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

[drakonas777]

"I guess this supposed to be a joke. Sure, ZEN4 being a ZEN3 derivative is not a ground-breaking new uarch, but it's still miles ahead of those garbageIntel E cores, "

Why did you leave out P-Cores? Because it doesn't fit the narrative?

If combining weak cores with stronger ones is bad, why does AMD also do this in new processors?

The E-cores core takes up 4 times less space on the silicon than the P-cores and that is the essence. The speed of miniaturization is over and if you want to maintain single thread and multi-thread performance gains while maintaining REASONABLE COSTS, there is no escape from 'poor cores'. 8 P-cores take up the same space as 32 E-cores. What will be faster in multithreaded programs?

And when it comes to microarchitecture, Intel has nothing to be ashamed of, e.g. 6 wide decoder, very capacious out-of-order structures , etc.

Intle's problem is high energy consumption when the entire CPU is running, hence the clocks drop. But this is solely the fault of the manufacturing technology, and AMD's advantage is ensured solely by TSMC, and not by the advantage of the CPU microarchitecture.

Combining weak cores with stronger ones is not a bad solution. The specific implementation made by Intel is a bad solution, because they failed to maintain a unified ISA across different core types. Furthermore, they had to invent new AVX extensions to partially workaround this hacked-in hybrid approach. That's my main criticism. Intel architecture is ugly and even worse than that - it adds extra unnecessary complexity on the top of x86 ISA, which itself is already pretty ugly. That's all.

AMD does not even have a 'hybrid' architecture yet. Not really. All of the ordinary, X3D and dense cores are the same cores, just in a different config. It's possible for them do do it, because ZEN core itself is not fat, it's somewhat mid-size core. It's quite possible that next year AMD will drop a CPU version with one X3D CCD and one dense CCD alongside it. That's lightyears cleaner and more programmer-friendly approach than Intel's solution.

[mibo]

Thanks Michael for this test.
I like this Thinkpad a lot. My only (small) complaint would be a missing SD card reader which I would use.

[HEL88]

They don't, which CPU do you think does this? There are rumors, that a future CPU might combine Zen5 and Zen5C cores but these have to be proven true first.

Rumors .

AMD said it officially and there are leaks from engineering samples.

Intel always claims that their manufacturing is as good or even better than the latest TSMC stuff and constantly rename their 10nm++++++

Stop telling fairy tales. You're doing fantasy here.

Give a link to the source where Intel said that 10nm is better than the best TSMC processes.

[Shtirlic]

Thanks Michael for this test.
I like this Thinkpad a lot. My only (small) complaint would be a missing SD card reader which I would use.

There is expansion slot, I ordered with card reader option the same p14s

image.png

PS
I was searching to replace my old dell xps 7390 2in1 (died week ago with heat/bios/system chip failure) and could not decide between new t14s and t14/ps14s, but after I saw the differences in service manual and the fact that Michael also purchased the p14s I ordered the same specs without any doubts. While the t14 and p14s is the same machine however you can order p14s with 64GB RAM and it would cost less than the same t14 with 32GB RAM, don't understand how this works, but whatever.

PPS
If someone as me in the past still not decided between t14/p14s vs t14s here are some of my thoughts:

• t14s is smaller and it has better materials(magnesium. aluminum) but tightly packed and the heat would be greater, so the numbers I expect be lower than t14/p14s in sustained performance (so for long compilations it would suffer some time), after heat issues that killed my dell xps 7390 2in1 and dell xps m1330 some time ago I will try to avoid tightly packed highend laptops.
• t14/p14s has 1GBE ethernet built in without any dongles
• keyboard is easily replaceable in t14/p14s. but it not the case for t14s see the service manuals for both
• option to add 64GB and don't care about memory for 5+ years.
• in some countries you still can't order OLED option with t14s

[mibo]

There is expansion slot, I ordered with card reader option the same p14s

image.png

PS
I was searching to replace my old dell xps 7390 2in1 (died week ago with heat/bios/system chip failure) and could not decide between new t14s and t14/ps14s, but after I saw the differences in service manual and the fact that Michael also purchased the p14s I ordered the same specs without any doubts. While the t14 and p14s is the same machine however you can order p14s with 64GB RAM and it would cost less than the same t14 with 32GB RAM, don't understand how this works, but whatever.

PPS
If someone as me in the past still not decided between t14/p14s vs t14s here are some of my thoughts:

• t14s is smaller and it has better materials(magnesium. aluminum) but tightly packed and the heat would be greater, so the numbers I expect be lower than t14/p14s in sustained performance (so for long compilations it would suffer some time), after heat issues that killed my dell xps 7390 2in1 and dell xps m1330 some time ago I will try to avoid tightly packed highend laptops.
• t14/p14s has 1GBE ethernet built in without any dongles
• keyboard is easily replaceable in t14/p14s. but it not the case for t14s see the service manuals for both
• option to add 64GB and don't care about memory for 5+ years.
• in some countries you still can't order OLED option with t14s

Thank you for your reply.
I think, this card reader is for credit card sized cards - maybe there are security or id cards of that format.
In the pictures the card slot looks different to a SD card slot.

Your list is interesting - I did not check the service manuals.
For me, the RJ45 ethernet is also very important as I use it daily and hate dongles...
Also, I always wanted to have OLED - I'm just not sure about the scaling under KDE with the strange 2880x1800 resolution. And FHD would have been enough for my old eyes :-)

[Shtirlic]

Thank you for your reply.
I think, this card reader is for credit card sized cards - maybe there are security or id cards of that format.
In the pictures the card slot looks different to a SD card slot.

Your list is interesting - I did not check the service manuals.
For me, the RJ45 ethernet is also very important as I use it daily and hate dongles...
Also, I always wanted to have OLED - I'm just not sure about the scaling under KDE with the strange 2880x1800 resolution. And FHD would have been enough for my old eyes :-)

You are right, smart card is for the real smart cards with chips, okay I will find openpgp card(2fa etc) to make it usable then

My main concern with OLED is a battery life, but actually I don't care, since most of the time I use it in AC mode, as for the KDE scaling - 200% should be okay, maybe fractional scaling also now works nice in latest wayland/kde. Currently I am temporarily working on 14x Asus vivopro with the same res/specs OLED display 2880x1800 and 200% scaling(windows 11) and it looks okay, but your mileage may vary.

PS
After using OLED devices it actually hurts to go back using IPS without proper black color, the same for the 60hz vs 90hz+ displays.

[Anux]

AMD said it officially and there are leaks from engineering samples.

Do you have a link to AMDs official statement? Also your argument sounded as if Zen4 is hybrid core.

Give a link to the source where Intel said that 10nm is better than the best TSMC processes.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/246902-intel-claims-three-year-advantage-10nm-process-wants-change-define-process-nodes

The general thrust of Intel's argument is that these new technologies will give it a significant lead over its rivals and competitors in the foundry space.

You have to be a massive fanboy to somehow miss Intels regularly bragging over their future lead in the foundry space.

When they renamed their 10 nm+++++ process they said explicitly that it was done to better compare to TSMC, as if their Intel 7 is as good as TSMCs 7 nm.

Just compare Milan (that is nearly 2 years older) to Sapphire Rapids https://openbenchmarking.org/result/...7a1e15ea68bf98

[ddriver]

Wrong. TSMC production technology - only thanks to this, it has higher average clocks and lower power consumption.

AMD gave up on this field a long time ago and could not withstand the competition.

Can you provide empirical evidence to back up that claim?

Cuz intel claims their process rules.

And at the very least, it seems to clock marginally higher.

And if that's the case, does this mean tsmc process is TWICE AS GOOD as intel?

They even renamed their 10nm to 7 specifically to illustrate it is a 7nm equivalent. Yet intel 7 loses to 7nm amd chips, and intel 5 loses to 5nm chips, with nearly double the core count lol...

Or could it be you are just salty and trying to diminish the merit on amd's superior uarch?

They even got hybrid right, unlike intel and its multi generational failure to do so. Amd's "small cores" actually make sense - a fully loaded cpu will never hit the same clocks at light workloads, so the same cores with less cache and resources, since they will never run at clocks high enough to need the throughput. Whereas intel just shoehorned an inferior core that I guess was supposed to go in routers and other low end stuff like that... to prop up its core count which was starting to look ugly, and in turn continued bloating their P cores to claim top results in a few meaningless benchmarks at ridiculous power consumption.

Remember, zen is a sever architecture first and foremost, and amd merely adapted to for desktop and laptop use, and it still rules. Can't say the same with intel's "desktop" uarch and its performance in the server space...

[NSLW]

Nice but expensive, and seems to have a lot of wasted surface around the display and the keyboard. The laptop below looks to be better designed in this aspect

[nfrenay]

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.

I unfortunatelly have the same opinion. While I do love the form factor, performance and efficiency of my TP T14s G3 6850U, it feels like I'm beta testing the product.
Some issues were solved by AMD and Lenovo, but not all of them.

The most serious one is random GPU crashes, specially while sharing screens in meetings (Google Meets, Zoom). For me it's almost guaranteed to crash in less than 15 minutes.
This is not only annoying but a serious issue as I crash in business meetings, wasting minutes to reboot and rejoin.

Issue and reproducer here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/a...0#note_1972791

While I recognize this looks like a complex issue, it has been open for almost a year, and I can reproduce it frequently.

Another issue I had was with VAAPI (someone mentioned it here). If want your battery to last while watching videos you have to:
1) disable IOMMU as a workaround to a bug that affects VAAPI
2) use Chrome 115 with some flags, as from 116 Google broke VAAPI support with AMD GPUs

I also had issues with suspend. The computer would waste tons of battery while suspended, but AMD and Lenovo both responded quickly on that.

Fun fact: I recommended an AMD Lenovo laptop to a friend before discovering that I can't share screens and he has the same issue, even though it's not the same hardware and software. I'm using Arch and he uses Ubuntu.