I'm holding out a little bit of hope that Valve puts out a laptop - the Steam Deck has notably good power management for a linux device of its class (and I've even heard of people using them as laptop replacements), though the idle power is still higher than a Macbook. They're going to have made a desktop, gaming handheld, and VR device; why not one more?
Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
31–40 of 282 posts
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#32Honestly if you actually need high end specs then you should just build a PC. "16 core Zen 5 CPU, 40 core RDNA 3.5 GPU. 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM @ 256 GB/s + stunning OLED" - Easily done as a pc build. In a world where you can get this laptop with Linux, there's a new set of trade-offs - - be prepared for a LOT of things not working because the size of the market for extremely expensive configurations with high end CPU +…
Is his build even possible today in a laptop?
In a desktop, you would need a top of the line threadripper for that 256GB/s of memory bandwidth.
Consumer grade Zen 5 desktops reach only about 80GB/s in real world testing, with a theoretical max of slightly over 100GB/s.
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#33I wonder why ThinkPads are not mentioned. It's not like I recommend them (I mean, I use one, but it's not like I've tried most laptops out there, so who I am to judge), but I was under the impression it's still a de-facto Linux laptop standard.
How’s the battery life?
Cannot properly evaluate now. I never really use it without a cable for too long, and by now the battery must have slightly degraded too. Anyway, it never was Macbook-level, I guess, and it's an oldish model, so you should check actual reviews for current models that you are interested in, there always was plenty of them for ThinkPads (at least, the last time when I looked for a new laptop).
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#34One model/configuration will never work because developers are awful, picky customers.
You’ll lose 90,000 of your 100,000 with one or more little nitpicks.
Probably 50% right off the bat because you chose a keyboard with or without a numpad.
Another huge chunk because you chose the wrong screen (Retina resolution? Low resolution? Refresh rate?)
Too bad, because I want this. Or at least the version of it I have in my head :)
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#35Honestly if you actually need high end specs then you should just build a PC. "16 core Zen 5 CPU, 40 core RDNA 3.5 GPU. 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM @ 256 GB/s + stunning OLED" - Easily done as a pc build. In a world where you can get this laptop with Linux, there's a new set of trade-offs - - be prepared for a LOT of things not working because the size of the market for extremely expensive configurations with high end CPU +…
Is his build even possible today in a laptop? In a desktop, you would need a top of the line threadripper for that 256GB/s of memory bandwidth. Consumer grade Zen 5 desktops reach only about 80GB/s in real world testing, with a theoretical max of slightly over 100GB/s.
AMD Strix Halo (a consumer mobile processor) has theoretical support for 256GB/s of memory bandwidth (quad-channel, 8000 MT/s LPDDR5X, must be soldered, supports 128GB at most).
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#36the whole pc laptop industry really is an embarrassment right now. It has been 5 years since the M1 Macbook release, and there is no real equivalent. I'm on a thinkpad x9, which might be the closest I've seen, but the cpu performance just isn't as good.
It has always been an embarrassment. Vizio made a good laptop once and then they just existed the computer industry. They had a vision of high quality approachable laptops, desktops and pro platforms and their first gen was a good attempt, but they just didn’t follow on.
Yes! I had a Vizio laptop (the thin one ala a macbook air) and it was absolutely fantastic, probably the best PC laptop I have ever had. It was lightweight, powerful, had a good screen (for the time) plus some things that few other laptops had at the time, like a TPM.
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#37Honestly if you actually need high end specs then you should just build a PC. "16 core Zen 5 CPU, 40 core RDNA 3.5 GPU. 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM @ 256 GB/s + stunning OLED" - Easily done as a pc build. In a world where you can get this laptop with Linux, there's a new set of trade-offs - - be prepared for a LOT of things not working because the size of the market for extremely expensive configurations with high end CPU +…
Is his build even possible today in a laptop? In a desktop, you would need a top of the line threadripper for that 256GB/s of memory bandwidth. Consumer grade Zen 5 desktops reach only about 80GB/s in real world testing, with a theoretical max of slightly over 100GB/s.
The memory is shared for the GPU, so you should probably compare with desktop GPU, so 1-2TB/s.
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#38I mostly think of when geohot wanted to make his own RISC-V core and cranked out some basic verilog. It was incomplete and barely commented, and never touched again. I suspect we are going to get a few blog posts of analysis and then he moves on to something else
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#39I wonder why ThinkPads are not mentioned. It's not like I recommend them (I mean, I use one, but it's not like I've tried most laptops out there, so who I am to judge), but I was under the impression it's still a de-facto Linux laptop standard.
How’s the battery life?
The old ones had hot-swappable batteries (a second internal battery - of decent size - kept the device going while you replaced the external one). I used to keep a couple of extra 50 Wh batteries in my backpack and therefore had excellent battery life. The power efficiency wasn't great though.
I now have a Z13 Gen 1 (AMD 6850U) running Fedora and the battery life is passable. It draws 7-8W at idle from a 51 Wh battery.
Re: Bikeshedding, or why I want to build a laptop
#40Your attention is drawn to https://system76.com/
Just from the pictures you can tell it doesn't feel like a MacBook's unibody.