Linux 5.8 Will Finally Be Able To Control ThinkPad Laptops With Dual Fans

[Guest]

We don't have an A14 vs Tiger Lake vs Zen3 comparison, so everything you say is just speculation on your part.

Even if IPC is ahead (and I remember Apple claiming that they pulled ahead of Skylake back in the day), lack of active cooling to allow for long periods of usage at max capacity will make these chips effectively slower. Any x86 software will run much slower as well due to overhead of emulation.

I want to see proper thick laptops with adequate cooling again, I'm sick of seeing these slim throttlebooks.

[andyprough]

The last thing I want in a laptop is fans and mechanical parts. Imagine when Apple is launching their new ARM-based Macbook with the upcoming Apple A14 processor which will also be used in the upcoming iPhone 12. The IPC is way ahead that of any x86 processor, so even at lower frequencies it can outperform then while using less energy, emitting less heat. You will be able to have a silent laptop with great battery time and performance.

Intel and AMD are so far behind, all their cores are identical. The ARM-based processors can pair weaker cores with stronger cores. Even when they eventually catch up with mixed-core functionality they're still stuck with the shitty ass x86 architecture that has terrible and is full of hacks and suffers from lots of vulnerabilities. Mean while RISC-V and ARMv8 (AArch64, ARM64) are properly designed ISAs and don't even need SMT because they don't suffer from those shortcomings.

Someone's been drinking the Cupertino Kool-aid.

[tildearrow]

The last thing I want in a laptop is fans and mechanical parts. Imagine when Apple

Oh, I see now.... You must love Apple:
- Lack of compatibility
- Utopic/near-impossible thoughts
- Open source everything even if it does not exist


Now I'm waiting for your Threadripper-beating energy-efficient $35 RISC-V board that is 100% open hardware...

[Sonadow]

I want to see proper thick laptops with adequate cooling again, I'm sick of seeing these slim throttlebooks.

Not a fan of thick laptops anymore after having bought and used three Chinese fanless laptops with Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake processors.

And many mainstream mobile Intel processors can now be used fanless. So far it's only Ryzen laptops with fans nowadays.

[torsionbar28]

No it is not, x86 was designed as CISC architecture, then came RISC which was deemed superior. So Intel implements modern x86 microprocessors in a way that is more like a RISC architecture. Later DEC Alpha, ARM, SPARC, POWER and MIPS were released which were considered superior but Intel could still stay competitive due having greater fabrication technology that was years ahead and due to enormous resources.

Eh, no. Someone didn't learn their history. Alpha, Sparc, Power, and MIPS were not "considered" superior than x86 in their day - they were superior, and by quite a wide margin.

In the mid 1990's, the place I worked bought two top-spec'd workstations, one with intel cpu (Pentium Pro) and one with DEC Alpha. We benchmarked it every which way. Of course the Alpha completely destroyed the intel product. On paper alone, it was obvious: a 32 bit 200 Mhz chip vs. a 64 bit 500 Mhz chip. The DEC Alpha was literally *years* ahead of anything from intel. The only reason we don't have Alpha today still, is because DEC was bought by Compaq who was in bed with intel. In 2000, Compaq decided to kill off the Alpha in favor of Itanium. This was for purely financial reasons - Compaq saved money by eliminating in-house CPU design, and intel got to eliminate a superior competing CPU. Win-win for Compaq and intel. Lose-lose for the server market. I worked for DEC/Compaq/HP from the 90's through the early 2000's so I had the inside view of that entire train wreck.

The MIPS story is similar, with MIPS powering the entire lineup of SGI's IRIX workstations and servers. These were top of the top cost-is-no-object machines that nobody else could match in the computer visualization world. SGI fell for the same Itanium trap and the rest is history.

SPARC and POWER are both alive and well today, and ahead of anything from intel/AMD. Remember, POWER was the first platform with PCIe4, and is also the first platform with SMT4 and SMT8 threading, while intel and AMD are stuck at SMT2. SPARC is moving along nicely too, offering a 256 thread chip @ 5 Ghz, something neither AMD nor intel can match today.

RISC-V is little more than an academic exercise at this point. Viable commodity products are years away, if we ever see them, and they will likely be closed and proprietary. ARM is winning in the mobile space, where they will continue to win, but inroads into desktop will never happen without Windows OS support, and inroads into server are unlikely until they can compete with Xeon/EPYC which won't happen any time soon.

In a nutshell, AMD and intel own the commodity market. SPARC and POWER own a sizeable portion of the HPC market. ARM owns mobile. RISC-V is academic vaporware. This dynamic will not change for the foreseeable future.

[torsionbar28]

Not a fan of thick laptops anymore after having bought and used three Chinese fanless laptops with Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake processors.

And many mainstream mobile Intel processors can now be used fanless. So far it's only Ryzen laptops with fans nowadays.

Bullshit. intel and AMD mobile chips compete in the same TDP brackets. The 15w chips from both companies are largely fanless. The 45w gamer and mobile workstation products all require fans. There is no differentiation between intel and AMD when it comes to cooling requirements. If anything, intel is worse because they're allowed to spike *well* above their rated TDP wattage for brief periods. It's why you literally cannot do anything intensive on a modern intel laptop without thermal throttling kicking in. AMD's advantage will widen with the imminent release of the 7nm Ryzen 4000 series.

[uid313]

Someone's been drinking the Cupertino Kool-aid.

It is well-known that the Apple A14 is far superior to its competition from Qualcomm and Mediatek.
My understanding is that it has a very impressive IPC.

Oh, I see now.... You must love Apple:
- Lack of compatibility
- Utopic/near-impossible thoughts
- Open source everything even if it does not exist


Now I'm waiting for your Threadripper-beating energy-efficient $35 RISC-V board that is 100% open hardware...

No, I despise Apple. I don't have any Apple product nor have I ever owned any, but their upcoming Macbook sounds very promising due to it using their new ARM processor.

Eh, no. Someone didn't learn their history. Alpha, Sparc, Power, and MIPS were not "considered" superior than x86 in their day - they were superior, and by quite a wide margin.

In the mid 1990's, the place I worked bought two top-spec'd workstations, one with intel cpu (Pentium Pro) and one with DEC Alpha. We benchmarked it every which way. Of course the Alpha completely destroyed the intel product. On paper alone, it was obvious: a 32 bit 200 Mhz chip vs. a 64 bit 500 Mhz chip. The DEC Alpha was literally *years* ahead of anything from intel. The only reason we don't have Alpha today still, is because DEC was bought by Compaq who was in bed with intel. In 2000, Compaq decided to kill off the Alpha in favor of Itanium. This was for purely financial reasons - Compaq saved money by eliminating in-house CPU design, and intel got to eliminate a superior competing CPU. Win-win for Compaq and intel. Lose-lose for the server market. I worked for DEC/Compaq/HP from the 90's through the early 2000's so I had the inside view of that entire train wreck.

The MIPS story is similar, with MIPS powering the entire lineup of SGI's IRIX workstations and servers. These were top of the top cost-is-no-object machines that nobody else could match in the computer visualization world. SGI fell for the same Itanium trap and the rest is history.

SPARC and POWER are both alive and well today, and ahead of anything from intel/AMD. Remember, POWER was the first platform with PCIe4, and is also the first platform with SMT4 and SMT8 threading, while intel and AMD are stuck at SMT2. SPARC is moving along nicely too, offering a 256 thread chip @ 5 Ghz, something neither AMD nor intel can match today.

RISC-V is little more than an academic exercise at this point. Viable commodity products are years away, if we ever see them, and they will likely be closed and proprietary. ARM is winning in the mobile space, where they will continue to win, but inroads into desktop will never happen without Windows OS support, and inroads into server are unlikely until they can compete with Xeon/EPYC which won't happen any time soon.

In a nutshell, AMD and intel own the commodity market. SPARC and POWER own a sizeable portion of the HPC market. ARM owns mobile. RISC-V is academic vaporware. This dynamic will not change for the foreseeable future.

Yes, the Intel x86 is the worst of all established architectures. Not only is Apple betting on ARM with their new Macbooks but Microsoft is also betting on ARM with their Surface line up. Windows 10 does have ARM support.

Amazon is betting on their homegrown ARM-based CPUs for their cloud.
Alibaba Group is betting on their own homegrown RISC-V based CPU.

[numacross]

Remember, POWER was the first platform with PCIe4, and is also the first platform with SMT4 and SMT8 threading, while intel and AMD are stuck at SMT2.

The top POWER9 CPU with has only 88 threads while AMD EPYC tops out at 128. POWER10 is also MIA for quite some time now.

SPARC is moving along nicely too, offering a 256 thread chip @ 5 Ghz, something neither AMD nor intel can match today.

Frequency is only loosely related to actual performance. How does that SPARC behave in a variety of workloads that are not Oracle database servers? Does anyone even make new high core SPARC parts? I thought Fujistu finally gave up on their design in favour of ARM and Oracle hasn't had anything new since 2017.

In a nutshell, AMD and intel own the commodity market. SPARC and POWER own a sizeable portion of the HPC market.

Do you have any numbers to back those claims up? Because it doesn't seem like it:

[carewolf]

In a nutshell, AMD and intel own the commodity market. SPARC and POWER own a sizeable portion of the HPC market. ARM owns mobile. RISC-V is academic vaporware. This dynamic will not change for the foreseeable future.

Maybe 20 years ago, but those days are long over. AMD64 killed the non-x86 CPUs in the server and HPC markets, what is left is all legacy stuff. Now there are just two markets x64 and ARM, but with some minor overlap on the low end of x64 and high-end of ARM.

Edit: And the real lesson from all that is that instruction sets doesn't matter any more and haven't for decades. The decoding is minor and happens for every architecture, as they now all decode to feed an out-of-order backend. The separations in markets is mostly just artificial.

[rlkrlk]

Not a fan of thick laptops anymore after having bought and used three Chinese fanless laptops with Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake processors.

And many mainstream mobile Intel processors can now be used fanless. So far it's only Ryzen laptops with fans nowadays.

I want a big laptop (like my current ThinkPad P70, no less) if for no other reason than to load it to the gills with storage. I've had my P70 for less than 3 years, so it has a way to go yet, but I don't like the trends toward eliminating 2.5" bays and kill off decent cooling. If I were to buy a laptop, I'd want a reasonably powerful CPU (say, one of the Ryzen 7 or Ryzen 9 Zen2 chips). I don't mind being a pack mule.

Now, I'm admittedly not likely to shoot 50,000 frames next football and basketball seasons, thanks to our fiend COVID-19, but that's the kind of thing I do a lot of. And I was still hoping Canon would introduce a replacement for the 7DmkII, presumably with a somewhat higher pixel count, further consuming storage. I have copies of everything on my server, of course, but it's convenient having them both places (and not to mention that I'm a pack rat).