AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 laptop processors • Hacker News Board

Re: AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 laptop processors

#31

Post by bsdubernerd » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

bestham wrote: post #20

bsdubernerd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, I'm in the need of a new laptop this year, and I'm explicitly waiting for an AMD Ryzen. I don't even care about the performance to be honest, I'm sure it will be adequate and I simply don't want Intel anymore. With all the mitigations applied, I've lost the performance gain of the last two Intel laptop generations I had. The integrated intel gpu is ok performance-wise, but being on linux I'm also tired of…

Where can I read more about these kernel / driver related regressions of each revision?

These are deaths by a 1000 papercuts, caused by a combination of kernel/kms drivers, xorg & dri. Reporting these bugs is an issue by itself, since it's really non-trivial to understand where some of these problems are and how to report them.

One example I like to give is how for the better part of 2018, xorg+kms with (if I remember correctly) broadwell was new, caused random tearing issues that required to use the legacy i915 driver. The i915 had also other issues at the same time, causing blits in xrender to copy dirty areas of memory. Different issues popped up depending if you were daring enough to switch the dri version, glamour and kernel version.

This got eventually resolved.. but by the time I switched to haswell. Things got better on the kms front, until I realized I couldn't rotate the screen anymore. When this got resolved, the driver couldn't restore the screen after dpms blanking... This one is fixed on skylake, but on haswell still isn't.

... and so on and so forth. All this was on the lenovo x1 carbon (various versions), then on the x1 yoga (1st, and I'm now on the 3rd version).

Re: AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 laptop processors

#32

Post by ksec » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 11:49 PM UTC

DiabloD3 wrote: post #24

Roritharr wrote: post #17

So Anandtech has this to say about Thunderbolt 3 support: "Display support for the CPUs allows for two 4K monitors through DisplayPort over Type-C, an additional 4K monitor if Thunderbolt is used, and a fourth monitor if USB 4.0 used. AMD has designed Renoir to not need additional chips to detect which way a Type-C is connected – that is all handled on die. With the display and USB support, the processor allows for c…

No, you want the next generation, for the same reason: Thunderbolt is now officially dead, it has been absorbed into the official USB4 standard. There is very unclear support for existing Thunderbolt-over-Type-C devices under USB4, and it is likely your devices will stop working. Please wait until USB4 and USB4-based solutions start shipping before you start adopting it, else you're going to be stuck with a bunch of…

>Thunderbolt is now officially dead

There is, actually Thunderbolt 4. It is in no way dead. To what extend this is different to TB3 is unclear yet.

>it has been absorbed into the official USB4 standard.

Not Strictly true. TB is not a mandatory part of USB 4 standard. Which means you will likely have lots of USB 4 controller without TB support. ( Cause It will be cheaper )

>There is very unclear support for existing Thunderbolt-over-Type-C devices under USB4

It will work as long as your USB4 has support and certified with TB. You will have to use a TB cable ( which you should have if you are already using it ) instead of any USB-C cable.

How exactly will TB certification works without involving Intel is still unclear.

Re: AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 laptop processors

#33

Post by ksec » Tue, Mar 17, 2020, 11:56 PM UTC

Roritharr wrote: post #28

DiabloD3 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you want the next generation, for the same reason: Thunderbolt is now officially dead, it has been absorbed into the official USB4 standard. There is very unclear support for existing Thunderbolt-over-Type-C devices under USB4, and it is likely your devices will stop working. Please wait until USB4 and USB4-based solutions start shipping before you start adopting it, else you're going to be stuck with a bunch of…

I already have a bunch of TB3 Docks in our company, so ditching them would really be painful and a reason to stick to Intel.

Refer to my comment above.

Re: AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 laptop processors

#34

Post by richajak » Wed, Mar 18, 2020, 9:07 AM UTC

bsdubernerd wrote: post #18

close04 wrote: post #6

I'm not sure if my next laptop purchase is going to be an AMD one because I haven't got enough data yet, specs, benchmarks, etc. But I know one thing for sure, I will exclude from my shortlist any OEM that does not have a serious AMD based lineup. If they only have 1-2 models, or only in the low cost segment just to tick a box, I will be looking at other brands. I can't help but remember Intel's practices in the past…

In my case, I'm in the need of a new laptop this year, and I'm explicitly waiting for an AMD Ryzen. I don't even care about the performance to be honest, I'm sure it will be adequate and I simply don't want Intel anymore. With all the mitigations applied, I've lost the performance gain of the last two Intel laptop generations I had. The integrated intel gpu is ok performance-wise, but being on linux I'm also tired of…

I would suggest to get another Thinkpad as other brands may not not be tweaked to Thinkpad loyal customers. For me, I always find my Thinkpad is quiet and cool during heavy workload.

As for Ryzen, I just bought their budget laptop, E485 (with Ryzen 2200u+SSD+FHD screen) last year. I was waiting patiently for Thinkpad deal to come, it was worth to wait, as my aging SL410 was still working. It has been matching my expectation so far: affordable, snappy enough, and good battery.

As for Thinkpad models, I find that their budget ones are sufficient for my startup and personal usage, as I do not use enterprise-level features, like those in T series (that I used during my corporate lives).

Re: AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 laptop processors

#35

Post by snvzz » Wed, Mar 18, 2020, 9:24 AM UTC

kemotep wrote: post #15

abrowne wrote: post #10

They mention Linux at least once in the article. That's always good to see.

Patches for Renoir based APU's appeared in kernel 5.4[0]. Looks like by the time these launch they will have out of the box Linux support which is huge compared to how Raven Ridge launched. [0]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Reno...

And 5.4 is a LTS kernel. They were just in time apparently.

Re: AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 laptop processors

#36

Post by bsdubernerd » Wed, Mar 18, 2020, 12:16 PM UTC

richajak wrote: post #34

bsdubernerd wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my case, I'm in the need of a new laptop this year, and I'm explicitly waiting for an AMD Ryzen. I don't even care about the performance to be honest, I'm sure it will be adequate and I simply don't want Intel anymore. With all the mitigations applied, I've lost the performance gain of the last two Intel laptop generations I had. The integrated intel gpu is ok performance-wise, but being on linux I'm also tired of…

I would suggest to get another Thinkpad as other brands may not not be tweaked to Thinkpad loyal customers. For me, I always find my Thinkpad is quiet and cool during heavy workload. As for Ryzen, I just bought their budget laptop, E485 (with Ryzen 2200u+SSD+FHD screen) last year. I was waiting patiently for Thinkpad deal to come, it was worth to wait, as my aging SL410 was still working. It has been matching my expe…

Although thinkpads work fine, I attribute this due to the number of developers using them, definitely not because Lenovo is spending ANY money to make it work. This is not how it's supposed to be working. There are a few big issues that are making me reconsider them entirely.

You cannot buy a Lenovo without a Windows license. This is minor considering the price I'm usually going for, but since I don't use it at all, I consider it a microsoft tax.

Their "computrace" bios feature is still there in every new laptop.

With skylake, the last edition of the Yoga and X1 Carbon couldn't do S3 sleep by default anymore. For no other reason than to force windows use S2Idle. It requires a quite annoying work-around on linux to force S3, and only ~6 months ago we finally got a bios patch to re-enable S3...

The temperature throttling defaults are different from linux to windows, causing linux to throttle much more aggressively than needed on skylake. This is also caused by some bios issue which you can work-around with msr registers, but again... why?

I overall like the hardware. I'm quite fond of the built-in wacom pen too. I have minor quibs about the keyboard (QC issues) and screen (all TP I had in the last 5 years tend to develop bright spots in the backlight), but overall it's hard to find something similar. The dell XPS developer line is the only alternative I would be considering, and mostly due to their linux offering.