Yeah, same here. I'm now on an AMD X13 gen 2 and it's fantastic. I can't get temp to go past 68 degrees even with all 8x2 cores at 100% on performance profile. Fan is also completely silent and only goes on with sustained usage. Why deal with the pain of a poor WM/DE (OS X) and all the arm nonsense when you can get excellent thermals and performance w/ a Linux laptop.
Interesting. I switched to an AMD laptop for over half a year (ThinkPad T14 AMD). And I went back to a MacBook and convinced me not to go back to Linux on a laptop for at least half a decade.
Battery life was terrible compared to a Mac (6 hours if I was lucky, barely 4 hours when in video meetings). S3 Suspend worked badly, the battery would drain very quickly. Devices would often not come back after wake (particularly the trackpad). During video meetings, the fans would go into full blast (though they were more quiet than most non-M1 laptops). Noise cancellation was quite bad on Linux (ok-ish in Windows). Lenovo’s own USB-C dock wouldn’t work with 4k@60Hz (works with Windows, Linux misconfigures the lanes and didn’t use HBR3).
It was one of the models that was certified for Linux (IIRC even Fedora). But the whole experience was miserable. I bought an M1 MacBook and didn’t look back.
Fair enough - I think there were a lot of teething issues with the recent amd laptops due to lack of kernel support and some bugs in the s3 bios implementation. I probably would have been similarly frustrated if I bought 9 months ago.
Fortunately the bios bugs are fixed and the latest kernel (5.15.11) supports s3 pretty flawlessly so far, although I was using traditional suspend before that without issue. I haven’t had any other issues and has been stable over the last month of usage. Temps and performance are great and around 9-10 hrs battery life. So I think it's worth buying now.
Same story with my AMD based T495. It was horrible. I also have an M1 MacBook Air now.
I lost count the amount of times it’d panic or something would break when I needed it. The same laptop was rock solid running windows and my daughter has it now as her daily driver.
t14s here (ubuntu), there was a bios update that solved the suspend battery drain issue, same with the dock as there was updates for that too that can be installed with fwupdmgr. Disabled Bios power management to allow the OS to control it and really it's pretty flawless.
I love my thinkpad t14s, it's fast and quiet and all hardware works (even lte, although does admitedly require an alpha driver, it works fine)
No throttling as far as I can tell. When using 16 virtual cores at 100%, each core tops at about 3Ghz (probably due to power limits). Temps creep up to about 68, fan goes on, and it stays there.
That's good to hear. I'm used to laptops having terrible cooling, and suffering through processor throttling when doing anything other than browsing the web. I'm guessing that performance is a function of AMD's all around better power draw and thermals.
At least with the mobile Intel processors I'm familiar with, things like Turbo Boost get disabled and the cores will be scaled down in order to bring temperatures down. I figured AMD would do something similar, but I have no experience with their mobile processors.
According to Wikipedia, AMD's Turbo Core feature depends on power draw, while Precision Boost and Extended Frequency Range features depends on power and temperature.
was refering to the figure of 68°C which i consider very low and hence asking the question "why would the thermal management enact any limits at that temperature?"
