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Lenovo Announces New ThinkPads With AMD APUs

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  • Lenovo Announces New ThinkPads With AMD APUs

    Phoronix: Lenovo Announces New ThinkPads With AMD APUs

    For the many of you Linux users that have been desiring an AMD laptop, things could get interesting with Lenovo having just announced the ThinkPad A-Series...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    the initial A275 and A475 models are powered by "7th gen AMD PRO A12 processors with AMD Radeon R7 integrated graphics."
    I REALLY hope it's not because they are recycling the same mobos in new chassis, you know the ones with SINGLE CHANNEL ram, the ones with SOLDERED DOWN 4GB "ram bank" so you can only get up to 12GB total.

    Not that I'm complaining for the current models (they are entry level laptops), but you never know, OEMs always had APUs on shitty mobo designs so far.

    Really hope these laptops supposedly for businness stuff actually received some love on the mobo design side.

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    • #3
      ah come on vbullettin, stop blocking my posts.

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      • #4
        I've got a T440p at work (quad-core haswell), and I'm in the market to replace my personal laptop (2009 model MacBook pro, core 2 duo) this fall/winter. I am really hoping for a good 13-14" Raven Ridge option. The money is waiting to be spent... Now I just want to know who gets it.

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        • #5
          That's Bristol Ridge so it's DDR4.
          BR is basically Carrizo with DDR4 support.
          BR FX-9830P works pretty good and it should make it easy for lenovo to upgrade to RR in the future if they chose to do so.
          Last edited by Nille_kungen; 07 September 2017, 06:36 PM.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by starshipeleven View Post
            I REALLY hope it's not because they are recycling the same mobos in new chassis, you know the ones with SINGLE CHANNEL ram, the ones with SOLDERED DOWN 4GB "ram bank" so you can only get up to 12GB total.
            Aside from IT geeks running virtual machines, nobody comes close to using 12 GB on a laptop. Heck according to 'top' I'm not even using 12 GB on my 32 GB desktop, while running Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Steam, Bitcoin client, *and* a 4 GB Win7 VM all at once.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by torsionbar28 View Post
              Aside from IT geeks running virtual machines, nobody comes close to using 12 GB on a laptop. Heck according to 'top' I'm not even using 12 GB on my 32 GB desktop, while running Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Steam, Bitcoin client, *and* a 4 GB Win7 VM all at once.
              For a 800$+ laptop as the ones in the article it should very well do what other Intel laptops in its price range do (or better), so I expect no soldered RAM bullshit and proper dual channel, especially because APUs do show better GPU perfromance with dual-channel (unlike most Intel stuff that is too weak for it to matter).
              Would also be cool if the APU was unlocked to 35w of TDP instead of locked to 15w (both CPU and GPU performance increase, not at the same time though as they share the same thermal budget).

              At that price point and target (kinda-businness) you don't spit on 16GB RAM. VMs are a thing in many jobs where you need to work with different IDEs depending on the hardware used in your project, like in embedded or in industrial automation (and each IDE is a total bitch, installing 123345 useless crap services, needing a specific Windows version, and so on and so forth so you can't just install them in your host Windows 10 OS).

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              • #8
                Originally posted by torsionbar28 View Post
                Aside from IT geeks running virtual machines, nobody comes close to using 12 GB on a laptop. Heck according to 'top' I'm not even using 12 GB on my 32 GB desktop, while running Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Steam, Bitcoin client, *and* a 4 GB Win7 VM all at once.
                This is true for the vast majority of users out there, however an excess of RAM does a lot to assure the machine will be usable well into the future. Personally I'm trying to milk my 2015, 13 MBP until we start to see real AI / ML acceleration hardware designed into our laptops. There are many differing approaches so it will be interesting to see whom will lead with hardware and software.

                By the way I only mention that having an excess of RAM as being a good thing because in the past laptops certainly didn't have enough RAM to remain viable long at all. This was pretty much true no matter what OS you ran, eventually an upgrade or two to the OS or your favorite apps demanded more RAM than you had. From the reliability standpoint I do wish that more companies soldered in far more RAM instead of tossing in an upgrade slot.

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                • #9
                  Well let's hope they do a proper dual-channel setup with unlocked 35W APU and NO dGPU !!!! For what ever reason, there does not seem to be such a combination on the market. Why do they bundle inferior R5 or R7 DDR3 dGPUs into these laptops ? The iGPU is strong enough to not need the dGPU at that level, and Dual Graphics is not really a usable solution.

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                  • #10
                    Can't wait for laptops with Ryzen APUs.
                    Zen CPU cores combined with Vega graphics on the same die will be something that looks really good compared to Intel's offerings.

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