Strix Halo's Memory Subsystem: Tackling iGPU Challenges | Hacker News Reader

Strix Halo's Memory Subsystem: Tackling iGPU Challenges

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75 pointsPaulHoule35 comments

If only you could buy the hardware. There are very few laptops or similar with the chip. Even the Z13 is difficult to find and (at least in Europe) only with 32 GB of RAM.

HP ZBook Ultra is in every eshop in czechia. Just got 128GB for 3200 euro :)

Those are very good prices, it's 3700€ in Austria

I was disappointed to see an endless stream of nearly identical mini PCs using it while the options for an actual laptop remained "do you want one of two small touchscreen tablet?". Even Framework only made it available in mini PC form factor!

That said it wasn't too hard to grab a HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14, just not the ideal model I had in mind. The hardware is great though!

Is HP ok these days? I've been avoiding them because of the atrocious build quality I've experienced in the past.

That particular laptop also seems very heavy.

I had a friend come over with a recent low end HP laptop to print something and I was shocked at the poor build quality.

Low end everything has poor build quality (they're probably all made by Quanta).

Not only. I had a look at a coworker’s Framework 13 and was shocked at the poor build quality. The keyboard flex in particular was terrible. That’s not a cheap laptop.

I was looking at a school-issue Chomebook from Dell the other day and thought the build quality was pretty good even if the parts inside were weak. I like the build quality of corporate Dell laptops and their 1.5 liter desktops -- though an Alienware 15 I had died earlier than it should have because the battery swelled up and damaged the circuit board. The machine still sorta but made a chime every 30 seconds or so because it thought USB devices were being plugged or unplugged or something.

From envy upwards they are usually fine besides the x360 hinge problems.

The last laptop I bought from HP was a ZBook 15 in 2014. I'm still using it. It's rock solid.

You really have to split this kind of thing into market category, not just what the brand name is. The 3.5k mobile workstation is going to be a different realm than a 0.6k laptop which may well also be a different quality than the mid range enterprise focused laptop.

I'm very happy with the build quality of the G1a though, no complaints in that regard. Just wish it were a few inches larger. OTOH I got my nephew an HP Victus laptop a hear ago and the build quality was a bit garbage, but the price matched.

I have the Zbook Ultra G1a since it came out. The USB-C PD implementation is very bad, badly broken. I have not been able to get it to charge or even use anything but the HP 140W charger while on. While off, anything works, but once powered on into Ubuntu (from HP!) of Windows... It does not charge or use the power at all. Even with 140W 3rd party chargers from Anker, Ugreen, Insignia, etc.

Super limits its usability.

For me the firmware 0x01030b00 solved most of the problem. It now runs well on my previous laptop 65W HP charger, which is much lighter than the literal brick the G1a came with. It still does not work on an Anker 140W power bank I have.

However this firmware was only available on HP's website for a few days. It has now been retracted, but it works well for me so YMMV.

My last remaining hurdle is getting color correction working for the DCI-P3 OLED screen. Maybe it's a Gnome/Wayland thing but I cannot get full display correction to work so colors are ultra saturated.

Edit: the fan curve is also bad, it makes fans spin up/down continuously under certain conditions. Not a deal breaker but quite annoying when it happens.

The fan curve also drives me nuts. It seems to be related to the processor's speed so I turn off boost — I don't notice a perf diff for my workloads. The fan noise is much better.

echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost

The AMD Framework laptops have the same issues, I've heard from several people. It seems AMD's implementation of USB C/4/PD is just broken (or at least extremely difficult to write firmware for)

I have one as well and haven't had this problem. I've been using mostly the HP G4 dock and a Dell dock at the office with an occasional use of the charger. I'm running Linux 6.17.8-arch1-1, it could also be fixed in newer kernels. When I play demanding games, it pulls quite a few watts and all the chargers are keeping up.

It might be your device that is unlucky, maybe contacting support might help.

I had the same issue, where it would only charge with my 100W or above chargers. It worked with Dell USB-C 130W chargers (both genuine and knock off) and the HP charger, as well as a Baseus 100W charger. I have noticed yesterday it was working with my other chargers as well, something it certainly didn't do before. Maybe fixed through firmware update?

> Even with 140W 3rd party chargers from Anker, Ugreen, Insignia, etc.

I use a 140 W UGREEN charger with mine (X762 - https://www.amazon.com/UGREEN-Charger-Charging-Foldable-MacB...) and it charges fine at full speed on both Windows 11 and Arch. If you're looking for a "it just does all of the things" USB cable to go with that, I pair said charger/laptop with https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DRP25V8T in my bag (1 short and 1 long).

I think the requirement is your charger + cable both support 140 W single port charging (not just that the charger support 140 W overall or that the charger does but cable doesn't). I've noticed 100 W cables/chargers seem to work, but it says slow charging when I do so I don't use them. Lower negotiated PD rates than that only work when powered off.

I think this is deliberate, and stopped me buying HP they don't support third party chargers while powered on to prevent dodgy chargers causing damage.

It was a while ago they said this, but it has put me off HP well and truly.

Framework Desktop Mainboard only, mini itx, 128gb, delivery in Q4 (which we are in)

I set mine up today, what an amazing and beautiful machine. Goodbye Windows, hello Arch btw!

My Windows box has been a dust collector since receiving mine last month. Such a fantastic little machine.

Ironically, I'm not keeping my Windows machine around for gaming but rather very specific CAD tools that, despite the developers best efforts, will probably only ever be windows tools.

That said, I'm super close to pulling the trigger on the FW desktop and just installing a second drive for windows.

Interesting - how do those sorts of tools run with Wine?

Beelink GTR9 Pro is a great option as well.

I actually cancelled my first FD order after seeing how much cheaper the Beelink was. Then after some weeks of waiting I noticed their website said sold out, and when I contacted their support they said oh yeah whoops, you might get your order in 3 months (website said up to one month).

So right then I asked for a refund worrying I'd been scammed (paying a Chinese company in USD from Germany without seeing VAT was pretty sus already).

Another thing is that apparently the ethernet is seriously broken, like makes the machine hang. Sill unfixed apparently, and also apparently the cooling isn't very good.

Soooo I went back to FD preorder, got it soon after. Expensive, but ehhh... every time I look at it I get a little dopamine hit <3333

The network issue is the windows driver, only relevant if you are running windows. There is a work around by pinning the old version and I believe there's a new driver that works, but isn't the final driver.

Several reviewers have mentioned this.

I got my framework desktop a few weeks ago, I'm quite fond of it.

I have an HP ZBook g1a ultra in Austria. I've had mine for about 4-5 months and I got the 64gb version because I needed a new laptop and the 128gb wasn't yet available. It should now be widely available everywhere.

It's pricey but I have to say it's the best Linux laptop I've used. I'm a Linux user so for me that's as good as it gets :-).

https://geizhals.at/hp-zbook-ultra-g1a-v193148.html

HP are your friend. In laptop or desktop form factor, 128gb ram.

I take that back, returning their laptop after two days.

This article doesn't mention the suitability of the Strix Halo systems for running MoE LLMs that use much of its 128GB 256-bit DDR5-8000 memory.

If LPDDR5X's latency is a limiting factor, I wonder if something like HBM would have show significant improvement to speed.

HBM has latency similar to DDR. The real benefit is via the interposer (or now die to die connections) you can get 16x 64 bit buses in a single HBM stack.

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