Shopping For A Launch-Day AMD Ryzen AI 300 Series Laptop For Linux Testing

With this week's Computex announcement by AMD of the Ryzen AI 300 series laptop processors built atop Zen 5, one of the pleasant aspects has been several laptop models being announced already to be powered by either the Ryzen AI 9 365 or Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 flagship models. Some models are also already available for pre-order ahead of launch day. This is quite nice compared to in the past there was often at times quite a delay between the initial AMD Ryzen mobile announcements and being able to (pre)order any hardware. And thus I've already been looking around to coordinate near launch day Linux testing of the new AMD Zen 5 powered Ryzen AI 300 series hardware.

I've been evaluating the different announced AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops to decide on what to pre-order to provide punctual support for Linux support testing and performance benchmarking of the first RDNA 3.5 + Zen 5 laptop processors. As is typically the case, I resort to usually buying one or two laptops each (interesting) Intel/AMD generation retail due to most major laptop vendors not being particularly concerned about Linux support nor their marketing budgets for review samples catering to the small percentage of Linux consumers. AMD also typically hasn't been helpful in providing any hardware on the laptop side for Linux testing. In the months ahead there will almost surely be new Linux-minded laptops from the likes of Framework, System76, and TUXEDO, but to be able to provide timely insight to the Linux support and performance at launch, it's typically left to whatever hardware I am able to afford in providing prompt testing for the Linux community.

Thus this week I've been looking at the announced AMD Ryzen AI 300 series laptops in deciding what model to pre-order. Most (all?) of the laptops available to pre-order for launch day availability so far are from ASUS. I haven't bought an ASUS laptop since I think the Intel Haswell days and there's been some discontent by readers and others around ASUS support and warranties more recently, but looks like I may end up buying an ASUS laptop to provide punctual Ryzen AI 300 series Linux testing in July. At least the ASUS laptop support on Linux has been improving a lot thanks to the work of Luke Jones on the ASUS WMI driver.

Of the ASUS laptops available to pre-order, all of the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 series laptops have been with NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics. That doesn't really interest me as I'd much prefer the integrated graphics only for Linux testing. Plus the hybrid graphics under Linux can at times be problematic and ultimately the NVIDIA RTX dGPU just leads to an increased price tag. It's a bummer that there aren't any Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 laptops yet with just integrated RDNA 3.5 graphics, but the lower tier AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 there is.

The ASUS Zenbook S 16 3K OLED Touch Screen Laptop (6584435 / UM5606WA-S16.R3651TB) with AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 has just the RDNA 3.5 integrated graphics. The ASUS Zenbook S UM5606WA-S16 has the 10-core Ryzen AI 9 365 with 24GB of LPDDR5X RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD, 3840 x 2400 OLED 120Hz display, and relies on the Radeon 880M integrated graphics. The price-tag on the laptop is $1399 USD.

Plus this ASUS Zenbook with Ryzen AI 9 365 is expected to be available on 15 July while some models won't be out until 28 July.

So for lack of other options available with the Ryzen AI 9 365 / Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 using just the integrated graphics, it's likely this ASUS Zenbook S I'll be pre-ordering for Linux testing. If anyone sees any other options available in the coming days, please let me know. Thanks to those subscribing to Phoronix Premium (special thanks to those making the leap in joining as part of the Phoronix 20th birthday special) or viewing the site without ad-blockers for making this purchase possible for providing the Linux insight into these next-generation AMD Ryzen laptop SoCs.

So with that said, within a few days of ~15 July, I should be able to deliver these first AMD Ryzen AI 300 series Linux laptop support information/compatibility and performance benchmarks of the new Zen 5 cores. I'm soon beginning my re-testing of existing laptops on hand atop the freshest Linux software stack. My expectation is that using Linux 6.10 Git and Mesa 24.2-devel should be primed for success on the RDNA 3.5 + Zen 5 laptop SoCs... Perhaps Linux 6.9 and Mesa 24.1 will be good enough too, but as there's still been a flow of new patches in recent weeks, I'll first start with the leading-edge software stack. In any case AMD engineers have been busy both on the Zen 5 CPU side and polishing of RDNA 3.5 while also preparing for next-gen RDNA 4 discrete graphics. The main sore spot with the Ryzen AI 300 series will likely come down to the Ryzen AI NPU. Since earlier this year AMD has published the XDNA open-source Linux kernel driver for AMD NPU acceleration but that kernel driver isn't yet upstream and AMD's been quiet on the NPU Linux side about their plans or expanding their user-space software support. At least it was mentioned in the forums a few days ago that AMD is indeed working toward eventually having that NPU kernel driver upstreamed.