In a laptop, I care far more about battery life and the fan noise. However, Intel 12th gen is only able to pull these impressive performance feats due to very high turbo boost clocks.
It's not that Intel is bad, it's still pretty great but in the age of M1 I wish Intel released a processor with similar power consumption.
The AMD offerings are much closer to M1 although they're not yet on TSMC 5nm so they don't quite match it. It's a historic event. Intel was #1 in laptops for an eternity. Even when the Pentium 4 was being outclassed by AMD Intel still kept the crown in mobile. This time around they first got overtaken by AMD and then by Apple and are now #3. Puts into perspective how huge of a miss their process node fail was.
Let’s remember AMD was absolute garbage for like 10 years until around 2016, when they finally bounced back. And they were getting closer and closer to bankruptcy, having to flog the silver - their fabs and even their campus. I’d say the Zen design and tsmc saved them (or Lisa Su and Keller).
Intel is in a better position financially than AMD was, and could catch up again. I tend to think it depends a lot on the organization and the people.
The CPU is great. It’s power envelope and performance feel amazing.
My biggest complaint is the there is a very limited selection of Laptops with AMD’s chips, especially the top tier. The one I bought required me to replace the Wifi/Bluetooth card (it came with a barely “supported” MediaTek one) for Linux.
Its really interesting with Intel on mobile platforms during the P4 era. Their P4 mobile chips were often terrible for temps and power use, but their Centrino/Pentium M platform was excellent despite being based on the PIII. The P4's architecture became a dead end, while the Pentium M's essentially continued to be improved, scaled up, and became the Core series.
If they had tried to force the P4 mobiles instead of rethinking and retooling the PIII core with some of the P4's FSB innovations and other things, they probably wouldn't of had as competitive mobile processors and maybe wouldn't have dethroned AMD a few years later.
The AMD offerings are still very far from the M1. Try comparing the 6800U to the now 2-year old M1 in Geekbench. The M2 widens the gap even more.
The Ryzen chips are already clocking over 3 GHz, so there isn't much more scaling from power left. That's why 5nm Zen4 probably won't move the needle too much.
During the pentium4 era me and my friends all got mac laptops running powerpc. Our laptops could actually go on our laps without burning us and the powerbook versions were fast enough to emulate windows in a VM without feeling slow at all. My battery lasted quite a while for the time.
I agree, but than you have corporate compliance installing an insane amount of Spyware on your device so that a 2021 XPS 13 Dell with a gen 10 Intel is out of battery when only using word within the hour.
Fans spinning all the time and no way of disabling this madness.
Nearly the same for my Mac colleagues. They maybe get 2 hours out of their M1 MBPs unplugged.
Recently discovered that Infosec has now mandated that all laptops have sleep disabled (the reason given is to be able to do endpoint patching). ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So I'm faced with having to log out and power off every day or suck up the cost of keeping the laptop on. /r/maliciouscompliance, here I come I suppose.
Irony being, one of the biggest benefits for me of the M1 power consumption is that it can run quiet and smooth even with all the corporate spyware on there. It can even run MS teams along side that and docker too which also permanently consumers 100% of one core, while still staying completely silent.
It's crazy to think you have these opposing teams of engineers, the Apple ones working away to optimise like crazy to reduce power consumption and the compliance software teams thinking up new ways to profligately use more.
Note that Cinebench R23 (the main CPU benchmark we use) runs for 10 minutes, so it’s a measure of sustained performance. Boost (PL2) is typically 30 seconds or less with a long period after that of staying at the PL1 limit.
Also note that Cinebench R23 is a terrible general purpose CPU benchmark. It uses Intel Embree engine which is hand optimized for x86. It heavily favors CPUs with many slow cores even though most people will benefit from CPUs with fewer, faster cores.
Cinebench is a great benchmark if you use Cinema4D, which I asumme 99.99% of the people buying these laptops won't use. Cinema4D is a niche of a niche.
Geekbench is far more representative of what kind of performance you can expect from a CPU.
I agree that 12th gen can sustain good performance given decent cooling. However, the issue is still heat.
It could be fun to have a `lap benchmark`. That is can you keep a laptop on your lap while it runs Cinebench R23 for 10 minutes? With TB disabled, I can.
The wild thing is, your benchmarks with turbo boost disabled (GB5 single: 617 / multi: 5163) almost identically match the benchmarks on levono's new ARM laptop[1], the Thinkpad x13s (GB5 single: 1118 / multi: 5776). True, Windows on ARM will likely keep on being a pain for some time, but linux support seems to be coming[2], and for those of us that target Linux ARM development anyways, this is one of the first performant alternatives to post-arm Macbooks. Plus it has the killer feature: no fan, long lived battery life.
Another interesting ARM system is Nvidia's Jetson AGX Orin DevKit, which clocks in at (GB5: single: 763 / multi: 7193) [3]. That system is linux native right now, but of course isn't a laptop form factor.
> However, Intel 12th gen is only able to pull these impressive performance feats due to very high turbo boost clocks.
Don't forget 12th gen Intel CPUs have a lot more cores than 11th gen Intel CPUs. That's where the significant benchmark improvements are coming from. Unfortunately though, these often don't reflect the real world use case. Having more cores isn't going to improve the day-to-day performance very much. The new efficiency cores probably improve battery life though
Maybe the new efficiency cores improve battery life over the 11th gen Intel CPUs but they're still far from the battery life of AMD or Apple silicon CPUs
I believe Intel 12th gen is not properly tweaked yet, currently the benchmarks show that the battery performance is worse with 12th gen than 12th gen. But if you 'limit' the chip and force the usage of the efficiency cores then you should be able to beat 11th gen.
You can usually use the "Xtreme Tuning Utility" (by Intel) to scale down without disabling turbo boost. I use it to scale my ~4.8 Ghz cores to 3.2 Ghz, so they can run without fans on my small form factor PC. 3.2 Ghz x 8 is enough to run most my favorite games.
Without TB, I'm down to 8x 2.4, which is a bit sluggish.
You may get better results by leaving the clock speed settings alone and adjusting the long-term power limits to an acceptable level. That way you won't sacrifice peak performance (ie. latency, especially with only one or two cores in use) but will still get most of the power savings.
I'll echo the concern about the turboboost really helping at times. Often, you have a single-threaded process running that benefits from a single core running at a higher clock rate for a short period of time and improves the experience tremendously.
How is 12th gen compared to 10th gen, in your experience? My XPS 13 on a 10th gen i7 just becomes absolute syrup on battery, even if I put it in high performance mode.
I have an XPS 17 with 12th gen and it drains around 50% battery per hour on a zoom call.
edit: My laptop has a i7-12700H, which uses more power than the cpu in the framework laptop.
More thoughts: The laptop is pretty much always plugged in. When I'm out I carry a little 60W charger with me.
However for other reasons I wouldn't recommend the XPS 17. I have a Lenovo legion 7 at home that I'm more happy with (cheaper, better performance, lots of ports, etc)
We all wish intel could release a processor with similar power consumption to the m1, but it's not like they just overlooked battery life. x86 is just fundamentally not competitive with arm on that front, unfortunately. The only advantage it seems to have from an architecture standpoint is raw performance
Meanwhile in a server, I'm starting to worry that as I work to flush performance issues out of the system, especially latency problems, that I won't see the sort of perf numbers I'm expecting because the fact that the machines are running well below 50% CPU utilization are likely to dogleg the moment it hits the thermal limits, and I have no way to predict that, short of maybe collecting CPU temperature telemetry. Not only might my changes not translate into 1:1 or even 1.2:1 gains, they might be zero gains and or just raise the CPU utilization.
Magical CPU utilization also takes away one of the useful metrics for autoscaling servers. Thermal throttling opens the door to outsized fishtailing scenarios.
Tested an i7 1260p recently and it ran like a beast. What's interesting is they have a discrete GPU now which is the Intel Arc that should take a lot of the load off the CPU.
The coolest thing isn't just the cpu upgrade, but that the whole mainboard is something like a standard. Other laptops have weird shaped boards just for that one model.
If this 'standard' takes off it could start an entire ecosystem of modular hardware. That's exciting. I'm hoping for a 'Framework surface', a 'Framework tv', a 'Framework 400', etc.
I'd pay very very good money for a Framework router or a Framework TV...
Imagine hardware that you control, that you can upgrade piecemeal when something gets out of date. Besides the eco friendliness, it just sounds... nice?
I went from saying, "if only they had an AMD" to getting a different machine in ARM and now im saying "if only they had ARM".
I never realized how much heat, vibration, air blowers negatively affected me before. A framework laptop with some type of ARM or ARM-like cpu could do a lot with the space savings on cooling.
I've played with an AMD 6800u laptop and I would say it's the ideal x86 laptop chip right now. Normal usage at the 12w mode or light gaming at 20w mode was super impressive. Even though 12th Gen Intel chips have made great performance gains Intel is still relying on unsustainable high turbo boosts to get the benchmark numbers.
I just recently stumbled across these two otherwise identical laptops.
Exactly. Not just 1 model but you can compare identical ThinkPad models as well and AMD versions have significantly better battery life. Not only that, even last year's identical models with 11th Gen Intel CPUs have better battery life than their new 12th Gen models. So Intel's power efficiency actually decreased compared to last year, even though they introduced the hybrid architecture.
In some instances Alder Lake CPUs slightly edge out Apple's CPUs in performance, but with a terrible battery life (~4 hours of real world battery life vs >10 hours on Apple laptops) and noisy fans.
AMD on the other hand seems to have focused on getting a good balance this year. 6800U models have significant performance improvements over the last gen while improving the battery life as well.
I am thinking of buying a new laptop this year, but I am waiting for the AMD models. For anyone interested, these are the models I am waiting for:
Since this is Hacker News and a lot of people here runs Linux, I want to remind everybody to hold your horses before you tested Linux on these machines.
The machine that I'm currently using comes with a Ryzen 6800H CPU and LPDDR5-6400 RAMs, made by Lenovo. On Linux, the builtin keyboard don't work because of IRQ problems (See [1], a fix is also available at [2]), and it constantly spams out "mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged" messages.
If you read the code in [2], the patch basically disables IRQ override for every new Ryzen machines (`boot_cpu_has(X86_FEATURE_ZEN)`). Based on that, I assume every new Ryzen CPU has the same problem(???)
Edit: wait... blaming it on the CPU might be unjust, it's more like a kernel adoption problem.
Luckily, compiling Linux kernel with 16 threads is not really too big of a struggle, you can just apply the patch manually every time the kernel updates :-) :-| :-(
I have been using a 6800U on Linux for the past two weeks. With kernel 5.18 almost everything is supported out of the box. The few issues I have:
- Kernel logs show that the GPU driver crashes from time to time. When it happens the screen freezes for a few seconds but recovers.
- HVEC hardware decoder gives green artifacts on VLC using VA-API.
- It seems not to support advanced power management, on battery the CPU will happily boost to 4.7 GHz which in my opinion makes little sense. AMD has been steadily pushing work related to power management so I expect it to improve. As it stands total power consumption on battery averages 5.1 W.
At least on most ThinkPads, the AMD versions lack Thunderbolt 3/4/ USB 4.0 Full Feature (e.g. including TB) so if I have a Thunderbolt docking station, it will probably not work. Nobody confirmed to me, what would work in such a setting. Will Lenovo/ AMD provide USB 4 upgrade using firmware?
Of course, the next question is the potentially asymmetric RAM on the ThinkPads with one channel soldered and one SO-DIMM slot, e.g. the 48 GB version. Will it use dual-channel until ~32 GB and then single-channel? How will the GPU perform, e.g. will it use only one slot in such a configuration. So many questions...
The 6800U models on the market just show that the integration by the OEM is far more important than the choice of CPU. The Asus Zenbook S 13 manages to hit 60° on its bottom case under sustained load, which is an impractical temperature. The Lenovo Yoga 9i which on paper uses a hotter Intel CPU runs cooler, quieter, and longer while also beating the Zenbook on benchmarks. So you really have to look at the entire package.
I don't doubt those benefits are real, but I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Book with Intel 12th gen and integrated graphics, and it is actually fantastic. Super thin, lightweight, silent, and low heat, while still boasting 12 extremely fast cores. And it was very affordable. It is very weird for me to buy a laptop where I have almost no complaints... and Samsung did a splendid job with all the fit and finish. I'm sure a lot of it is in fact thanks to the non-CPU upgrades like DDR5, since CPU is rarely the bottleneck, but it is all the same to me.
This to me sounds like the experience people were praising the M1 chips for, and tbh Intel actually delivered for once. I say this as someone who had been solidly in the AMD camp for a long time. Thanks to competition, Intel now has to be good. Weird!
Gen 12 machine with low heat is an exception rather than the norm sadly. It must be possible, since there are a few machine out there that manage to do it, but most machines right now are quite hot and has low battery life (compared to 11th gen), especially the P-series in thin-and-light form factor (I am writing this comment from Lenovo X1 Carbon Gen 10 with 1280P, which can't even match the Cinebench score of the frame.work)
> I never realized how much heat, vibration, air blowers negatively affected me before.
It's like a constant drilling sound that gets into your brain and makes thoughts flow like through the mud in the full sunlight.
For that reason, despite that I don't like Apple and I am not a fan of macOS, I decided to buy M1 MBP.
This is a lifechanging experience, that laptop. You can even put it on low power mode and won't lose much perfomance and it is absolutely silent.
Even if you run a prolonged heavy task and fans kick in, you will barely hear them (ha hope it won't get worse over time and that there will be a way to disconnect them if that is going to be a problem).
Oh and no coil whine. Even if my XPS 15 miraculously don't have fans on, you can be sure their noise is inconveniently replaced by distinct coil whine that is just as annoying as fans.
I am probably going to buy another macbook, this time the Air one just for leisure and learning.
I'm honestly impressed that so many people in these threads work in environments quiet enough where the fan is the largest source of annoyance. If I'm inside its drowned out by my window AC unit. If I'm outside on the patio its drowned out by my neighbor's window AC unit. If I take it to work then its the hvac vent over my desk that's the dominant source of noise, followed by the construction site across the street. Usually I use third party tools to pin my fan at max speed when I'm doing anything because it keeps the keyboard cooler.
My XPS didn't blow. My MacBook Pros (Intel) always did. As others have shown heat management in Intel MacBook Pros were abysmal and not comparable to other Intel Laptops. Yes, the M1 is a huge power efficiency jump forward, would love affordable ARM desktop machines, but a lot of the MacBook Pro (Intel) problems are from very bad heat management.
[Edit] My understanding is, that a lot of power efficiency and performance comes from the large cache - not only ARM - which is more efficient than main memory and faster - also see AMD X3D. (per core AFAIK) Ryzen 7 L1/L2: 32/512, M1 L1/L2 192/3072
Really the only ones in my opinion who have a chance is nvidia since they have the experience and know how to deliver chiplets on cutting edge processes. They’ve been working on arm cores in the past. It might be several years but I’d be surprised if they don’t try once Qualcomm’s exclusive deal with windows ends
I have absolutely no data or information to back this up, but I predict a RISC-V based Framework within the next 5 years. And I'll be one of the first customers to buy one.
First gen unlikely to be low(er) power though surely? I can see this emerging, but power would have to lie in the space of "premature optimisation" risks. For intel, AMD & ARM they're all multiple generations in, have understood their exposure of risk to parasitic effects in the VLSI of choice, have fab at viable defect rate. RISC-V is more played with in FPGA or emulation than otherwise. (happy to be corrected, but I think this remains true)
Apples M1 only worked because everything is in one chip. Very different from the goals of framework. There aren't any vendors offering M1 competitors either.
Lowering the power of an intel/AMD CPU enough to passively cool it would yield way more performance than currently commercially available arm CPUs. (Obviously excluding CPUs that aren't purchasable like Apple's)
After Apples announcement of M1, I feel like it is mandatory for such a laptop test to discuss power per watt and for how long you can game on the 11 vs 12th gen processor.
I also feel like it is worth mentioning that 12th gen laptop is priced ~ $150 over the 11th gen.
If you're coding against an online build system and 11 last an extra hour (or whatever), it's a no-brainer to stick with the old one.
Im generally not that concerned about power consumption. My laptop almost never is unplugged for more than a couple hours. I understand that there are many others who don’t use their computer like I do, but personally the only negative effect of power consumption is that it costs an extra $10 a year.
I think not everyone is going to be sensitive to this, but apart from battery life, it's super nice having a computer that's not spewing out heat or running the fans loudly.
Lots of people just don't game at all. Also, a lot of people like me prefer different gaming and work setup (and different rooms) in order to achieve better work-life balance. I build games on my M1 machine, just don't play on it.
I game on my m1 macs. Maybe not the latest and greatest 3d games but for me that’s ok. Have a ps5 for that. there are a ton of older ones that just work, and even many newer ones. Currently playing baulders gate EE
This is not true. I have an Macbook Pro 16 Inch M1 Max and I play a ton of games. Both Dota 2 and World of Warcraft runs without issues, you just need to do some tweaking with the settings and also framerate cap the game so you don't end up thermal throttling which introduces stuttering.
You can't play the latest and greatest (graphics-intensive games at least), but there are many titles that work just fine, and the performance of the x86 translation is surprisingly good. There are even a handful of games with native builds, like World of Warcraft and Disco Elysium.
As per most reviews 12th gen is more power efficient. Particularly for the use cases you have mentioned, as P cores wouldn't be working most of the time and E core are much more power efficient.
I think for those who primarily work on AC and do not mind increased power draw, 12th Gen is a good choice. As a software developer, I appreciate a few seconds shaved off here and there. With good thermal design, 12th Gen laptops can be silent and cool (I've never heard my MSI GT77 spin up the fans, unless I tell it to with a dedicated hardware button). I understand that people have different use cases and for lot of customers laptops need to be lightweight. I'm okay with the bulk and weight.
Just ran Phoronix Linux kernel compilation test (defconf), I get 74.68 sec on my laptop, on par with desktop Intel Core i7-12700K, but I can carry my "desktop" around. :) In comparison, Apple M2 result is 416 sec, AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX is 103 sec. It's not much, but it's compound gains if you compile and test a lot.
Do you think the very broad loose culture of macOS users (developers/creatives - coffee shops, nomadic etc) vs Windows (most corporate stuff - workstations, meetings etc) could be some factor in how they are optimised?
I’m rather disappointed in 12th Gen for mobile. I have a AMD 5800h Lenovo laptop and a 12700 Dell. The dell stutters, fans spin, etc. the Lenovo is just rock solid and fast. Never stutters or slows down. Fans spin up only when playing games.
I wish framework would do an AMD laptop. But Linus put them in touch with AMD and they done nothing.
Building a new laptop from scratch is time-taking and costly. So Framework may rightly be spending their time on optimising product, reducing cost and reaching more countries.
The Lenovo Laptops I have are Legion 7 2021 (5800H / 3070), X1 Extreme Gen 1 (8th gen / 1050ti) vs Dell XPS 15 (12700 / 3050ti)
Both Lenovos are rock solid, not laggy or stuttery.
But I had a Dell XPS 15 (2020) model from work, I gave it back because idling in Windows made the fans spin...
I got a newer Dell XPS 15 (2022) for work (new job) and its great, but its stuttery and the fans spin under light loads. (the screen is amazing tho, i love the screen)
What I don't like about framework notebooks is that they seem to be mostly interested in speed, which is why they seemed to choose these P-series CPUs. With a notebook, I'm much more interested in energy consumption (how long can I work off grid), emissions like fan noise and the like. Why no U-series CPUs?
The U and P series parts are actually the same dies on 12th Gen, but binned. If you set the Power Mode to Best Power Efficiency on Windows or the equivalent power limiting in Linux, you can make a P behave pretty similarly to what a U would (with the Intel DTT settings we used).
Restricting TDP is generally an option on laptops if you really wanted to. Not sure if Framework provides any out of the box TDP switching but software like ThrottleStop can do it.
Also on Linux most distros have thermald installed and you can change the config to limit the max temperature to defacto throttle power usage. Alternatively, you can modify the RAPL limits to cap power usage directly to taste: https://community.frame.work/t/thermal-management-on-linux-w...
Yeah. I tried locking some of my older CPUs to, say, 700MHz. Still entirely usable unless I started compiling something, say.
Issue is Intel tries to race to halt which demonstrably saves more power on average. The power consumption of your chip probably is some intrinsic quality related to how the package and die are set up.
I'd like to point out that Intel allows you to tune the cores for whatever profile you want. Sure, it's not "same performance, less noise", but you can get something like an 80/20 (80% performance, 20% noise) by just scaling back the core frequencies a little. I tune my intel machine down to 8x3.2 Ghz, and can run without fans (on small form factor PC), but sometimes want the full 4+Ghz, but it's loud.
This can be done application-specific, so when you launch a big game or something, it'll spin cores up to max frequency, for example.
Could you please be more specific? Are you talking about Windows or Linux? Do you mind giving some references for how to scale core frequencies application-wise? Thanks.
Would increasing the RAM really make that big a difference in terms of kernel compilation time? It feels to me that 16GB should be plenty for any sort of caching that will speed things up.
Yeah if you think about it in lower levels. Many optimizations use memoization to save clock speed. Therefore, you almost always need more memory to speed things up.
I think you can use `brd` or `ramdisk` (NOT tmpfs) to eat up 48GB of ram on the newer machine. Just make sure you actually write data to the disks so that the memory is allocated.
That should be an easy way to do an apples to apples comparison and not require shipping any hardware.
Saying that you intended to do something, and in the same breath that you were subsequently unable to do said thing, because you couldn't find what was required is very discouraging for a prospective customer.
Also, "benchmarking" dissimilar systems comes across as marketing scam, scammy marketing, appealing to the deceivable, which some might view as reprehensible
:(
Readit News
It's not that Intel is bad, it's still pretty great but in the age of M1 I wish Intel released a processor with similar power consumption.
I use my Intel i5-1240p with turbo boost disabled when on battery. Here's the geekbench with TB disabled. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/16497299
Intel is in a better position financially than AMD was, and could catch up again. I tend to think it depends a lot on the organization and the people.
The CPU is great. It’s power envelope and performance feel amazing.
My biggest complaint is the there is a very limited selection of Laptops with AMD’s chips, especially the top tier. The one I bought required me to replace the Wifi/Bluetooth card (it came with a barely “supported” MediaTek one) for Linux.
If they had tried to force the P4 mobiles instead of rethinking and retooling the PIII core with some of the P4's FSB innovations and other things, they probably wouldn't of had as competitive mobile processors and maybe wouldn't have dethroned AMD a few years later.
The Ryzen chips are already clocking over 3 GHz, so there isn't much more scaling from power left. That's why 5nm Zen4 probably won't move the needle too much.
Fans spinning all the time and no way of disabling this madness.
Nearly the same for my Mac colleagues. They maybe get 2 hours out of their M1 MBPs unplugged.
So I'm faced with having to log out and power off every day or suck up the cost of keeping the laptop on. /r/maliciouscompliance, here I come I suppose.
Tempted to get one of these: https://us.amazon.com/Vegamax-Button-Ethernet-Internet-Netwo...
It's crazy to think you have these opposing teams of engineers, the Apple ones working away to optimise like crazy to reduce power consumption and the compliance software teams thinking up new ways to profligately use more.
I sudo turn off the garbage and I haven’t been caught yet.
Cinebench is a great benchmark if you use Cinema4D, which I asumme 99.99% of the people buying these laptops won't use. Cinema4D is a niche of a niche.
Geekbench is far more representative of what kind of performance you can expect from a CPU.
https://reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/pitid6/eli5_why_does_...
It could be fun to have a `lap benchmark`. That is can you keep a laptop on your lap while it runs Cinebench R23 for 10 minutes? With TB disabled, I can.
Another interesting ARM system is Nvidia's Jetson AGX Orin DevKit, which clocks in at (GB5: single: 763 / multi: 7193) [3]. That system is linux native right now, but of course isn't a laptop form factor.
[1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/15575694 [2]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-5.20-SoCs-8cx-Gen3-Arm [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrZt90c_-C8 (sorry for the video link)
EDIT: Also confirmed that WSL2 runs natively on Win11 ARM. So you can have an optimized full Linux kernel running on the Thinkpad as well.
Don't forget 12th gen Intel CPUs have a lot more cores than 11th gen Intel CPUs. That's where the significant benchmark improvements are coming from. Unfortunately though, these often don't reflect the real world use case. Having more cores isn't going to improve the day-to-day performance very much. The new efficiency cores probably improve battery life though
Without TB, I'm down to 8x 2.4, which is a bit sluggish.
edit: My laptop has a i7-12700H, which uses more power than the cpu in the framework laptop.
More thoughts: The laptop is pretty much always plugged in. When I'm out I carry a little 60W charger with me.
However for other reasons I wouldn't recommend the XPS 17. I have a Lenovo legion 7 at home that I'm more happy with (cheaper, better performance, lots of ports, etc)
Meanwhile in a server, I'm starting to worry that as I work to flush performance issues out of the system, especially latency problems, that I won't see the sort of perf numbers I'm expecting because the fact that the machines are running well below 50% CPU utilization are likely to dogleg the moment it hits the thermal limits, and I have no way to predict that, short of maybe collecting CPU temperature telemetry. Not only might my changes not translate into 1:1 or even 1.2:1 gains, they might be zero gains and or just raise the CPU utilization.
Magical CPU utilization also takes away one of the useful metrics for autoscaling servers. Thermal throttling opens the door to outsized fishtailing scenarios.
Deleted Comment
If this 'standard' takes off it could start an entire ecosystem of modular hardware. That's exciting. I'm hoping for a 'Framework surface', a 'Framework tv', a 'Framework 400', etc.
* https://github.com/whatthefilament/Framework-Tablet
* https://www.instructables.com/Framework-Tablet-Assembly-Manu...
Imagine hardware that you control, that you can upgrade piecemeal when something gets out of date. Besides the eco friendliness, it just sounds... nice?
I never realized how much heat, vibration, air blowers negatively affected me before. A framework laptop with some type of ARM or ARM-like cpu could do a lot with the space savings on cooling.
I just recently stumbled across these two otherwise identical laptops.
https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_...
https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/Lenovo/Lenovo_Slim_...
The AMD version is rated for 20% greater battery life just from the CPU difference.
In some instances Alder Lake CPUs slightly edge out Apple's CPUs in performance, but with a terrible battery life (~4 hours of real world battery life vs >10 hours on Apple laptops) and noisy fans.
AMD on the other hand seems to have focused on getting a good balance this year. 6800U models have significant performance improvements over the last gen while improving the battery life as well.
I am thinking of buying a new laptop this year, but I am waiting for the AMD models. For anyone interested, these are the models I am waiting for:
https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkBook/ThinkBook_13s_G4_...
https://psref.lenovo.com/Product/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X13_Gen_3...
Both have much better battery life than their Intel counterparts:
ThinkBook 13s Gen 4 (AMD): 14 hours
ThinkBook 13s Gen 4 (Intel): 10.9 hours
ThinkPaf X13 Gen 3 (AMD): 15.68 hours
ThinkPad X13 Gen 3 (Intel): 11.8 hours
These numbers are usually lower in real life, but they are comparable with each other.
The machine that I'm currently using comes with a Ryzen 6800H CPU and LPDDR5-6400 RAMs, made by Lenovo. On Linux, the builtin keyboard don't work because of IRQ problems (See [1], a fix is also available at [2]), and it constantly spams out "mce: [Hardware Error]: Machine check events logged" messages.
[1]: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=277260
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/all/20220712020058.90374-1-gch981213...
If you read the code in [2], the patch basically disables IRQ override for every new Ryzen machines (`boot_cpu_has(X86_FEATURE_ZEN)`). Based on that, I assume every new Ryzen CPU has the same problem(???)
Edit: wait... blaming it on the CPU might be unjust, it's more like a kernel adoption problem.
Luckily, compiling Linux kernel with 16 threads is not really too big of a struggle, you can just apply the patch manually every time the kernel updates :-) :-| :-(
- Kernel logs show that the GPU driver crashes from time to time. When it happens the screen freezes for a few seconds but recovers.
- HVEC hardware decoder gives green artifacts on VLC using VA-API.
- It seems not to support advanced power management, on battery the CPU will happily boost to 4.7 GHz which in my opinion makes little sense. AMD has been steadily pushing work related to power management so I expect it to improve. As it stands total power consumption on battery averages 5.1 W.
Of course, the next question is the potentially asymmetric RAM on the ThinkPads with one channel soldered and one SO-DIMM slot, e.g. the 48 GB version. Will it use dual-channel until ~32 GB and then single-channel? How will the GPU perform, e.g. will it use only one slot in such a configuration. So many questions...
This to me sounds like the experience people were praising the M1 chips for, and tbh Intel actually delivered for once. I say this as someone who had been solidly in the AMD camp for a long time. Thanks to competition, Intel now has to be good. Weird!
It's like a constant drilling sound that gets into your brain and makes thoughts flow like through the mud in the full sunlight.
For that reason, despite that I don't like Apple and I am not a fan of macOS, I decided to buy M1 MBP.
This is a lifechanging experience, that laptop. You can even put it on low power mode and won't lose much perfomance and it is absolutely silent. Even if you run a prolonged heavy task and fans kick in, you will barely hear them (ha hope it won't get worse over time and that there will be a way to disconnect them if that is going to be a problem).
Oh and no coil whine. Even if my XPS 15 miraculously don't have fans on, you can be sure their noise is inconveniently replaced by distinct coil whine that is just as annoying as fans.
I am probably going to buy another macbook, this time the Air one just for leisure and learning.
[Edit] My understanding is, that a lot of power efficiency and performance comes from the large cache - not only ARM - which is more efficient than main memory and faster - also see AMD X3D. (per core AFAIK) Ryzen 7 L1/L2: 32/512, M1 L1/L2 192/3072
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/07/first-risc-v-laptop-...
That’s not true in any way?
I also feel like it is worth mentioning that 12th gen laptop is priced ~ $150 over the 11th gen.
If you're coding against an online build system and 11 last an extra hour (or whatever), it's a no-brainer to stick with the old one.
In the near future you might if you install linux.
Using box64 for amd64 translation and steam proton for windows translation if necessary.
But if you aren’t picky about specific games, there’s something from every category that runs on m1.
* League of Legends
* Civilization 6
* Stellaris, EU4, etc.
* Minecraft
* Factorio
Just ran Phoronix Linux kernel compilation test (defconf), I get 74.68 sec on my laptop, on par with desktop Intel Core i7-12700K, but I can carry my "desktop" around. :) In comparison, Apple M2 result is 416 sec, AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX is 103 sec. It's not much, but it's compound gains if you compile and test a lot.
They're just tools ffs, no need to romanticize or stereotype them.
I wish framework would do an AMD laptop. But Linus put them in touch with AMD and they done nothing.
For example if the Lenovo is a P15 and you’re comparing it to a Dell Latitude, then yeah duh.
Both Lenovos are rock solid, not laggy or stuttery.
But I had a Dell XPS 15 (2020) model from work, I gave it back because idling in Windows made the fans spin...
I got a newer Dell XPS 15 (2022) for work (new job) and its great, but its stuttery and the fans spin under light loads. (the screen is amazing tho, i love the screen)
Issue is Intel tries to race to halt which demonstrably saves more power on average. The power consumption of your chip probably is some intrinsic quality related to how the package and die are set up.
This can be done application-specific, so when you launch a big game or something, it'll spin cores up to max frequency, for example.
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I want a portable desktop, speed I can bring with me without lugging my 35lb liquid cooler setup with its 4x140mm radiator.
I want something compact and sexy but insanely fast when I “dock” it
As there are compilation units, translation of addresses, linking, etc.
Memory AND storage takes important part. While CPU might be "idle" in some parts.
For big projects especially, memory and storage speed would be important for proper benchmarking.
That should be an easy way to do an apples to apples comparison and not require shipping any hardware.