Lenovo To Address Linux Laptop Thermal Throttling, Lower Performance Against Windows

[coder]

Hm, I haven't experienced thermal throttling myself. My CPU goes all the way from 400 MHz to 2700 Mhz, no problem. Of course, at those higher frequencies it hits 80 degrees celsius and the fan ramps up to 7500 RPM.

It's possible I experienced this problem 1-2 years ago, but I thought it was due to some UEFI setting set for maximum battery life. I changed that to maximum performance and haven't had any problems since.

Yours goes all the way to 2700 MHz? Man, I never felt so good about buying an i3! Mine is capped at 2300 MHz. Thank goodness for that. It doesn't even have turbo.

[microcode]

I dislike stupid people technology.

Q: How hard of a concept is "hot, don't touch"?

A: Apparently, very hard. We have this.

I think it's more a convenience: if you have to to take it off the desk and it's running at the higher temperature, you'll want it to come down in temperature regardless.

[coder]

I dislike stupid people technology.

Q: How hard of a concept is "hot, don't touch"?

A: Apparently, very hard. We have this.

Well, it depends on how hot. You really can't have products people are supposed to touch/hold that would either cause them burns, or at least might be so surprisingly hot that they'd possibly drop the laptop.

If it's merely uncomfortably warm, that's another thing.

[faldzip]

The absolute worst is putting a laptop on a blanket in bed. Damn thing can't breathe and just chokes and screams quitely while it is cooked alive.

You see, Lenovo makes it easier to you! Just buy P52 with i7-8750H and just place it on your desk in an air conditioned room and you get the same results as with a blanket. No beds, no blankets and still throttling down to 800MHz.

[M@GOid]

Lenovo started caring about Linux? The hell's apparently freezing over.

Actually, they sell some models with Linux, Ubuntu I believe. Also Thinkpads are the laptop of choice of a lot of developers, given the overall good support of those machines on Linux.

[coder]

Thinkpads are the laptop of choice of a lot of developers, given the overall good support of those machines on Linux.

Yeah, I was surprised how everything "just worked", on mine. No issues with wifi, special keyboard buttons, laptop lid, docking station (and its NIC), audio, external displays, or anything like that. Shit just worked.

[tildearrow]

>> These settings are used for determining between on-desk and on-lap behavior for trying to ensure that the laptop doesn't become too warm should it be on your laptop.

I'm sure this would trigger a recursive loop!

The next typo is yours, OK? I'm getting tired of this.

[intelfx]

Actually, they sell some models with Linux, Ubuntu I believe. Also Thinkpads are the laptop of choice of a lot of developers, given the overall good support of those machines on Linux.

Well, come back when they do something to non-functional (under Linux) LTE modems that cannot be ever replaced due to firmware-level whitelisting.

Also do you remember how much time did it take them to fix S3 (suspend to RAM) support on Skylake+ models? I'm not sure if Lenovo fixed S3 earlier than Linux learned S0i3.

Linux support in ThinkPads is a strictly second-class citizen. Selling stuff with preinstalled Ubuntu is nothing but a cheap PR move, prove me wrong.

[azdaha]

Actually, they sell some models with Linux, Ubuntu I believe. Also Thinkpads are the laptop of choice of a lot of developers, given the overall good support of those machines on Linux.

I wonder how much of it is truly due to Lenovo's support for Linux, rather than community projects (thinkwiki.org for some refs) or even hardware vendor support. Given that, as an example, the thinkpad workstations are intended for business users, the focus toward Linux should definitely have been greater than it has been.

Yeah, I was surprised how everything "just worked", on mine. No issues with wifi, special keyboard buttons, laptop lid, docking station (and its NIC), audio, external displays, or anything like that. Shit just worked.

I guess you're not taking into account the addition of nvidia optimus to thinkpads, or the laptop battery drain, or the thermal throttling (I'm guessing this is what they're finally trying to somehow resolve). A lot of issues have since been resolved. I'm just not sure that Lenovo deserves any more or less credit than most other PC makers.

[coder]

I guess you're not taking into account the addition of nvidia optimus to thinkpads, or the laptop battery drain, or the thermal throttling (I'm guessing this is what they're finally trying to somehow resolve). A lot of issues have since been resolved. I'm just not sure that Lenovo deserves any more or less credit than most other PC makers.

I bought one without a dGPU, due to bad prior experiences with linux support on a laptop with an ATI chip. The battery life of mine isn't awesome, but I bought it refurb, so it wasn't clear to me how much of that was due to prior wear on the battery. And being an i3, thermal throttling hasn't affected me, probably because mine strictly runs at base clock.

So, I related all of the things that surprised me, when I got it. It was vastly better than my previous Linux laptop experience. I'm not denying any of your points, but I still feel my experience has been a good one. Aside from wrestling with UEFI booting - that was a nightmare, but I suspect my issues were more to do with openSUSE and Ubuntu's support for it, and not Lenovo-specific.