Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 w/ AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U Running Nicely On Linux

The Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U within the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 with the balanced platform profile was pulling 25 Watts on average and a peak of 36 Watts, compared to the Ryzen 7 7840U with a 15 Watt average and 30 Watt peak. With the Ryzen 7 7840U within the Acer Swift Edge 16 there is no APCI Platform Profile support. While the Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U within the P14s Gen 4 was pulling more power than the other AMD Ryzen SoCs tested, on average it was still less than the Core i7 1165G7 Tiger Lake and Core i7 1280P Alder Lake laptops tested.

On average the Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U in the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 was 12% faster than the Ryzen 7 7840U within the Acer Swift Edge 16, 29% faster than the Core i7 1280P Alder Lake, and 36% faster than the prior generation Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U within the ThinkPad X13s Gen 3.

The laptop comparisons were done with all of the defaults on each laptop under test -- including the default (balanced) platform profiles where supported. For those wondering about the performance difference when using the ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 in the different ACPI Platform Profiles, I ran some additional benchmarks.

The balanced profile was quite close to the performance profile while switching over to the low_power profile was at 95% the performance of the balanced profile.

But switching from balanced to low_power reduced the Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U power consumption on average by about 5 Watts as well as dropping the peak power consumption by 6 Watts. So 95% the performance at 82% the power use for those wanting to maximize the power efficiency of the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4.

When in the low power profile, the peak CPU frequency of the P14s Gen 4 was typically around 3.6GHz compared to 3.9GHz with the balanced and performance modes.

Besides saving power, running in the low power mode did drop the CPU SoC temperature on average by about 8 degrees and the peak CPU temperature was also 10 degrees lower than the higher modes.

With the Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 being focused as a "mobile workstation", the benchmarks were primarily focused on CPU/system performance. But the integrated Radeon RDNA3 graphics are plenty capable as well:

The ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 integrated RDNA3 graphics were much faster than the prior generation graphics with the Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U and Ryzen 7 PRO 6850U laptops. The Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U graphics were also much faster than the Intel Alder Lake integrated graphics found with the MSI MS-14C6.

Having bought the ThinkPad P14s Gen 4 for just $1389 USD, I am very happy with the purchase so far. The Linux support has been working out fine on modern Linux distributions besides being stuck to the low_power ACPI Platform Profile with the current released BIOS, but a fix is on the way with the new BIOS. Even in the low_power mode as shown there is 95% the performance of the balanced/performance profiles while consuming much less power anyhow. The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 7840U performance is terrific, the integrated RDNA3 graphics are very competent and have no issues driving an external 4K display, and the 64GB of LPDDR4x memory and 14-inch 2.8K OLED display round out this nice laptop purchase for less than $1400... Albeit the sale in August is now over but even at $1869 is a very respectable showing out of this laptop and specs -- the price at that level is still competitive against what can be found from some Linux laptop vendors while still using older AMD Rembrandt CPUs.