AMD Ryzen 5 4500U Benchmarks - Previously Unimaginable Performance For Sub-$600 Laptops

[dkasak]

I have a previous gen of this - Flex 14 with AMD Ryzen 7 2700U with Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx ( and it's an amazing laptop ). The RAM is definitely not soldered on in this one. I actually bought my son a Huawei Matebook D ( with a Ryzen 5 ), and that has its RAM soldered on. I mentioned this to my neighbour, and he said "Yeah, that's not a problem ... come and see me if you want to upgrade". He apparently has some tools for removing these soldered-on bits ( he's an electrical engineer ). I asked him how safe that would be, and he sounded very confident. I haven't taken him up on the offer ( my son doesn't need more RAM ), but it at least sounds feasible to swap out RAM if you locate someone with tools & skills.

[andrei_me]

I still to this day do not understand why people buy laptops. They serve almost no use case at all. Every single use case you can present to me, i can present you with a different solution that is going to be cheaper AND better. Unless you absolutely need to work during your travel time (on the bus, train, airplane etc) or you need access to your machine on a location where access to another machine/power grid is not available, you can be better served with other kinds of hardware. Laptop form factor is more of a fetish than a legitimate tech need.

I live in a developing country, although I'm in the upper mid class here, laptops for many reasons, are expensive.
A few weeks ago I did a research for the US price of my at then new laptop, just to find out it was discontinued 3 years ago, and when nee there, it costs around US$ 300, so low end there is a regular laptop here.

A MacBook costs as much as 250cc motorbike

That said, laptops usually are used as home computer, we consider 2h battery as a good one, as the battery is used when we loss energy (which is REALLY common depending where you live) or when you take the laptop from room to room.

I checked the benchmark here and geekbench of this Lenovo ryzen laptop, the results are 1.5x in ST and ~4x in MT than my ivybridge laptop.

Also, with the pandemic, people realized that investing in an iPhone wasn't a great choice, as the bigger creen state and productive of laptop, allied with the practibility of it compared to a desktop, is a better investment

[elovin]

Michael, I have an issue with my new 15.6" 4500U model. My touchpad is not working on both Ubuntu 20.04 and Arch Linux, but it works on Fedora. And I can't set brightness below 50%. Updating the kernel to 5.7 didn't help. Have you encountered a similar issue? Thank you.

I have an lenovo Ideapad 5 (15) with a 4500U and my touchpad is also not working with Arch Linux, it is either not detected at all or it shows up as a touchscreen. Thanks for the information about fedora though.

[Mez']

I live in a developing country, although I'm in the upper mid class here, laptops for many reasons, are expensive.
A few weeks ago I did a research for the US price of my at then new laptop, just to find out it was discontinued 3 years ago, and when nee there, it costs around US$ 300, so low end there is a regular laptop here.

A MacBook costs as much as 250cc motorbike

In Europe in general, I would say people will spend less money on a laptop than in the US.
Most people (not corporate, not gamers, not extreme on-the-goers) will be satisfied with a laptop between 400 and 800€. They just don't need more for their usage.

I believe these Ryzen 5 45000U could be very good value for money for the average Joe as it is definitely targeted at this price range.

[andrei_me]

In Europe in general, I would say people will spend less money on a laptop than in the US.
Most people (not corporate, not gamers, not extreme on-the-goers) will be satisfied with a laptop between 400 and 800€. They just don't need more for their usage.

I believe these Ryzen 5 45000U could be very good value for money for the average Joe as it is definitely targeted at this price range.

Yep, totally agree.
IMHO, AMD would sweep all the sales if they made an APU with this CPU perf but with an iGPU of 4800U or 4900U (which still a rumor yet)

[thxcv]

Do you guys think that System76 or similar vendors could sidestep the awful treatment AMD gets with the mainstream ones? Soldered ram, no Ethernet port etc. AMD can probably force the OEM providers in this area now that they have the proper bargaining "chips" Maybe this will gain more ground with another iteration of ZEN chips aimed at the laptop market.

Small players usually can't. They depend on the designs, that the ODM offers. Historically AMD is considered budget. Especially in Notebooks they were never really present. So only cheap mainboard designs are available. Maybe a few advanced designs that do not make sense for small players, too expensive.
Maybe that changes slowly with this gen and the ODM can offer more designs. But if the product isn't way cheaper than the intel version, then no one buys it. Because intel inside. This will have to wait anyway because small manufacturers don't get access to the newest stuff at first.

[dpanter]

With Linux 5.7 the Renoir graphics have been working well, blacklight controls are working, etc.

Nice retro feature!

[molecule-eye]

Midrange laptops are a whole different beast now with Zen 2 mobile. I had planned to build a desktop in the near future but since I'll need a new laptop anyway in a year and since laptop performance is way closer to desktop than it's ever been, I've basically just decided to pick up a new Ryzen laptop. The ultimate dream (for me) would be an at least 6-core mobile APU with a substantially more powerful iGPU. I find it weird that there's no iris-level mobile Ryzen sku. The 4000 series iGPU is decent, but could be way more performant without the need of a dGPU.

[BrianRamsay]

This is a bit of a tangent (and direct me somewhere else if that's more appropriate), but how do different distros handle the 2-in-1 form factor? Are there different operating modes, what is the transition like, etc? I'm considering getting one of these, but if the 2-in-1 is more of a gimmick and just results in a bad tablet or compromised laptop I may give it a miss.

[polarathene]

That said, laptops usually are used as home computer, we consider 2h battery as a good one, as the battery is used when we loss energy (which is REALLY common depending where you live) or when you take the laptop from room to room.

Sounds like a good business to bring in laptops and sell them then :P

Ryzen 4xxx series is meant to have pretty decent power savings over previous generations, and thus be competitive against Intel, AMD graphics also recently got PSR(Panel-Self-Refresh) support via kernel which Intel has enjoyed for many years(including optimized v2 of PSR, unclear if AMD graphics drivers got parity to that or just basic PSR).

PSR in basic version will allow for deeper power saving states on the system as it doesn't have to keep refreshing the screen data when idle, the display can store the idle screen in it's small memory buffer, this can have some notable power savings, v2 does that better by allowing some activity like the clock or mouse to update in their regions but still saving power when most of the screen content is unchanged(which would obviously be more realistic in usage). Intel also has another optimization for fullscreen video playback I think, though I'm not sure if Linux benefits from it and can't remember what the feature was called, I remember it being mentioned in a windows benchmark and being stated as the reason for 10 hours+ battery life vs others that performed much worse.

Budget laptops however, as I learned doesn't mean you get to benefit from PSR just because you buy an intel laptop, even if it's a new model with modern hardware. PSR requires eDP 1.3 iirc and that came out a year after eDP 1.2(around 2010-2011?), yet my laptop had a display manufactured in 2017 that still used the eDP 1.2 interface, I can't imagine that it costs that much to support the newer standards(we're at eDP 1.4 since around 2016), so I miss out on that benefit unless I spend 30%-ish of the laptop cost to buy a replacement display(which could be brighter, higher resolution, less power, etc as well) and swap that out for the standard one.

Displays tend to consume a fair amount of the battery life, so getting the 1W displays that also support PSR(could be that they're 1W when using PSR, I forget), can bump up battery life nicely. 2 hours though for casual usage is a bit low with todays products, even in the budget range.