I wish they had a laptop with a latest and top AMD, 14" 4K IPS matte panel, programmers friendly keyboard (pg up/down home end on dedicated keys at least), expandable RAM and nvme drive, silent fans and metal chassis and a Linux support. Less important physical camera and wi-fi cut off switch.
If there was an ARM chip with comparable performance to M1 I would consider it too if it was running Linux.
After watching their talk with Louis Rossman I really like this company. Hopefully one day they'll have a product that will match my needs.
The link to the talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGle6z9KfZQ
Note the latest AMD 5850U chip is 40% faster [1] than the M1 for the same wattage! It really deserves more media exposure than the M1 which has the only merit of beating Intel.
TDP rating != wattage consumed. In an ideal world it would, but it has long since stopped meaning that generally. This includes the M1, which will happily exceed 15W of power consumption, and the 5850U almost certainly does as well since AMD's previous generation CPU in that class happily exceeded 15W.
You'll have to wait for a proper review that does power measurements to get a sense for how they actually compare on that front.
I agree, it'd be fairer to compare wattage at peak load. Notebookcheck indicates 40W for AMD and 30W for M1, so I guess the perf/watt is closer between the 2 chips.
Is it? I see Geenbench gives the M1 as having 1733 (single) and 7652 (multi) GeekBench score, whereas a AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U system has 1414 (single) and 8140 (multi), so the M1 is quite faster in single core than it (22%) and slower but close in multi-core (the AMD being 6% faster).
And that's with the M1 having 4 slow cores for better battery life / consumption (with 8 full speed cores it would obliterate the 5850U).
> And that's with the M1 having 4 slow cores for better battery life / consumption (with 8 full speed cores it would obliterate the 5850U).
It's not really that simple. An M1 with 8 full speed cores would also consume significantly more power and would no longer work in something like the MacBook Air. On paper these CPUs are both targeting the same power budget, so if AMD can put 8 full-speed CPUs in the same power budget that Apple can "only" put 4 full-speed and 4 low-power then why shouldn't AMD get a win from that?
I had a laptop with a similar amd cpu and even though it was rated for the same wattage, it was a lot more inefficient. The laptop would get warm just watching youtube videos and the fans would always kick on.
In contrast to the M1 which is so efficient that Apple doesn't even put a fan in it on its lower end models, and it still barely gets warm.
Can you buy one today other than the HP EliteBook 845 G8, which starts over $2300? Because you can buy M1 laptops yesterday for less than half that and I can't find any other 5800U series laptops for sale.
Lenovo has a number of 5000U models coming out (including various Thinkpads), but if I were looking for an upgrade this year, I think I'd be most excited about the 5800H Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 Pro (available for preorder now).
Regarding H vs U processors, based on my testing of a previous-gen 4800H laptop, it benchmarked comparably on a perf/W basis to the U series, but via 3rd party tools (I use RyzenAdj) you can easily set whatever TDP you want (eg from 10W or 15W to match a U up to 65W+).
Bulky, low res screen, design suggests that it relies heavily on active cooling, looks cheap and plasticy even in the marketing photos. I wouldn't buy this if it was 10x faster than a Macbook Air.
Interestingly, I have opposite preferences. I never had a Macbook Air, and I would not buy one regardless on the price because I don't like the design.
> Bulky
Often a sign of user-replaceable RAM and SSD, which is good. I don't mind if it adds a few millimeters to the thickness.
> low res screen
1920x1080 is enough resolution for a 13" laptop.
> design suggests that it relies heavily on active cooling
I don't want passively cooled computers, I want fast ones. All else being equal, compute performance is proportional to electricity consumption, and heat generated.
>I don't want passively cooled computers, I want fast ones.
Ok, but then why are we even making comparisons with M1 laptops? The M1 is a low TDP chip designed to be used in devices with minimal or no active cooling. Apple will no doubt be bringing out beefier chips for its higher end laptops in due course.
M1 CPU consumes up to 30W of electricity. That’s impossible to do with minimal or no active cooling. Instead of designing good cooling, Apple does aggressive thermal throttling.
The problem is not specific to Apple, many other companies are offering ultra-thin laptops with similar tradeoff.
As a consumer, I don’t like that tradeoff. I’m already paying for a fast CPU. Yet due to the lack of a proper fan assembly (a low-tech and cheap component, compared to CPU) I’m only able to get good performance for brief periods of time. While usually that’s OK, sometimes I want sustained performance for minutes or hours, even on a laptop.
The M1 Macbook Pro has active cooling, if that's important to you as a matter of principle. However, real world tests show that the performance gains from actively cooling the M1 are pretty marginal.
More broadly, it seems that you prioritize performance over everything else when it comes to laptops. Apple doesn't – especially not in its 13" range. What they are providing is a small form factor with crazy good battery life and performance that's more than good enough for most people.
Thermal throttling is not inherently a bad thing – it's a sign of a balanced design. If you have a fixed amount of thermal headroom to play with, then you want a processor that uses more power at peak loads than you can dissipate (so that you can take full advantage of the cooling off periods provided by non-peak usage).
> you prfioritize performance over everything else
More or less. I’m a programmer, and I want computers to compute things.
If I only wanted them to play youtube, I’d get a tablet instead. If I only wanted a laptop to run a word processor, I would look at these MacBooks or equivalent Windows devices.
> If you have a fixed amount of thermal headroom to play with
In case of ultra-thin laptops like macbooks, the primary reason why it’s fixed to just 10-15W is to look good on marketing materials. Technically, it’s easy and cheap to make it fixed to the value several times higher than that. After all, 10 years ago mainstream laptop CPUs were dissipating 35-45W: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bridge#Mobile_platform
I'm also a programmer, but don't find performance particularly important once it reaches an acceptable level. I would rather have a thin a light laptop (as would most people, judging by sales).
I should have noted I specialize on desktop and embedded development. I can always find uses of faster CPUs, more cores, and more RAM.
> I would rather have a thin a light laptop
I agree, but to an extent. I don’t have a gamer-targeted laptop because heavy to carry around.
But still, I believe these unupgradable ultra-thin laptops are a bad deal.
They only saving a few millimeters of thickness and ~0.2kg of weight, for a huge performance cost. BTW, I have installed 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD in my reasonably thin (2cm) and reasonably light (1.6kg) 13” laptop.
> as would most people, judging by sales
Judging by sales, most people don’t need a computer at all, they prefer phones and tablets. On the internets, more than half of page views are now from mobile devices.
But there’s no indication from benchmarks that it would have much better performance then the MacBook Pro. Indeed, it would be expected to perform less well on some common tasks - and it has half the battery life. I can’t even find a benchmark comparing that particular laptop to a MacBook Pro. Did you find one somewhere?
There're benchmarks comparing M1 with Zen 2 mobile CPUs such as Ryzen 7 4800U. Based on the results I saw, on average, AMD delivers similar single-threaded performance, and way better multithreaded performance.
Ryzen 7 4800U is very similar to Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U: same core and threads count, same frequency, same 10-25W TDP. The main difference of the new one is Zen 3 microarchitecture instead of Zen 2, and there're quite a few sources comparing Zen 3 to Zen 2.
If you want to be certain, wait for the direct benchmarks.
Also accessible for maintenance; you get the service manual with purchase; they actually bother writing the manual, and the support line isn't half bad.
Hate to break it to ya' but just chucking a chip into a gigantic heatsink of a frame, and relying on one or two USB-C ports to support gigantic networks of peripherals through a powered hub (sold seperately) which has issues running multiple added on monitors because the HDMI over USB-C tends to put off EMI in the 2.4 GHz band is honestly a step backwards compared to the characteristics you complain about. My old MBP would kill it's own network connection trying to drive large smart TV's through it's USB-C ports; and constantly stall handling all the input demands as I'd end up outtyping the capability of the processor to context switch on a typical programmer/scripter workload. Not had an issue one with System76's older school design approach to things like the Serval (whose battery life is abysmal comparatively, but I knew that going in. It's a workstation.)
System76 isn't out to build dispose-a-systems or systems that can only be swapped back through them on warranty. These are systems intended to be user serviced. That means thicker. You have to account for fasteners, less/no glue, stay away from over-using overly brittle plastic bezels that break at the drop of a hat, more room for connectors, so soldering labs aren't required for swapping out or adding RAM/SSD's... More generous tolerances for hand room, ergonomic motherboard and keyboard layouts. I can trust my system more, because I can actually take care of it.
Compared to my old VAIO Z Series, which I love dearly to this day, but which I always crack open with fear and trepidation because of the over-reliance on FPC's, System76 stuff is a breath of fresh air for me. I'd prefer an XFCE derivative desktop over GNOME, but eh. I'll live.
I didn't have to go hunting all over the Net for years for an unofficial community driver that actually gets me passed the most recently updated by manufacturer driver from 2012 for the Nvidia GT 630M/Intel IHD kludge, I don't as a consequence have to run with Driver Signature Enforcement off, and hardly ever update, I don't have to worry about FPC's breaking or put up with software remapping two keys on the keyboard in software because it's easier than risking screwing something up while disassembling the whole bloody laptop to get to the keyboard and mobo so I can reseat the ribbon connector in the hopes of a more solid connection reviving the bloody. No longer functioning keys.
Heck. I ended up able to find my way through troubleshooting their initial setup tool after making my own life more difficult than it needed to be on OS setup bbecause I wanted to understand how the machine worked from boot to userspace.
Something I still have zilch insight into with Macs.
AMDs chip peaks at 4.4GHz vs 3.2GHz. Together they imply 30-40% better IPC. 5nm only offers 15% better performance OR 30% lower power consumption vs 7nm.
In truth though, the A14 design isn’t too much faster than A13 or even A12 despite them being 7nm. Most of its advancements were from clock ramps. I wonder if the hardware layer for x86 kept a lot of resources tied up on that instead of advancing the architecture performance more.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but comparing clock speeds cross-manufacturer and especially cross-architecture doesn't really make much sense, right?
As far as I understand it, just because AMD and Intel chips are in the 5GHz range doesn't mean it is realistic to assume that Apple could also scale M1 up to that frequency so looking at just frequency or just IPC mean next to nothing. We pretty much have to resort to frequency x IPC i.e. benchmarks to gauge the relative difference.
You're right that M1/A14 perf jump is relatively small and seems to effectively be a port of A13 to 5nm in terms of core design, so if we wanted to guess at AMD's perf at 5nm we could try to use that as a yard stick.
I remember seeing someone do the benchmarks on that but I can't seem to find it now. He lowered ryzen 5000s wattage to match M1 with an offset to account for 7nm vs. 5nm and found that AMD was still behind in perf/w but by something like 20-30%. I'll keep looking to see if I can find it.
He arrives at the M1 having a 1.23x perf/w advantage in Cinebench when accounting for 7nm vs. 5nm. Without that it has a 1.34x advantage. Note that this is measuring the core directly. Ryzen's IO die is a huge power sucker so this really shouldn't be used to decide what laptop to buy or whatever, it's just a peek into how close their core architectures are to each other.
According to the comparison the M1 has 10% faster single-core performance. That's not nothing, but it's not really "significantly better" or something you'll notice in day-to-day usage, either.
But this is also just a single test result that's going to be far from comprehensive.
I’d assume that’s because of the novelty of it being a competitive desktop ARM processor. The processor listed isn’t much faster than the previous gen Ryzen, it’s unremarkable from an apple to apple comparison.
Because it's available in the cheap models, including a model (the Mac Mini) that costs about as much as the AMD 5850U cpu itself.
Also, I see the M1 as having 1733 (single) and 7652 (multi) GeekBench score, whereas the AMD Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U has 1414 (single) and 8140 (multi), so the M1 is quite faster in single core than it (22%) and close in multi-core (the AMD being 6% faster).
So what gives, and how does that fits with the numbers given by the grandparent?
Because so far Apple has only released entry level products with the M1. It’s pretty obvious that they will release higher end chips for higher end products later this year.
I recently bought a Lenovo Legion 5 (4800H, 512GB, 16GB, 1660ti) for around $1200 after checking the 4700u ideapad. This was before the Ryzen 5000 series launch, so I suppose the Legion 5 is around $900 mark these days.
Many OEMs don't really give a good thermal headroom for the AMD processors, and only Lenovo seems to have done it right.
Lenovo's stock management sucks though. There were no stock for many days, and had to go unorthodox methods to get my hands on a unit.
Keep in mind only four of those cores on the M1 mac are performance cores. A M1 Mac with 8 performance cores would blow that thing out of the water based on how close they already are.
It seems incredibly likely that such a product would be reserved for the highest end models for example the MacBook Pro and Mac Pro starting at 2400 and 6k respectively and would be properly compared to high end laptops that like the example don't exist yet.
It's nice to see the CPU space heating up in recent years.
4K on a 14".. what is the use case for that? unless you have some hybrid long-short sightedness (d)efficiency, use your laptop as a chesttop, or want quadruple the pixels for half the battery life I really can't see any benefit
I currently have XPS 15 with 4k screen and I can easily see pixels, so 14 should be a little better. There is also the feeling that it is 2021 and should I still be seeing pixels? I think crisp high resolution view is much better for the eyes and feels more natural. I am also almost always within reach of a mains socket, so I don't particularly care about battery life, just that I can move the machine from one place to another easily.
I think different people mean different things by "see the pixels." I can't imagine being able to see individual pixels on a 15" 4k display at laptop distances, but I can imagine being able to notice minor distortions in the outlines of text, or more discomfort than necessary when reading small text, as a result of lower pixel densities. That could be reasonably described as seeing the pixels.
My iPhone has ~320dpi and I can't see pixels at non-ridculous viewing distances. I don't know what GP's viewing distance habits or eyes are like but for me, considering laptop viewing distance is probably like twice that of smartphones, I can't imagine a 15" 4K laptop being anything but overkill.
I love pixels. Seeing them reminds me that I am in front of a computer and not a TV. Same as a car that smells a bit of oil/gasoline. Feels like a real car.
Use a Mac with a Retina display for a week and see whether you don't notice a difference — and it's certainly nowhere near half the battery life. Everyone I know who's done this has never wanted to go back.
Well, the 13 inch Macbook Pro only has a QHD screen (2560x1600) at 227 PPI.
A 14 inch screen at QHD would still be 210 DPI.
A 4K (3840x2160) display at 14 inches is 315 PPI.
I have used retina Macbook screens for extended periods of time and increasing the DPI seems like overkill to me.
As someone who went from a mac (for the last 15 years including several retina MBPs) to a 1920x1080 13" screen on a lemur pro, I really don't find that it makes a huge difference to me. I thought it would really irritate me but it doesn't.
It's really noticable when reading/writing text. I personally do dev work for a living and when I have to use a FHD screen instead of a UHD screen it's really noticable.
It's kind of like going from 144Hz back to 60Hz when playing FPS games.
Based on lots of previous comments (and yours!) that describe a day/night difference, I've concluded this is highly personal.
Work issued me a 2018 Mac with a 2880x1800 15.4" display (220 dpi), and I work at home with it plugged into a 1920x1080 23.5" display (93 dpi) from Sceptre. They are side by side, all day long, and I vastly prefer writing and coding on the FHD display, to the point that I thought I was being trolled when I read comments about "never going back".
So, I'm guessing people just like different things!
Yeah, it must be. I much prefer using monitors at stock resolution, without scaling, for that sweet real-estate, rather than having pretty displays where I can't see pixels just so it's pretty. I had a retina MacBook for a while, it was very nice, but especially for dev work... I couldn't bring myself to care enough that I'd want a 4k screen (that I'd have to run at an effective 1080p anyway) vs just a 1440p monitor of the same size I can use without scaling.
> 4K is great because it is a factor 2 compared to 1080p.
I strongly disagree. QHD is perfect for me, because everything renders natively and looks beautiful. 4K without scaling is unusable, and 4K scaled up is just 1080p - You lose all the screen real estate you paid for.
You're missing the whole point of 4K at 14". Everyone uses it scaled but there is more detail, most importantly with fonts. You don't need any stupid sub-pixel rendering stuff.
4k scaled up like that is incredibly sharp fonts tho, it looks really nice. but yea total waste of space otherwise. i was surprised to see big sur default to 200% scale on a 4k attached to m1 mac mini but obviously screen real estate is the least of concerns with that garbage padded ui
I really try to avoid looking at higher res screens too much. I like the lower price and better battery life of the HD screens and they look fine to me, but I think once you really try the higher res it will ruin the lower res for you.
I use 4K on 14". Windows defaults to 300% scaling so clearly the defaults agree with you. But 200% scaling is usable; things are a little small but the extra real estate is worth it.
I guess if my math is right, that's 104 ppi after 3x scaling? Bit large, but not bad. Take a couple fonts down in size a tad and you're probably golden. I've been writing off 4k laptops, but this brings them back into consideration for me.
Since they resell Clevo designs, they'll definitely offer such a laptop but it may take them a few more months to have one available.
They seem to be several months behind new hardware launches, which as I understand is partially because their value-add is rigorous testing and hardware support for linux. They will often patch or back port the newest kernel for the latest drivers.
There are a few things that they've never even tried, and would be obvious for the type of folks that use linux. High resolution and power efficiency are two of them that almost everyone wants.
No kidding. The OP posts a list of 10 very specific things, including some that are difficult to accomplish, expensive or nearly pointless (4k on a 14"?). "If you do this, I will support the company". So noble.
What's your logic there? I would have thought that if your eyesight is poor, resolution matters much less as you can't tell the difference. You'd want to scale things 2-4 times anyway.
2x scaling at 4k is comfortable and crisply rendered fonts are a MUST. My eyes are far more fatigued at the end of the day if font rendering isn't crystal clear. Other resolutions require non-integer scaling and my experience with that has been... not great.
I am in the exact same boat, 2x scaling at 4k. I am young but I wear contacts that are not an exact perfect prescription due to the limitations of contacts.
But people will swear up and down to me that there is no way I could possibly tell the difference between screens.
You can literally see individual pixels on a 1080p screen!
I am on Macbooks, but I want to switch to something with Linux so I am waiting for the gen 9 Thinkpad X1C with 4k screen to be available at some reasonable price.
Font rendering is also clearly worse on Linux than Mac, making the fuzzy pixels even more unworkable. I dual booted a 2015 Macbook Air into several Linux distros and I could barely read the text no matter which settings were applied.
More relevant to the overall thread:
Pop OS is awesome.
Yes, they are needing for to change name, however. "Pop_OS!" is very a stupid name, no low hyphen "_" charactir or exclimation in name is good. Only "Pop OS" is good.
2x scaling in 4K is the Hi-DPI equivalent of 1080p: on 13 or 14 inch screens, elements on screen are really tiny. On this screen size, we have mainly 1280x800 (Apple) or 1366x720 (PC) resolutions, where the Hi-DPI or Retina equivalent (2x scaling) is 2K.
With GNOME, screen elements (texts, windows and widgets) are big (way bigger than macOS or Windows). In this case 1080p-like at 2x scaling should be OK with this screen size.
It's complicated. For me it's about how smooth the text is and how consistent the experience is. 4k with 2x (integer scaling) is a pleasant balance of crisp rendering and appropriate text size.
The lower resolutions would require non-integer scaling and so far my experience doing that in Linux environments has been very poor. I don't expect this to be a smooth experience any time in the near future. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
Yes, I can definitely tell. I have owned both WQHD and 4K laptops. At least for text, I can tell the difference at first sight, and I’m more comfortable with 4K.
...And use a panel that covers at least 100% DCI-P3 color gamut.
I bought an Acer at the tail end of last year because I need color accuracy (and couldn't get my hands on high-end HP or Dell or Lenovo in Thailand because markets).
You know, I thought that that would bother me on a keyboard. However, it turned out that having PgUp/PgDn/Home/End on Fn+arrow keys, after getting used to it, is a speed improvement (at least for me). I don't have to move my hand as much. In fact, I liked so much that I have Alt+Left/Right arrow mapped as Home/End in AHK (on normal keyboards).
Laptops that aren't apple are dog slow at adding HDMI 2.0, USB-C in sufficient numbers, etc etc etc.
You'd think the amount of business laptops still made by Dell and HP would lead to a better set of mobos for laptops in general (since they are made by such a smaller number of vendors I think), but it is dog slow. The Desktop is supposed to be totally dead but the mobo support for features runs way ahead of still kind relevant laptop market by 12-18 months.
When I bought a linux laptop 4 years ago I was between System76 and Dell Developer Edition. I ended up going with Dell and I’m very happy with it but I’ve kept an eye on these guys ever since.
Really like what I see from PopOS and I will probably buy from them next time.
Take a look at the Thinkpad P14s - I don't think they offer a 4k screen but apart from that I believe it ticks all your boxes. I'm running Fedora 33 on mine and it's brilliant.
+1 on HP Omen. Fits most of your demand except for the 4k screen. I have the AMD Ryzen 7 4800H version and it's significantly faster than the beefiest macbook pro you can buy.
I have the same one - and the symmetry in the design when you open the case is beautiful, the dual SSD lots mirrored on each side from each other is really nice.
actually thats not 100% true. asus has a motherboard for that: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/Pr... it's possible on the motherboard side (this board supports amd mobile), so it should be possible for laptops, too. in fact there was a laptop for ryzen gen 2 with a motherboard that somehow added it, but I could not find it.
