What Sub-$500 Laptops Are You Most Interested In For Linux?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: What Sub-$500 Laptops Are You Most Interested In For Linux?

In the next few days I will be buying at least two sub-$500 (USD) AMD/Intel laptops for Linux testing... what should I choose?..

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sub-500-Linux-Laptops

[chimpy]

We've seen a lot of Intel laptops, so how about 2 AMD laptops. One Kaveri based and the other Carrizo based (I don't know if they make sub 500$ Carrizo based laptops though), so we can see both the radeonsi and the amdgpu drivers in action.

[kenjitamura]

Buying AMD stuff and then pointing out on the site how crappy they are for Linux has been inflaming certain members so maybe we should avoid an influx in those articles?

[schmidtbag]

Most of the laptops on sale are over a year old. Nothing that you probably don't already have. But if you insist on getting a new one, I'm on board with Chimpy about getting a Carrizo model. The GPU likely won't be anything special to test but the CPU being excavator based might be interesting to look at when you consider PPW.

[cbxbiker61]

Here's what's in my HP Pavilion 15:

CPU0: AMD A10-8700P Radeon R6, 10 Compute Cores 4C+6G

Things really only get interesting when you have a custom build done with such things as:
1080P screen
wirelesss AC
backlit keyboard

Additionally I've added:
16G memory
512G Samsung 850 PRO SSD

The Carrizo chip itself does quite nicely, it's well balanced CPU/GPU performance. I did a comparison between it and my 3 yr old AMD notebook and it halved the time for OpenSCAD to generate a 3d object, even though they are clocked very similarly.

Also note that Carrizo has hsa and gcc6 will support hsa in 2016, so computationally intensive tasks will finally be easy to share between the cpu and gpu. Expect huge gains in performance for some programs.

You have to add well know workarounds on HP notebooks to the kernel boot line: acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor for proper behavior.

Pretty much all of the vendors are trying to jack prices up by withholding 1080P and SSD's from standard units. When everyone knows that without them no notebook will look/perform up to modern expectations.

[GraysonPeddie]

Not that I've seen one so far, but I don't know if AMD A10-7400P is considered a Carrizo processor. This is what I saw:

https://www.amazon.com/forum/-/Tx247FF5X4F7IFZ/1/ref=cm_cd_naredir?_encoding=UTF8&asin=B0158XJGJ4&cdItems=25&cdNewQuestion=1&store=generic&cdPenName=

[rabcor]

Seems like most people are wanting an AMD benchmark, normally I wouldn't be one of those... But yeah I'd really like to see AMD vs Intel CPU benchmarks to see where AMD stands in that department.

Why not just buy two AMD laptops like the first commenter suggested, and use an existing Intel one for the intel benchmarks?

[stiiixy]

Agreed with the two very differant AMD lappies. Intel's GFX offering isn't as good as AMD's, for obvious reasons.

[Veerappan]

I'd also love to see some Carrizo benchmarks and power efficiency tests

[mmstick]

I also vote for AMD laptops. The latest AMD APUs are just wonderful to have, especially on Linux.