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Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by tadzik_ on Thursday October 10, 2019 @06:43PM (#21219934)
Can't speak for System76, but I got the AMD Thinkpad (A485), and I'm honestly disappointed as hell and now I understand why you don't see the Ryzens on laptops too much.

The power management is an absolute joke (the thing has two batteries and barely lasts 2 hours total), suspend works maybe 20% of the time, and the OS actually freezes on it every now and then leaving no trace in syslog. I'd much rather get an Intel now if I had a choice.

Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by lettergram on Thursday October 10, 2019 @07:57PM (#21220389)
The A485 was their first attempt with the first mobile Ryzen release. The T495s (latest mobile release) should be way better.

For reference, I had a Ryzen 1800x and it had the same OS freeze issue. The latest Ryzen CPU hasn’t had any issue with 0% down time for months.

Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by beatgammit on Friday October 11, 2019 @12:12AM (#21221502)
I have an E495 (would have gotten the T495 if it didn't have soldered RAM and/or if it still offered a second battery), and it does okay. I think I get 3-5 hours battery (haven't measured it), and I'm considering getting an external battery pack before I need the extra battery life.

The E495 uses a newer rev of their chips and is completely usable (not as good as Intel) despite still not being on 7nm. I expect the next gen to be very competitive with Intel.

That being said, I'm really disappointed at the direction Lenovo is going by trying to make everything thin. I want a powerful laptop (compiling, light gaming) and I'm fine with some extra thickness, but I want don't want anything bigger than 14". If I want thin, I can go for the X models or the T...s models, but for some reason, the regular T line is getting thinner as well, and losing a lot of the reasons I have for getting them. I ended up with the E series because I don't want soldered RAM and I'm not paying a premium for a laptop that has much of what I want removed.

If System76 can deliver a decent Ryzen laptop (want those cores) with a good keyboard and open firmware, I'll pay. I'm happy with it being thick, provided it's not too wide (needs to fit in my bag). But all I see from System76 is mediocre laptops with open source bits, and that's just not my cup of tea.

Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by franey on Thursday October 10, 2019 @06:51PM (#21219989)
What distro? I have a T495s and I haven't had any issues with it running Arch.
Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by peller on Thursday October 10, 2019 @07:24PM (#21220230)
Yea, something seems fishy. My E485 (one 3-cell battery) gets 3-4 hours on Arch
Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by tbrock on Thursday October 10, 2019 @08:22PM (#21220495)
You poor bastard. I’m running arch on an X1 6th and getting 8 hours+
Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by g4d on Friday October 11, 2019 @06:24AM (#21222996)
I mean, they're very different laptops and anyway, if this is a competition, I get ~10-11 hours with a 9 cell in my x220 on arch.
Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by freeflight on Thursday October 10, 2019 @09:20PM (#21220736)
What Ryzen are you specifically referring to?

Afaik newer generations have Intel beat on performance/watt, particularly in HT heavy applications and at least on desktop.

Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by derefr on Thursday October 10, 2019 @09:27PM (#21220769)
Being able to put out more FLOPs at max pinned wattage, doesn’t imply that you’ll take in fewer watts at idle. Power consumption isn’t linear.
Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by freeflight on Friday October 11, 2019 @05:59AM (#21222876)
I'm not talking about "more FLOPs at max pinned wattage", that would be Intel. I'm talking about efficiency as in performance delivered per watt used and on that metric Ryzen has Intel beat on desktop.

So it stands to reason those new Ryzen chips would also perform very well in laptops.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-9_3900x-vs-in...

Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by derefr on Friday October 11, 2019 @11:17AM (#21225187)
No, you’re misreading what I said. My point was that the metric AMD has Intel beat in is “performance per watt under load”. With Ryzen, each watt you spend will get you more FLOPs than the same marginal watt will get you on an Intel chip. It’s like Ryzen is a car with more torque, that can turn each cc of gasoline burned into more force, and so get you further down the road. But that doesn’t mean that Ryzen idles as low as an Intel chip; i.e. that the Ryzen car would end up burning less gasoline over an hour of city driving.

Ryzen can be more power-efficient in e.g. a server (constant near-100% load profile) while also being less power-efficient in a laptop (constant near-idle load profile.) People who talk about the Ryzen power efficiency numbers are only talking about how it performs in the server-like test context (or, often, a gaming context, where the measurement they’re using is just “what sort of PSU do you need to power this thing at max load.”) As is evidenced by sibling posts in this thread, Ryzen doesn’t fare so well in the laptop-like test context in practice.

Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by busterarm on Thursday October 10, 2019 @09:26PM (#21220760)
Leaving HT enabled in 2019.

You're bold. :)

Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by voldacar on Thursday October 10, 2019 @09:48PM (#21220854)
Not a single one of those exploits has ever been seen in the wild.
Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by busterarm on Thursday October 10, 2019 @10:50PM (#21221120)
We don't have to lock our doors, this is a safe community.

Security isn't even the only good reason to disable HT.

Re:System76 Will Ship Linux Laptops With Coreboot-Based Open... by LMYahooTFY on Thursday October 10, 2019 @08:47PM (#21220590)
I have a similar experience with the A285. Battery life is disappointing with Windows 10, and significantly more so with Ubuntu and variants.