HP Dev One - A Great, Well Engineered AMD Ryzen Linux Laptop

In total I ran 87 benchmarks across all of these laptops under test with Pop!_OS 22.04. All the individual data and benchmarks can be found via this OpenBenchmarking.org result page.

When taking the geometric mean of all 87 raw performance benchmarks, the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U in the HP Dev One was about 26% faster than the Core i7 1185G7 Tiger Lake with the Dell XPS 13 9310 Linux laptop. To no surprise, the prior flagship Ryzen 9 5900HX with the ASUS ROG laptop took the top spot but was just about 15% faster than the $1099 HP Dev One.

Above is a look at the reported CPU/SoC power consumption across all of the benchmarks tested. Not only was the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U in the HP Dev One faster overall than the i7-1185G7, but it also consumed noticeably less power. The 5850U had an average power draw of 14 Watts and a peak of 30 Watts in these benchmarks compared to the i7-1185G7 Tigerlake with an average of 25 Watts and a peak of 71 Watts.

With the default fan / cooling behavior across all of the laptops, the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U in the HP Dev One had a similar core temperature to the Dell XPS 13 9310.

See all of the benchmarks in full along with the per-test sensor monitoring via this OpenBenchmarking.org result page.

The HP Dev One is an extremely exciting Linux laptop. The HP Dev One being powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U Zen 3 SoC is great and allows for a fully open-source driver stack compared to the many Linux laptops out there relying on NVIDIA graphics, which is great if you are into CUDA and NVIDIA's other compute software components but for others means having to deal around with their binary driver stack until if/when their open kernel driver evolves into a mainline-able solution.

The overall specs on the HP Dev One are great with the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U being very capable, but a bit unfortunate that it hadn't launched a few months prior... There are the Zen 3+ laptops beginning to appear in market. While on the CPU side these "Rembrandt" parts are just incrementally better than the Zen 3 "Cezanne" APUs, these refreshed models do have the benefit of having newer RDNA2 graphics. Still though the Cezanne laptop SoCs are plenty capable and will be for some time ahead, but if they had been able to ship a Rembrandt-based SoC with this HP laptop it would have just been all the more compelling attraction.

The only other real hardware gripe is just the 16GB of RAM, which is enough for some but with this being targeted at developers it's unfortunate there isn't a SKU with 32GB of RAM. Yes, the laptop is user-upgradeable if wanting to go for 32GB of 64GB of RAM, but for user pricing, one less headache to worry about for RAM compatibility, etc, it would have been nice if there was a second SKU for the HP Dev One. The 16GB of RAM can be cutting it if compiling very large code-bases with parallel jobs, keeping multiple browser tabs open, etc.

The build quality of the HP Dev One though is great especially compared to that of many of the other Linux pre-loaded laptops out there. The FWUPD/LVFS support for firmware upgrading is very welcome and hopefully will be expanded across more HP consumer products moving forward for easier firmware updating under Linux. The 1000 nit display with this 14-inch laptop is terrific, the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U is plenty capable for 2022, and all-around this has been a great device.

HP partnering with System76 to deliver the HP Dev One is a very interesting initiative and will be interesting to see where it leads moving forward. Pop!_OS 22.04 is also a great fit for enthusiasts and developers, making this a good option for a developer-minded system. HP also noted they engaged with AMD engineers on the HP Dev One for ensuring proper suspend/resume handling and good support, besides all their steps to ensure this would be a Linux-friendly laptop design. HP also says they have trained a group of technicians for supporting this laptop.

At $1099 USD, the HP Dev One delivers terrific performance/value and would certainly recommend this laptop for Linux enthusiasts and developers with all factors considered. Thanks to HP/System76 providing this review sample and some additional articles will be coming up looking at the support/performance across other Linux distributions on the HP Dev One, among other interesting benchmarks from this AMD Linux developer laptop.

Learn more about the HP Dev One at HPDevOne.com.