gone. Yes Battery life could be better but it was way worse with the AMD.

Quoting another person here, seems like there are some big issues with Intel CPU's when it comes to laptops

"These may help:

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Core-i5-beats-Core-i7-Alder-La...

https://wccftech.com/intel-alder-lake-desktop-cpus-more-powe...

1. Efficiency, and 2. Integrated graphics power.

Conversely, what is the advantage of Intel, other than peak boost performance (at vastly higher wattage)?

Because it is not Intel.

Monopolies are bad.

AMD CPUs are much better for laptop as they tend to scale better at acceptable power draw levels for something battery powered while retaining good performance. Intel has the lead on the low power/low performance stuff.

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