AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U Linux Performance

[antonyshen]

It looks really good. But on the Lenovo website I don't see that model at $1.3k, rather at $2k. Where do you see such low prices?

I bet it's black friday price.

[antonyshen]

If they're using soldered RAM and other parts they're no where near the same quality of previous generations of Thinkpads. The reason they were popular is because they were also repairable as well as reasonably well supported with legacy ports (mainly RS-232) for interfacing with enterprise and hobby hardware. Lenovo is has been trashing the Thinkpad brand with these low end consumer grade hardware tricks wrapped in a formerly proud business lineup. Wouldn't touch the newer Thinkpads with a 10 foot pole.

L14 maybe the answer to you, however the LCD display/speaker quality may not be as good as T14; also there are some issue reported with linux previously.

[antonyshen]

Michael I can't see the entire article, it doesn't load
I am looking for a T14 amd gen2 or a L14 amd gen2, and I would love to see the article

I saw some nasty things about the L14 on Linux, and seems that a bios update solved at least the majority of issues.. like laptop doesn't wake up from suspend, some keyboard keys, press themself, or not respond the keyboard and such..

Here is the major thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=269449
For that price, I would buy one for sure..

Is there any problems with the site , because previous articles [Featured], doesn't show in my browser recently, I don't know why :/

Check your ad blocker, maybe it interfere with the content loading.

[antonyshen]

Oh I want one, wait until it lower the price again!

[sdack]

What kind of benefit do you get from rendering in higher resolution and downscaling it to lower res display? Especially on a laptop?

It can work as a form of super-sampling or multi-sampling. It can produce smoother edges, but the same can already be achieved with just anti-aliasing. Still, when a game has low graphics requirements (i.e. because it is an old game) then it can be used to enhance those games to look a little bit better. But this over-sampling comes at a huge performance cost, because the GPU has to render many more pixels than there really are and then downscale and filter the image in addition to it. Many games do not support it and fail to upscale their user interface and it becomes harder to see, because it is stretched out and its elements are very tiny. Again, this is not a feature of a particular laptop, but all modern GPUs support it now and it is implemented over the driver.

The real benefit lies obviously with the vendors, who use this feature to sell computers with a standard FHD display (1920x1080) and advertise it as 4K to customers. Those who do not know the difference are easily tricked into thinking that they are getting a computer with an actual 4K display. These do exist and 4K is on the rise, but such displays are not cheap, and when a clueless customer falls for the bullshit then they think they are getting a bargain.

[shmerl]

But since GPUs allow for the opposite, to render graphics at a higher resolution than the actual display, do some vendors use this feature to lie to customers and to tell them their machines have a "4K display", when it is really an FHD display

What kind of benefit do you get from rendering in higher resolution and downscaling it to lower res display? Especially on a laptop?

[lejeczek]

phoronix Is there any support for fwupd?

[sdack]

I'm not sure what you mean. It has resolution in pixels listed in the specs. What's a "virtual resolution"? How are you going fake higher resolution on the lower res screen?

Displays have a native resolution and whatever resolution you select in software gets either up- or downscaled to match the native resolution of the display. So can one render games at 4K resolution and still enjoy them on an FHD display, because GPUs these days allow for it. This was not always supported and in the past did GPUs only support upscaling, i.e. to select 800x600 in software where the GPU then applies a simple upscale filter to render it at 1920x1080 native resolution. But since GPUs allow for the opposite, to render graphics at a higher resolution than the actual display, do some vendors use this feature to lie to customers and to tell them their machines have a "4K display", when it is really an FHD display. If you tolerate such bullshit then you will soon hear them say they have 8K and 16K displays. In fact, when you go to the Lenovo website and search for the T14s will you find that all displays are listed as 14" with FHD as the native resolution. Just to be clear, any PC these days with a somewhat recent graphics card can do this. Any old PC with an Nvidia GTX 900 or 1000 card and some old 1920x1080 display can render at 8K and downscale it to 1920x1080 (FHD) resolution. It does not make it an actual 4K or 8K display. After an image has been rendered does it simply get downscaled and filtered into a 1920x1080 resolution.

[tildearrow]

If they're using soldered RAM and other parts they're no where near the same quality of previous generations of Thinkpads. The reason they were popular is because they were also repairable as well as reasonably well supported with legacy ports (mainly RS-232) for interfacing with enterprise and hobby hardware. Lenovo is has been trashing the Thinkpad brand with these low end consumer grade hardware tricks wrapped in a formerly proud business lineup. Wouldn't touch the newer Thinkpads with a 10 foot pole.

Completely agree. It's very sad to see that the next generation of laptops is all about being extremely thin (like why?), light and useless.

Where did the classic laptops go? To a niche market?
Even the 2012 MacBook Pro had a FireWire port, because there might be that person who still needs it.

The lack of serial port is a gripe. I mean come on, it was extremely easy to just plug in a cable and be able to debug a failing server...

[shmerl]

Can you elaborate on that? Do you mean in the BIOS settings, via a kernel parameter, or what?

When you are buying the laptop you select the amount of RAM, screen resolution and etc. Options for the latter depend on the former.