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Comment by trengrj | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how Ryzen CPUs will fare in laptops especially around Linux compatibility.

I can't think of any particular issues with the Ryzen desktop platform that messed with Linux compatibility. If anything, I expect Ryzen Mobile to be much more usable on mobile workstations than the Intel solutions I have to work with right now.

I've got a Lenovo W540 with a i7-4700MQ and a NVidia Quadro M1000, the integrated intel graphics are garbage and I constantly have performance issues running GNOME 3 - I'm going to run this thing to the ground until the mobile chips with vega graphics are available and then ask for an upgrade from my employer for having less problematic graphics alone..

Could you elaborate? TBH I don't know much about incompatibilities CPUs can cause in Linux world.

I'd be concerned about power usage and thermal dissipation, apart from that the Ryzen & co procs look awesome.

Zen has shown excellent efficiency figures for both the CPU itself and entire systems. That does not necessarily translate to good mobile systems, but is a good sign.

I think the implied question was more about system software compatibility. Power management tooling is often vendor specific.

This might sound naive, but shouldn't this be implemented within ACPI/APM? Or does pretty much every CPU family need special code for that anyway?

Why would you be concerned about power usage and thermal dissipation? Are you concerned the power saving features don't work as good as they could with Linux (like with Skylake? at first)?

Otherwise the reviews of the AMD Ryzen CPUs put AMDs 8 core parts around Intels high end 4 core parts [0][1][2][3][4][5][6][7] in terms of power consumptions, which is promising looking at the announced 4 core mobile APUs with Vega graphics. Also nice for thermal dissipation: AMD uses solder for the heatspreader, which helps with thermal dissipation.

My only concern would be the idle power consumption since the PCs are idle most of the time, which seems to be ~10 watt higher than Skylake/Kaby Lake due to more power hungry mainboards. But maybe that can be fixed in Notebooks?

[0] especially the R7 1700 which seems to run at a sweet spot with 3 ghz base clock.

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1700-cpu-rev...

[2] https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ryzen-strictly-technica...

> 850 points in Cinebench 15 at 30W is quite telling. Or not telling, but absolutely massive. Zeppelin can reach absolutely monstrous and unseen levels of efficiency, as long as it operates within its ideal frequency range.

[3] http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8081/amd-ryzen-7-1700-1700x...

[4] https://www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/amd-ryzen-7-1700-revie...

[5] http://hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/103270-amd-ryzen-7-1700-14...

[6] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...

[7] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=y&prev...

It's generally the case that clever software optimisations hit intel's platform first due to it's spread. Here's hoping AMD gathers interest in providing platform specific optimisations

Yes, that's true. In fact I think the software side is what's holding back AMD the most (together with OEM's producing Notebooks which are subpar compared to Notebooks with Intel CPU - but maybe that is different in other regions).

Basically, let's hope the fintech guys take a liking to it, right? ;)

It's not processors themselves that are an issue usually.

Usually the difficulties in getting things running is the booting the system, and the motherboard chipset and device drivers. It's also to do with the stuff that goes along with just "running" but CPU features. Does power management work well? Does ECC work at all? Is virtualization relatively bug free?

Since laptops are full computers packed with all hardware inside, you don't want any driver issues on your system and neither do you want power management issues. That's usually what people mean when they express concerns about new CPU platforms and Linux.

From what I've heard Ryzen runs Linux pretty well on desktops at least, so let's hope they can keep up the good work on laptops too.

> From what I've heard Ryzen runs Linux pretty well on desktops

Confirmed. I'm running one here-- 1700 (8c/16t), no-OC, stock cooler, X370 chipset and Samsung-based DDR4-3200 RAM-- on Ubuntu Xenial/Elementary and it's been rock solid and temps <50C doing desktop, development, and VM's.

Same, 1700, 32Gb Corsair Vengeance at 2666, 4 weeks not a single problem and I've battered it, was transcoding 30,000 multiple page tiffs yesterday (don't ask..).

The thing is a straight out monster for a 300 quid processor.

> transcoding 30,000 multiple page tiffs yesterday

Um, I have to ask. The only thing I've used multipage TIFFs for is turning processed page scans into a PDF. But not nearly that scale. What was the context?

Exactly that for an enterprise web app that attached all the physical paperwork of an order to the digital record.

Original dev just shoved all 30,000 in the webroot as multipage tiffs, average size 25Mb-30Mb.

End users couldn't easily view attached scans (multipage tiff isn't that prevalent), converting to pdf with jpeg compression took the first set from 76.8Gb to 6Gb with far less traffic on the network and much easier handling (PDF is far better supported).

Ryzen, Ryzen Threadripper and Epyc are all the exact same chip, the latter just use MCMs with 2 and 4 dies respectively.

Epyc being for for the datacentre, it needs good Linux compatibility, so AMD have already submitted the necessary kernel patches. I imagine that means Ryzen will work well too, at least for the portion of the chipset inside the CPU.

> TBH I don't know much about incompatibilities CPUs can cause in Linux world.

I remember one, a long time ago. This is from memory so it might not be 100% correct but the main details are true, and it's an interesting story:

CPUs have identifiers on them. GenuineIntel, AuthenticAMD, etc, models, plus a number to indicate what generation.

Pentiums were P1, P2, P3, etc.

Intel released the Pentium 4 (one of their worst chip designs - the next one, Core, was based on Pentium 3 rather than Pentium 4).

Which Linux saw as a P... FIFTEEN?

Some jackass at Intel though 'IV' - ie roman numbers for four - was a cool thing to put as the CPU ID. So Linux saw 'Pentium 15' and freaked the fuck out while people confirmed that yes, Intel were actually stamping Pentium 4s as '15'.

It's like the slipshod naming of an ISO volume.

This confused me because I couldn't see how that ASCII would relate to the number.

Turns out they chose 0xF for a different reason: http://linux.omnipotent.net/article.php?article_id=11457

It was to work around Windows NT!

Thanks for the correction!

History will tell you that AMD and laptops don't play nice together. AMD CPU's have typically very high TDP's.

However i am hopeful that AMD will change their ways from a crude brute force "moar power" approach (very high wattages/TDP's for performance gains) to a more finely-tuned, intellegent, and environmentally-friendly approach with higher efficiency (getting more performance per Watt/TDP)

They already have done that looking at all the reviews of their AMD Ryzen CPUs since release in March 2017.

You're out of touch on this topic. Firstly, AMD's newest architecture is competitive power wise with Intel's newest architecture.

Secondly, TDP does not mean what you think it means. TDP is the maximum power a processor is designed to run at. It only tells you something about peak power performance, not idle power or average power perfomance. Especially not in modern processors that can idle at 5-10W despite having a 95W TDP. Laptop and desktop processors run well below their TDP specification 99% of the time. It's not a useful metric for determining power consumption. At all.

Actually, TDP is the nominal expected power dissipation of a processor, and is intended as a guideline to design the cooling system. It is the intended power dissipation of the part when running "real (non-synthetic), expected workloads".

A processor's actual power consumption can easily exceed the TDP. (Actually a processor's power consumption can SIGNIFICANTLY exceed the TDP)

Yep and TDP as a measure of cooling design is inexact anyway.

My old bistro laptop was sat at 55C today and 85C two weeks ago, ambient temp today was 16-17C (I.e British Summer) and two weeks ago 30C (not British Summer ;) ).

Did you type this on your Blackberry? Open a newspaper from the last two years.

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