Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 w/ AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Running Nicely On Linux
The past few weeks I've been putting the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 AMD mobile workstation through its paces that is powered by the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U SoC. Besides uncovering one BIOS issue that is in the process of being resolved, this latest-generation AMD-powered laptop that features 64GB of LPDDR5X memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, and integrated Radeon graphics with 2.8K OLED display has been working out well on modern Linux distributions. Here's a look at this AMD Zen 4 laptop running on Linux and plenty of performance benchmarks for this laptop.
The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 as tested boasts the Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U SoC with 8 Zen 4 cores / 16 threads, 64GB of LPDDR5X-6400 memory, 1TB NVMe SSD, 14-inch 2.8K OLED display, 52.5 Wh battery, Qualcomm WiFi 6E, and all around a very nice device... Especially if you can snap it on sale close to $1400 while otherwise its current retail price is around $1869 USD. Some will be upset that the system memory is soldered with the P14s Gen 4, but at least with the option of having 64GB of memory pre-installed is enough for many applications.
The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 currently ships with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro x64, but Lenovo has also been working on testing and confirming its Linux support. My use with the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 has been working out well with modern Linux distributions. As with other AMD Phoenix laptops, you'll be best off on Linux 6.3+ as well as Mesa 23.0+ for the integrated Radeon graphics. The P14s Gen 4 at least didn't have all the graphics-related headaches as I did with the Acer Swift Edge 16 when attempting to use the GNOME desktop. No graphics woes with this laptop on Ubuntu 23.04 and 23.10 daily!
The WiFi was also working out of the box, the web camera was working out of the box, along with the other standard functionality. Much of my testing this month with the ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 was using Ubuntu 23.10 in its current development state given the official release being just weeks away and in being more forward-looking.
This laptop has also been working out fine on Fedora Workstation 39 Beta. Ultimately I bought this laptop to use as my main production system and with that will be running Fedora Workstation 39 when finishing with my initial testing. So I'm glad to report the ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 has been working out very well with Fedora 39.
I did encounter one notable issue in my initial testing and that was around the ACPI Platform Profiles support. By default the system was running in the "low_power" profile. When attempting to change the platform profile in use via the GNOME interface or by writing a different platform profile to sysfs, no change would happen. Lenovo ended up being able to reproduce this issue. It was found to be a BIOS change made to the P14s around platform profile modes for Windows that currently aren't handled on Linux and in turn that led to regressing the Linux platform profile support. Lenovo is in the (slow) process of rolling out a new BIOS to address this and allow for proper ACPI Platform Profile handling aside from the low_power mode. I've tested the new experimental BIOS and indeed was able to switch successfully between low_power, balanced, and performance profiles. Ultimately though it doesn't yield too much of a difference to performance/power so even with the current default BIOS users are in fine shape. Lenovo also does support LVFS/Fwupd for BIOS updates of the device moving forward.