"Display support for the CPUs allows for two 4K monitors through DisplayPort over Type-C, an additional 4K monitor if Thunderbolt is used, and a fourth monitor if USB 4.0 used. AMD has designed Renoir to not need additional chips to detect which way a Type-C is connected – that is all handled on die. With the display and USB support, the processor allows for concurrent USB 3.2 and DisplayPort use, with the peak DP v1.4 8.1G HBR3 standard in play using display stream compression (DSC)."
Which begs the question what does in-built mean? The Showcase Notebook Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 does not include USB 4 or Thunderbolt 3 so these modes will probably need additional chips.
...i want this 8-core chip with 32GB of LPDDR4X in a 13" Notebook that has 2 Thunderbolt 3 Ports and a matte Full-HD Touchscreen.
There is very unclear support for existing Thunderbolt-over-Type-C devices under USB4, and it is likely your devices will stop working.
Please wait until USB4 and USB4-based solutions start shipping before you start adopting it, else you're going to be stuck with a bunch of devices that are no longer being supported, or cannot be cross-supported across Thunderbolt 3 and USB4 variants.
There is, actually Thunderbolt 4. It is in no way dead. To what extend this is different to TB3 is unclear yet.
>it has been absorbed into the official USB4 standard.
Not Strictly true. TB is not a mandatory part of USB 4 standard. Which means you will likely have lots of USB 4 controller without TB support. ( Cause It will be cheaper )
>There is very unclear support for existing Thunderbolt-over-Type-C devices under USB4
It will work as long as your USB4 has support and certified with TB. You will have to use a TB cable ( which you should have if you are already using it ) instead of any USB-C cable.
How exactly will TB certification works without involving Intel is still unclear.
Absolutely nobody I know has been able to get a straight answer out of anyone; not Intel, not the USB IF, not other members of the USB IF, on if existing Thunderbolt 3 devices will work on USB4 hosts.
And it will be a complete and absolute shitshow if it doesn't, because Type-C has swindled us into thinking Type-C is just Type-C.
These recent Intel laptops often have really dicey real-time performance because of how aggressively their clock speeds are controlled.
For someone who does mixed multimedia work, a Ryzen 4000 2-in-1 would be amazing. All those cores are perfect for real-time audio work, rendering and 3d stuff.
edit: at first I read that this would have 8 GB RAM, but now I'm reading that you can get up to 16 GB, which I think would be adequate for some basic multimedia work.
edit 2: wait I'm confused, according to the announcement, the AMD version is set at 8 GB of RAM.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/coming-soon/IdeaPad-Slim-7-14AR...
I can't help but remember Intel's practices in the past. So I'll vote with my wallet and go with OEMs that give both Intel and AMD an equal chance. Hopefully if enough people do that OEMs will find any backroom dealings less attractive.
I don't even care about the performance to be honest, I'm sure it will be adequate and I simply don't want Intel anymore.
With all the mitigations applied, I've lost the performance gain of the last two Intel laptop generations I had.
The integrated intel gpu is ok performance-wise, but being on linux I'm also tired of their development model: there's a fresh new driver/engine being developed every year, and it always buggy. It's true that intel always gets the latest kernel features first, but by the time is stable and it _works_, it gets deprecated in favor of a new buggy one. Way to go!
I've been using top-of-the-line lenovo laptops for a decade now. This has been the same every year, year after year, and I'm tired.
As for Ryzen, I just bought their budget laptop, E485 (with Ryzen 2200u+SSD+FHD screen) last year. I was waiting patiently for Thinkpad deal to come, it was worth to wait, as my aging SL410 was still working. It has been matching my expectation so far: affordable, snappy enough, and good battery.
As for Thinkpad models, I find that their budget ones are sufficient for my startup and personal usage, as I do not use enterprise-level features, like those in T series (that I used during my corporate lives).
You cannot buy a Lenovo without a Windows license. This is minor considering the price I'm usually going for, but since I don't use it at all, I consider it a microsoft tax.
Their "computrace" bios feature is still there in every new laptop.
With skylake, the last edition of the Yoga and X1 Carbon couldn't do S3 sleep by default anymore. For no other reason than to force windows use S2Idle. It requires a quite annoying work-around on linux to force S3, and only ~6 months ago we finally got a bios patch to re-enable S3...
The temperature throttling defaults are different from linux to windows, causing linux to throttle much more aggressively than needed on skylake. This is also caused by some bios issue which you can work-around with msr registers, but again... why?
I overall like the hardware. I'm quite fond of the built-in wacom pen too. I have minor quibs about the keyboard (QC issues) and screen (all TP I had in the last 5 years tend to develop bright spots in the backlight), but overall it's hard to find something similar. The dell XPS developer line is the only alternative I would be considering, and mostly due to their linux offering.
One example I like to give is how for the better part of 2018, xorg+kms with (if I remember correctly) broadwell was new, caused random tearing issues that required to use the legacy i915 driver. The i915 had also other issues at the same time, causing blits in xrender to copy dirty areas of memory. Different issues popped up depending if you were daring enough to switch the dri version, glamour and kernel version.
This got eventually resolved.. but by the time I switched to haswell. Things got better on the kms front, until I realized I couldn't rotate the screen anymore. When this got resolved, the driver couldn't restore the screen after dpms blanking... This one is fixed on skylake, but on haswell still isn't.
... and so on and so forth. All this was on the lenovo x1 carbon (various versions), then on the x1 yoga (1st, and I'm now on the 3rd version).
[0]:https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Reno...
More airflow, lower max clocks and higher throttling temperatures make a massive difference on the set ups I've worked with.
Isn't it more like AMD dropped the embargo (partially) because Lenovo, ASUS and others wanted to get their devices out?
when i replace this eventually, I'll be looking at AMD again, more than likely. Really solid.
But had a quick look from the UK and plenty here for next day delivery.
Even some fancy ones like: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Zephyrus-GA401IV-GeForce-Graphics-W...
So technically they are available in the EU, just a slowly transitioning supply due to logistical human malware factors comming into play.
Did try look for the other listing I saw but not showing now, so hmmm.
