Lenovo Continues Improving Their Linux Support Down To The Hardware Sensors

[wizard69]

Well the real issue here is that Apple's performance and power usage advantage on this device is because they've abandoned the "modular" approach and gone fully integrated.

High integration is not something unique to Apple when it comes to laptops. It is a trend in industry due to technological advances and demands for performance in laptops. This is why the x86 world went with APU type chips years ago in laptops. Apple hasn't abandoned anything that wasn't already abandoned in the x86 world. The use of ARM chips just gives them more die area to place even more stuff on the SoC.

Multiple special purpose logic units on chip, fast GPU-shared RAM, (almost) on chip, and software ultra-optimised for their very specific hardware setup.

All available on x86 APU's by the way. The exception being ML acceleration hardware. What the x86 world doesn't have is decent software and that is largely MicroSofts fault. I don't blame Linux so much here due to the difficulty in getting manufactures to cooperate with data.

It's difficult for x86 PCs in the "modular" tradition inspired by the original ISA bus, to compete, because building blocks will never be as performant as tightly integrated, holistically designed device, though this approach of course comes with a closed ecosystem which is difficult to upgrade.

Nonsense!

Point is, Lenovo can't just "buy in" a CPU and build a computer using the old modus operandi. There's very significant R&D involved in getting up to Apple's level of hardware "teamwork", so to speak.

Also, Apple kinda has a lock on all of TSMCs leading edge nodes for the foreseeable future. They'll be 6-12 months ahead of everyone else, just on silicon process alone, at least until 3nm and probably beyond.

Not fanboying Apple btw, long time Thinkpad fan here, but I can't just ignore these new devices.

Look at it this way APU style chips have been available for ages in the x86 world, there is very little about what Apple has done that is different. The advantages that Apple has are years of focus on low power and a lot of free space not delegated to the legacy x86 cores. Every APU made by Intel or AMD is seemingly designed for low end performance, apparently in the hopes of driving sales to higher end parts. It is only recently that AMD and to a lesser extent Intel, have really made an effort in the APU space. Even then there are no competitive fanless laptops using hardware from AMD nor Intel.

Some people seemed to be shocked by how well Apples M1 machines perform. I'm not sure how that could be considering how well an iPad or iPhone perform. I really don't see the x86 world as having a chance in hell of catching up using the current approaches. I actually see Apple being 2 generations ahead for a very long time.

[Zan Lynx]

Look at it this way APU style chips have been available for ages in the x86 world, there is very little about what Apple has done that is different. The advantages that Apple has are years of focus on low power and a lot of free space not delegated to the legacy x86 cores. Every APU made by Intel or AMD is seemingly designed for low end performance, apparently in the hopes of driving sales to higher end parts. It is only recently that AMD and to a lesser extent Intel, have really made an effort in the APU space. Even then there are no competitive fanless laptops using hardware from AMD nor Intel.

Yes, Apple did not cheap out. They provided dual channel 4,266 DDR4 instead of crappy cheap Intel/AMD laptops with single channel 2,400 from the bottom of the memory barrel. Still not as good as the 8 to 12 channels of GDDR6 of a top end dedicated graphics card, but the result is not bad at all.

[vegabook]

High integration is not something unique to Apple when it comes to laptops. It is a trend in industry due to technological advances and demands for performance in laptops. This is why the x86 world went with APU type chips years ago in laptops. Apple hasn't abandoned anything that wasn't already abandoned in the x86 world. The use of ARM chips just gives them more die area to place even more stuff on the SoC.

All available on x86 APU's by the way. The exception being ML acceleration hardware. What the x86 world doesn't have is decent software and that is largely MicroSofts fault. I don't blame Linux so much here due to the difficulty in getting manufactures to cooperate with data.
Nonsense!

Look at it this way APU style chips have been available for ages in the x86 world, there is very little about what Apple has done that is different. The advantages that Apple has are years of focus on low power and a lot of free space not delegated to the legacy x86 cores. Every APU made by Intel or AMD is seemingly designed for low end performance, apparently in the hopes of driving sales to higher end parts. It is only recently that AMD and to a lesser extent Intel, have really made an effort in the APU space. Even then there are no competitive fanless laptops using hardware from AMD nor Intel.

Some people seemed to be shocked by how well Apples M1 machines perform. I'm not sure how that could be considering how well an iPad or iPhone perform. I really don't see the x86 world as having a chance in hell of catching up using the current approaches. I actually see Apple being 2 generations ahead for a very long time.

Your insistence that basically apple is doing nothing new on iGPUs is wrong as you can see here: https://debugger.medium.com/why-is-a...t-3262b158cba2.

A casual glance at any i7 vs M1 die shot will also show that your contention that Apple has given over more die space to the GPU compared with Intel or AMD is also incorrect. Die space on recent i7 given over to igpu is about 40%, as opposed to about 25% in M1.

Dismissing the idea that multiple components designed exclusively to work together, ie tight integration, work faster, as "nonsense", defies most of the laws of software and hardware, I would think. But perhaps I've been wrong for the past 25 years.

Yes there's more integration. No, nobody's going nearly as far as Apple. It does not follow from the fact that some integration is happening on x86, that more integration does not mean higher performance. It would be very difficult to argue that apple silicon is not more integrated than what you'll find in an x86 notebook. It's very difficult for x86 manufacturers to match Apple given that they are not nearly as vertically integrated.

[om26er]

Someone please tell Lenovo that the touchpad OR trackpoint on the X1 Carbon 6th Gen doesn't survive a deep sleep...

[Vistaus]

Claiming it as a competitor I think is fairly generous. Best case it that it's 4 A78's, and 4 A76's. Which in a race would barely keep in sight of the M1 much less try to keep pace. Not to mention the huge head start Apple has in integrating it's software and vendors with it's platform. Wheres Qualcomm on either Windows or linux has a lot of catching up to do in getting software to properly leverage the GPU, DSP, and NPU.

The good news for now is that it will be at least 2 or 3 years before linux developers get basic drivers up for the rest of the M1 functionality.

They're working on another speedier chip for laptops: https://winfuture.de/news,121737.html

[YamashitaRen]

You must be out of touch with what is happening in the Apple/ARM world, the M1 is truly amazing! As for known shortcomings I'm not sure what you are talkign about there, ARM has been running Linux/UNIX for years now.

I know how good Apple's ARM chips are.
And I am not surprised that they are running good against x86 alternatives since theses are kept back by the necessity of throttling them.

However, with ARM you will face issues.
Some instructions not available on the CPUs.
Not being able to install Windows and use professional softwares like Catia.
Weird bugs because GL softs are not designed for ARM.
Plain wine will not be available.
What about x86 emulation ? Something tells me you will miss features and the performance will be abysmal.

It's probably a good laptop but only because you are fine with sacrificing theses.
If you take theses into account, I am not sure you can call Apple's laptop good value for money...

[WorBlux]

They're working on another speedier chip for laptops: https://winfuture.de/news,121737.html

Unless the started a custom micro-architecture for AArch64 two years ago, they aren't going to be close. A78 the latest core from ARM and it's 6-wide vs M1's 8 wide decode. Do you see why simply bumping up the clock speed a little isn't a big help. Nor is even the X1 core a great answer, it's a slightly up-clocked A78 w/ a bit more cache. Nor is there indication Qualcomm is upgrading the core to 8 memory channels to match the M1. Nor does Qualcomm have experience providing long-term support for a desktop OS, and I'm not hopeful that this attempt will be much good, they are integrating other people's IP and may not even have the full information and understanding to troubleshoot hardware bugs and security issues that could pop up three years from now. Sure they might sell a fair number of units in the chrombook/webook category, but I don't think they'll convince the business or premium market to buy in.

[Vistaus]

Unless the started a custom micro-architecture for AArch64 two years ago, they aren't going to be close. A78 the latest core from ARM and it's 6-wide vs M1's 8 wide decode. Do you see why simply bumping up the clock speed a little isn't a big help. Nor is even the X1 core a great answer, it's a slightly up-clocked A78 w/ a bit more cache. Nor is there indication Qualcomm is upgrading the core to 8 memory channels to match the M1. Nor does Qualcomm have experience providing long-term support for a desktop OS, and I'm not hopeful that this attempt will be much good, they are integrating other people's IP and may not even have the full information and understanding to troubleshoot hardware bugs and security issues that could pop up three years from now. Sure they might sell a fair number of units in the chrombook/webook category, but I don't think they'll convince the business or premium market to buy in.

They're going to use Nuvia tech, so the new chips are going to be really good: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releas...uisition-nuvia

[WorBlux]

They're going to use Nuvia tech, so the new chips are going to be really good: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releas...uisition-nuvia

Nuvia was originally aiming at data center designs, it'll still take some time to refine the design for a 10-20W SoC. It puts timeline on these chips at 2023 at the earliest. https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/3...ms-for-laptops

And the fact it's from an unproven design company with no real silicon under their belt does nothing to alleviate my support and driver concerns.

They have no answer for the next couple of years, and I wouldn't want to buy an SoC from them I wasn't planning on throwing way in two years anyways.

[hiryu]

Unfortunately, Lenovo's support for Linux isn't complete. I have a Lenovo Legion 7i and I'm bitten by this issue: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=208555

The Yoga Slim 7 has a similar problem.

Just because Lenovo has support for Linux on some of their laptops, doesn't mean they have support for all of them. It'd be nice to have even some unofficial support to get this issue fixed. I'm definitely looking at possibly getting a Slimbook for my next laptop within this year as they have official Linux support and I've had my current laptop for just 7 months!

If you're going to buy a Lenovo for Linux, make sure Lenovo explicitly supports Linux for that laptop or YMMV!

I've had a number of System76 laptops over the years. Obviously, the Linux support is great! But with their latest laptops, they've been moving to Coreboot which has tons of problems with Windows. Probably most here don't care about that, but if you're buying an Oryx Pro to have a gaming GPU and dual boot, I'd recommend against Sys76 at least for the time being.

Aside from the Coreboot side of things, my experiences with System76 had been extremely positive! I bought my first laptop from them in 2009, and I stayed with them consistently until their Oryx Pro release toward the end of June. I just had too many problems, but I hope to eventually go back!