HP ZBook Studio G7 Aims To Attract Linux Developers, Data Scientists

[Davidovitch]

Nice. If it only had an AMD CPU. I really would like to know how the state of mobil dGPU of amd.

Yep, rn unless it is a light book with no dedicated GPU, AMD seems to be just a far far better choice especially considering a data scientist or developer will profit more from more cores than higher clocked cores.

For CPU, sure Zen 3 makes sense, although their shoddy Linux support is a real showstopper. For dGPU, well NVIDIA or Intel makes better sense. Way better Linux support, compute libraries and APIs.

OpenCL on NVIDIA is problematic so if you want that, AMD or Intel is better. But if you want hardware accelerated CUDA, NVIDIA is the only choice.

Regarding AMD. For work I got an HP Elitebook 845 G7 with a Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U (Linux hardware probe here) and although I think the hardware is generally of a good quality (nice aluminium case, good touchpad), the notable exception is the horrible quality of the screen. As for Linux support, everything is great...except for lacking power to suspend support (bug report here). I really hope that the new Ryzen mobile CPU's will be placed in better laptops generally, by HP and other vendors.

[SomeByteiUsedToKnow]

Is BIOS locked on this thing? HP loves to do that on their laptops.
Also this seems like they want to attract companies which are buying equipment for their developers. As in management departments looking up "developer laptops", "laptops for developer", "creator laptops" etc. on Google and then looking at the given options and contacting companies for requests.
Since no person who is developer will buy something that has only 2 USB C ports, 1 HDMI port and is 15 INCH with no numeric keys while also potentially being BIOS locked.

[Guest]

Regarding AMD. For work I got an HP Elitebook 845 G7 with a Ryzen 7 Pro 4750U (Linux hardware probe here) and although I think the hardware is generally of a good quality (nice aluminium case, good touchpad), the notable exception is the horrible quality of the screen. As for Linux support, everything is great...except for lacking power to suspend support (bug report here). I really hope that the new Ryzen mobile CPU's will be placed in better laptops generally, by HP and other vendors.

Properly working suspend support is critical. I've faced that same problem with suspend for years, on AMD GPUs. Most of the time, it goes unfixed for years. Blank screen after suspend and resume, or just plain refusing to suspend. Which means your only option is to shutdown and startup each time.

There's a reason I say AMDs Linux support is shoddy. Personal experience with several different AMD CPUs and GPUs for more than 10 years. It's crap support compared to Intel.

[zoomblab]

You did not mention the price.

It is an intriquing deal. From the photos it looks like it has the chassis of elitebook. I have been given an HP elitebook (windows) from my company and it has absolutely great build quality. The screen, keyboard and speakers are better than my personal thinkpad. The software selection looks interesting as well. Too bad I loath Gnome and so it would have to be formated immediately.

[hansdegoede]

Michael, I wonder if the speaker and mic mute-LEDs work (light up if you mute them) ?

I don't see any support for HP spk/mic mute LEDs under drivers/platform/x86, but I guess they could be directly connected to GPIOs on the audio codec.

[M@GOid]

Properly working suspend support is critical. I've faced that same problem with suspend for years, on AMD GPUs. Most of the time, it goes unfixed for years. Blank screen after suspend and resume, or just plain refusing to suspend. Which means your only option is to shutdown and startup each time.

There's a reason I say AMDs Linux support is shoddy. Personal experience with several different AMD CPUs and GPUs for more than 10 years. It's crap support compared to Intel.

HP are known offenders of broken ACPI tables. That is why I like to direct people to Lenovo Thinkpads. Those do get certified as Linux ready in a large number of models, even the AMD powered ones, even if you couldn't get one with Linux pre-installed.

[squash]

Imagine buying a laptop with an Intel CPU in 2021...

[Davidovitch]

HP are known offenders of broken ACPI tables. That is why I like to direct people to Lenovo Thinkpads. Those do get certified as Linux ready in a large number of models, even the AMD powered ones, even if you couldn't get one with Linux pre-installed.

Exactly. Seems also that Alex Deucher confirms that is not necessarily an AMD only issue, but depends heavily on the rest of the platform as well. Taken directly from the bug tracker here:

We are still actively working on this. The problem with modern standby in general is that all of the devices in the platform are involved. You may have 12 devices in the system but only 2 or 3 power rails. All of the devices sharing a power rail need to be in the right state before the platform can shut down the power rail. It means auditing all the drivers for all of the devices on the platform and how they interact with the platform firmware to figure out why certain power rails are not being powered down. If the power rail is not properly shutdown on suspend, the hardware may not be in the expected state at resume time. On top of that there are certain assumptions in the platform about the sequencing of all of this that are the same between Linux and Windows. For example, the issues with the C2/C3 latency values in some platforms, the quirks needed for the USB controllers, and we've also run into issues with some nvme devices which are still being debugged.

[nils_]

I'm wondering if the target audience would actually run an OS preinstalled by the hardware vendor. I certainly would wipe it, if only to ensure no third party has potential access to the encryption key for the disk.

[JosiahBradley]

You literally cannot buy this from HP, selecting Linux removes the option for keyboard (wtf) as it's listed as a Windows only feature. This means you can't add it to the cart as it's missing a keyboard. You also need to select a RTX 3000 minimum card to use the data science option at 4 grand (if you could buy it). I'm really interested in a Linux Laptop but until big box vendors figure out how to make a website, I'll stick with the botiques.