Lenovo Announces New ThinkPads With AMD APUs

[yturmisil]

Aside from IT geeks running virtual machines, nobody comes close to using 12 GB on a laptop. Heck according to 'top' I'm not even using 12 GB on my 32 GB desktop, while running Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Steam, Bitcoin client, *and* a 4 GB Win7 VM all at once.

Try doing Android development. Android Studio + Gradle = 4 GB lost.

[starshipeleven]

Continuing to sell these CPUs are such a mistake. Someone hears that AMD is good again, but isn't tech savvy and has no idea about architectures. Just buys one of these bulldozer craps and concludes that AMD isn't actually good again, then proceeds to not buy anything from AMD ever again.

It's not bulldozer, and it's not crap.

[soulsource]

Aside from IT geeks running virtual machines, nobody comes close to using 12 GB on a laptop. Heck according to 'top' I'm not even using 12 GB on my 32 GB desktop, while running Chrome, Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, Steam, Bitcoin client, *and* a 4 GB Win7 VM all at once.

There are plenty of scenarios where one needs more than 12 GB of RAM without any virtual machines. I'm working as a game developer, and need at least 16 GB of RAM to keep Unreal Editor remotely useable. The artists in our team are off even worse, as they need both, UE4, and 3D modelling software open simultaneously (as UE4 is a bit "special" when it comes to mesh import, and often needs a few export/import iterations to get a mesh to import properly).

[Nille_kungen]

Thinkpad is for professional users so many users should need lots of RAM.
For a normal consumer there's mostly no need for much RAM but for an portable workstation the needs are totally different.

So we could hope that the platform that Loenovo choose (if they are not too stupid) is based around a modern chipset and socket, that can currently accept Carrizo APUs and than can at a later point be offered with Ryzen + Vega APU in an updated catalog (either as a different ordering option, or under a A485 instead of A475 moniker).

Carrizo is not compatible with Ryzen and only supports DDR3 memory and i think it would be a real bad choice to come out with a new Carrizo laptop now.
Bristol Ridge on the other hand uses DDR4 and is compatible with Ryzen, you can use both BR and Ryzen on a desktop AM4 motherboard.
On the laptop BR to RR shouldn't be to hard for Lenovo.

[lejeczek]

Usually I'd be more concrete info-wise, but on this occasion I'll just say - I have had HP EliteBook 745 G3 with AMD PRO A12-8800B R7, 12 Compute Cores 4C+8G for over a year, and Fedora 26 runs off it and... it's awesome!

[humbug]

Hmm, i think it'll probably be Ryzen CPUs combined with Polaris GPUs, simply because Polaris is way more power efficient.
Unless they severely underclock and undervolt their Vega chips. That might work also.

Vega as an architecture is more power efficient than Polaris.
Every architecture has a performance vs power consumption curve. There is a max efficiency zone and once you go too much past that you start requiring insanely more power for minuscule performance gains. With desktop Vega; AMD had no choice but to push the architecture outside that comfort zone in order to compete with the GTX 1070 and 1080 on raw performance.

Laptops part will be a totally different animal.

[damonlynch]

There are plenty of scenarios where one needs more than 12 GB of RAM without any virtual machines.

Photography applications can also use lots of RAM when doing operations like assembling panoramas. I have 32 GB on my Lenovo W520 and it's not difficult to use it all.

[timofonic]

This is too expensive for what it provides. I don't understand why Lenovo made such dumb commercial decision. It seems like they are making it to fail in market on purpose :P

[finalzone]

Continuing to sell these CPUs are such a mistake. Someone hears that AMD is good again, but isn't tech savvy and has no idea about architectures. Just buys one of these bulldozer craps and concludes that AMD isn't actually good again, then proceeds to not buy anything from AMD ever again.

Running a 16GB streamroller APU based laptop with a dedicated South Island card here since 2014 with only open source driver which perform quite well.

[duby229]

I REALLY hope it's not because they are recycling the same mobos in new chassis, you know the ones with SINGLE CHANNEL ram, the ones with SOLDERED DOWN 4GB "ram bank" so you can only get up to 12GB total.

Not that I'm complaining for the current models (they are entry level laptops), but you never know, OEMs always had APUs on shitty mobo designs so far.

Really hope these laptops supposedly for businness stuff actually received some love on the mobo design side.

I'm in the same boat. I've been wanting a new laptop for a few years now and I want AMD. A few years ago there was a decent offer I was looking at, but just like you said, the build quality just wasn't on par with an equal priced Intel laptop. It's a matter of stupid things like the quality of the bezels or the synaptic pad or a shitty keyboard. As soon as i see an AMD product with specs I like that has a comparable design quality and build quality as an equal priced Intel product, that's probably the one I'm gonna buy.