Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 w/ AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Running Nicely On Linux

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 w/ AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Running Nicely On Linux

The past few weeks I've been putting the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD mobile workstation through its paces that is powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U SoC. Besides uncovering one BIOS issue that is in the process of being resolved, this latest-generation AMD-powered laptop that features 64GB of LPDDR5X memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, and integrated Radeon graphics with 2.8K OLED display has been working out well on modern Linux distributions. Here's a look at this AMD Zen 4 laptop running on Linux and plenty of performance benchmarks for this laptop.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/thinkpad-p14s-gen4

[Hohlraum]

Given my experience with my TP T14 6850U I don't know that I'll do AMD again with my next laptop. It just feels like such a moving target all the time. You need to be bleeding edge when a new AMD platform first comes out just to get the thing to boot. But then after awhile you don't want to be bleeding edge because they are constantly breaking things with new kernel releases. Maybe not isolated to AMD but frustrating either way.

[Mitch]

Michael, if you had to take a guess, how long do you think battery life is on this machine if you turn on those power saving settings and do some office work or web browsing?

[Michael]

Given my experience with my TP T14 6850U I don't know that I'll do AMD again with my next laptop. It just feels like such a moving target all the time. You need to be bleeding edge when a new AMD platform first comes out just to get the thing to boot. But then after awhile you don't want to be bleeding edge because they are constantly breaking things with new kernel releases. Maybe not isolated to AMD but frustrating either way.

Aside from the ACPI Platform Profile BIOS bug, the ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 hasn't given me any troubles on modern distros. Unlike the Acer Swift Edge 16 that's had some graphics driver bugs on different kernel versions or another [embargoed] Phoenix laptop that has a graphics driver bug too. So in that regard for the ThinkPad P14s it's worked out better than some of the other laptops - Lenovo has tested this device with Linux unlike some other vendors.

But yes it's a broader problem too, just like Meteor Lake laptops coming up and the Intel graphics driver there not yet exposing it by default.

[Michael]

Michael, if you had to take a guess, how long do you think battery life is on this machine if you turn on those power saving settings and do some office work or web browsing?

A number of hours but no accurate estimate to relay at the moment, due to playing around a lot with the platform profiles... Now that the main benchmarking is complete will have time to do more other tests. Or in like 2 weeks will be at an event with the laptop likely, so will be able to provide a real-world estimate in use.

[bubblethink]

Michael, did you get a chance to test h/w video decoding ? There's a long standing bug with decoding vp9 videos (common on youtube) for AMD GPUs. There's a reproducer in the tracker too: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/8044 .

[superm1]

Given my experience with my TP T14 6850U I don't know that I'll do AMD again with my next laptop. It just feels like such a moving target all the time. You need to be bleeding edge when a new AMD platform first comes out just to get the thing to boot. But then after awhile you don't want to be bleeding edge because they are constantly breaking things with new kernel releases. Maybe not isolated to AMD but frustrating either way.

Just want to mention this was absolutely a pain point a few kernel releases ago, but I got beyond annoyed by it enough during development that I pushed a kernel series that the amdgpu driver won't give up the EFI framebuffer unless you've got the matching GPU microcode and the kernel has support for the matching hardware. It's in all the major distros now. Famous last words; but I expect that "next year's" new hardware boots up no problem on 6.2 or later using the EFI firmware framebuffer. You can then move to a newer kernel with the "proper" accelerated support after you get installed.

Also in terms of bleeding edge - you don't need to be on bleeding edge for Phoenix. Everything important has backported to the 6.1 LTS kernel. You can run that.

[Nth_man]

Michael: Does it have a fingerprint reader that works?

[JEBjames]

Michael

Typo page 2

"Ryzen 7 PRO 7840UJ" I think should be "Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U"

[espi]

I'm really tempted by this laptop to replace my P14s gen 2. I dislike hybrid graphic solutions and these AMD APUs are incredible. The 7840U has about twice the GPU performance of my current 5850U, which I would love to have.

Now, the firmware situation of these Lenovo laptops is horrible, it took like a year to get decent firmware that didn't drain all the battery when sleeping when using S3 sleep. Kernel support might also be spotty, both thanks to Lenovo and thanks to AMD. For example, s0ix only started working without kernel flags on Linux 6.1, with some hacks to avoid firmware bugs being added to the kernel. The memory clock reported by the GPU is also stuck at max all the time on kernels below 6.5 (I don't know if mclk means anything on an APU, I'm guessing some internal bus is stuck at max clock).