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Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

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Re: Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

#121

Post by michalf6 »

intsunny wrote: post #13

I'm convinced there is a conspiracy that prevents laptop manufacturers from shipping AMD chips on 13" high end laptops. Almost every (every?) AMD laptop I find is some 14-15" clunker with a garbage screen. I've had to put off buying a new macbook because of the shitty keyboard situation and all laptops (mac/pc) because it appears Intel's newest CPUs are still vulnerable to Meltdown/Spectre. A highend 13" AMD based Li…

Zen and Zen+ mobile chips had really crappy idle power usage, so they're not that suitable for ultraportables. It may change with this generation.

Re: Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

#122

Post by scumbert »

baybal2 wrote: post #84

I will be not so easy. Big OEMs are bound by the supply chain. Small OEMs are dependent on solution providers. Intel pays to solution providers to not to work with AMD in China. That's pretty much on the record, and not a secret to anybody in the industry. And for big OEMs, the supply chain trumps everything. Idling assembly lines are extremely costly for them. One week idle can easily wipe out 1+ month of profits fo…

AMD is cooperating closely with Chinese firms and has them to thank in part for its resurgence in the desktop die space.

I wouldn't be surprised if these partnerships lead to more AMD PC's from small OEM's in the near future, perhaps only for the Chinese market.

Chinese home-grown fabrication is also at parity with AMD Bulldozer, and likely to accelerate with acquisitions of European chipmaker technology.

Notably meanwhile China has effectively blocked Qualcomm from making similar moves purportedly on antitrust grounds.

Re: Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

#123

Post by dhd415 »

jiggawatts wrote: post #26
jankotek wrote: post #16

> Ultramobile, slim, and desktop replacements No! I want proper thick modular 17" desktop replacement with 256GB RAM. Platform that would replace old Thinkpads.

We're the "nonexistent" market of IT consultants with high incomes that need a high-end laptop. As a third-party to my clients, I cannot rely on the availability of external monitors, keyboards, docking stations, or WiFi. I lug around a heavy Clevo laptop with a 17" 4K screen, 2x RJ-45 ports, quad-core 4 GHz CPU, and 64 GB of memory. These are my minimum requirements, and practically nothing meets it any more! Clevo…

Doesn't the Thinkpad P7x line of laptops still tick all those boxes? The only one it might not have is dual RJ45 ports, but I'd think a USB RJ45 port would suffice in the cases where a second LAN port was required.

Re: Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

#124

Post by nradov »

jiggawatts wrote: post #26
jankotek wrote: post #16

> Ultramobile, slim, and desktop replacements No! I want proper thick modular 17" desktop replacement with 256GB RAM. Platform that would replace old Thinkpads.

We're the "nonexistent" market of IT consultants with high incomes that need a high-end laptop. As a third-party to my clients, I cannot rely on the availability of external monitors, keyboards, docking stations, or WiFi. I lug around a heavy Clevo laptop with a 17" 4K screen, 2x RJ-45 ports, quad-core 4 GHz CPU, and 64 GB of memory. These are my minimum requirements, and practically nothing meets it any more! Clevo…

I'm surprised you find that guests can plug into the main corporate LAN. That's a sign of totally incompetent security (unless it's a lab network or something firewalled away from the regular enterprise network). Wired Ethernet access should be locked down to only authorized devices.

Re: Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

#125

Post by johndubchak »

big_chungus wrote: post #118
johndubchak wrote: post #115

Excellent challenge to the big OEM's. I doubt many will give it a second thought. What I'd love to see is some of the gifted and talented Makers we've seen in 2019 whip out their dremels and 3D printers and say, "THIS is what I want!" Couldn't you take a chassis with a high-end screen and fabricate a mount that would accommodate securing an AMD board to the existing mounts of a previous Intel board? I know I sound na…

At least part of the problem is getting said board; laptop motherboards are often specially manufactured for each chassis, and there is no standard form factor like there is for desktops. It might be possible to buy one from a different model, but most boards aren't socketed for AMD chips so that's out, and it's not really feasible to just build your own motherboard.

Very true and. I understand your point. I was trying to suggest that you cou take an AMD motherboard and 3D print some sort of adapter that would adapt its form factor to fit the particular form factor of the existing chassis.

At least as a PoC.

Re: Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

#126

Post by AnthonyMouse »

DCKing wrote: post #79
syshum wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Not enough to offset existing business agreements with Intel Translation, Anti-Trust violating agreements that Intel has been guilty of in the past

There are also legal business agreements like "buy 100,000 CPUs from me and you'll pay 10% less", which are really commonplace, don't violate antitrust at all, and AMD will also be negotiating these with major OEMs all the same.

The issue with those is when you look at the business the customer does to begin with. If they sell 103,000 laptops and you say "buy 100,000 CPUs from me and you'll pay 10% less" and a competitor sells 255,000 laptops and you say "buy 250,000 CPUs from me and you'll pay 15% less" and so on, always offering the deal where you choose between a discount for making >95% of your sales volume Intel or paying retail prices for CPUs, the fact that you're specifying that proportion of their sales as an absolute number rather than a percentage doesn't seem like it ought to change very much.

Re: Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

#127

Post by disintegore »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #105
fortran77 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Users don't want to switch, either. I won't take a chance on an AMD machine to save a couple of dollars. Maybe I'm being rational, maybe I'm not, but I'm sure I'm not the only consumer who feels this way. I want to buy the "happy path" when I'm getting a product.

I think most consumers are not very knowledgeable of chip manufacturers. A business guy buys Dell/lenovo, couldn't care less what chip is inside. At most they might check if it has a graphics card, or number of cores

IT professionals usually buy the hardware, and they're typically somewhat familiar with the market. As far as CPUs go, their options are "does this person need an i5 or an i7". When buying server hardware they'll gloss over the selection of Xeon systems their budget can accommodate.

You rarely get consequences for buying Intel/Cisco/etc, no matter how overpriced and otherwise maladapted their products may be.

Re: Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

#128

Post by smolder »

selectodude wrote: post #120
smolder wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk of breaking anything by overclocking is really low anymore - you'll run into instability long before you damage anything. The best argument against overclocking IMHO is that the time and expense is generally not worth it. With a CPU overclock you might gain 10% performance while consuming 30% more power, after investing time and fancy cooling solution. Gone are the days of rapid improvement when you could oc…

That, and CPUs will juice themselves up by default. Intel has turbo boosts up to like 5GHz nowadays. I couldn't do that if I tried, and frankly I don't feel any reason to.

Yep, they're very aggressive with the voltage and frequency out of the box. Continuous per-core thermal monitoring and frequency throttling changed the game - chips no longer need extra headroom to accommodate the worst thermal conditions they might see.

Re: Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

#129

Post by llampx »

TheOperator wrote: post #109
intsunny wrote: post #13

I'm convinced there is a conspiracy that prevents laptop manufacturers from shipping AMD chips on 13" high end laptops. Almost every (every?) AMD laptop I find is some 14-15" clunker with a garbage screen. I've had to put off buying a new macbook because of the shitty keyboard situation and all laptops (mac/pc) because it appears Intel's newest CPUs are still vulnerable to Meltdown/Spectre. A highend 13" AMD based Li…

Couldn't have anything to do with the fact that Intel literally has a more power-efficient SoC? I wouldn't be surprised to see more 13" AMD laptops with the 7nm die shrink next generation but even then I don't see AMD being more efficient than Intel 10nm.

Why?

Re: Laptop OEMs – make a proper high-end AMD laptop

#130

Post by llampx »

robertoandred wrote: post #113
DanTheManPR wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not? My work laptop has very high DPI, and I hate all the scaling issues I encounter with all the corporate software I have to use. To the point that I much prefer to plug it into a 1080p monitor.

Sounds like a Windows problem. Macs have had high DPI solved since 2012.

Sounds like a legacy software problem. Old Mac software is the same.
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