Lenovo's Newest ThinkPads Feature Snapdragon Processors and 165Hz Screens (theverge.com) 51
An anonymous reader shares a report: Lenovo has dumped a whole bunch of new ThinkPads into the world, and there's some exciting stuff in there. We're getting a brand-new ThinkPad X13s powered by Snapdragon chips, a fifth-generation ThinkPad X1 Extreme with a WQXGA 165Hz screen option, and new additions to the P-series and T-series as well. The news I'm personally most excited about is the screen shape. A few months ago, Lenovo told me that much of its portfolio would be moving to the 16:10 aspect ratio this year. They appear to be keeping their word. Across the board, the new models are 16:10 -- taller and roomier than they were in their 16:9 eras. Some news that's a bit more... intriguing is the all-new ThinkPad X13s, which is the first laptop to feature the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 compute platform. Qualcomm made some lofty claims about this platform upon its release, including "60 percent greater performance per watt" over competing x86 platforms and "multi-day battery life." The ThinkPad X13s will run an Arm version of Windows 11, with its x64 app emulation support. The P-series models and Intel T-series models will all be here in April, with prices ranging from $1,399 to $1,419.
x86s days are numbered (Score:2)
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Are you actually cheering for improved efficiency? Judging by what I see you usually post, I half expected you'd mention you carry around a Harbor Freight 2-stroke generator to run your laptop. As long as it's belching blue smoke, the laptop's got power.
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MS has a lot of work to do on Windows on ARM and they started with Windows RT in 2012. MS still has a long way to go.
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Windows can be recompiled on ARM. It is just a matter of Microsoft putting in the serious effort to fix it. That effort will improve with better ARM computers. So will most software vendors who actively maintain their software... they will migrate the builds to universal or ARM versioned software. The only thing you have to worry about is legacy software, which is where emulation kicks in, and they are making great strides in that department. At least this allows that ecosystem to complete with chrome and new Macs on battery life and performance.
Oh, please!
Windows on ARM is hardly just a recompile.
And, unlike Apple's Rosetta2, WoA's x86 translation is reportedly dog-slow; plus I am not sure that their x64 translation is still Beta after 2 years.
Pretty sad for an OS with roots in the largely processor-agnostic "New Technology" codebase. If MS wasn’t so tied to Intel, they could have moved to ARM as easily as Apple moved from PPC to Intel to ARM.
But they are so they can't.
Also, and more importantly, MS sorely needs to scrap their entire Transla
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My main laptop is a Lenovo C630 (ARM Snapdragon, built in 2018).
I didn't use much Windows 10, but I did give it a spin -- and it feels snappy and responsive. Of course, I dont have any Windows programs, and I'm sure I'd have hated it after a couple of days. But I downloaded a couple of free programs to get my Linux install started (i.e. putty)... and they worked transparently.
It was funny to me to find that the emphasis was all in the battery life -- and the fact that the architecture was different was almo
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such slow processing for $1500
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Right. The price is deceptive, and it will kill this model. When Lenovo offered the C630 I currently own, it was at half this crazy price; I bought it for US$300 two years later, and it is a very pleasant laptop to work on. But now Apple sells expensive ARM laptops, so Lenovo will try to get some easy machines sold for much and delivering too little.
x86 is still a high performance beast (Score:2)
Seriously, even my old i5 7500 can run circles around these CPUs. The way Apple gets away with it is they made custom cores for accelerating Photoshop and a handful of video editing packages. That's fine if that's your use case, but if you're anything else (like say a gamer running frame accurate emulators or a musician running low latency hardware) extra oomph in your C
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I'm much more interested in the new Ryzen ThinkPads. USB 4 will be great, and the performance unbeatable.
I can live with "only" 12 hours battery life.
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Arm isn't fundamentally significantly more efficient or anything so I don't particularly care for it.
The fast screens on the other hand would be great. I got a new X1 a month or so ago and it's sitll the last gen model. And you can really feel the refresh rate when using the touch screen, it's much more noticable than when just scrolling with the keyboard or mouse wheel or something.
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Arm isn't fundamentally significantly more efficient or anything so I don't particularly care for it.
Um yes it is. ARM chips can run at a fraction of power x86 chips run. Why do you think most smart phones run on ARM?
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ARM is significantly more efficient but also significantly less powerful.
So yeah, it can get you a lot more battery life, but you're gonna need it as your tasks are all going to take longer.
If all you ever do is websurfing then it probably won't matter, so it will serve the needs of most people okay. But this is Slashdot, and we are nerds, and many of us want more computing power than you can get with an ARM device.
This is why my phone is ARM, but my laptop is AMD. Both were cheap ($200 phone, $300 laptop)
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ARM is significantly more efficient but also significantly less powerful.
ARM can be more powerful if the chip is designed to be. See Apple's M1. It can match some Intel and AMD processors on some tests. Of course Intel and AMD chips can destroy the ARM CPU that is in my router but my router was never designed to compete with a desktop.
So yeah, it can get you a lot more battery life, but you're gonna need it as your tasks are all going to take longer.
Depends on the task. One of the advantages of ARM is customization so that designers can add specialized circuitry to handle tasks like encoding and decoding. Even in tests where it takes longer, the power savings was still significant. For example
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ARM can be more powerful if the chip is designed to be.
No, it can't. It doesn't scale up as far as AMD or Intel's architectures, period. You can add coprocessors and whatnot to ARM, but you could add the same things to other processors as well. There's literally nothing preventing it. If you need general purpose processing power, ARM literally cannot deliver what amd64 can.
You can find all sorts of videos on YouTube by video editors using M1 Macs as their main video editing machine.
So what? You can find all sorts of videos on YouTube by people producing videos on their budget cellphones. If you get near a point, you know what to do.
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No, it can't. It doesn't scale up as far as AMD or Intel's architectures, period.
And why does it need to scale up again? Your exact criteria was that ARM could not be a PC desktop. The M1 proves you wrong.
You can add coprocessors and whatnot to ARM, but you could add the same things to other processors as well. There's literally nothing preventing it. If you need general purpose processing power, ARM literally cannot deliver what amd64 can.
Again it is already providing general processing power for desktops. Is the M1 suitable for super computing? No but neither is a consumer model AMD or Intel chip. However super computing ARM chips exist.
So what? You can find all sorts of videos on YouTube by people producing videos on their budget cellphones. If you get near a point, you know what to do.
You’re just factually wrong about people not using ARM chips in work but will not admit it. People are using them as video editors. These are facts.
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ARM can be more powerful if the chip is designed to be.
No, it can't. It doesn't scale up as far as AMD or Intel's architectures, period.
And why does it need to scale up again? Your exact criteria was that ARM could not be a PC desktop. The M1 proves you wrong.
My exact criteria was that ARM could not be more powerful than x86[_64]. The thread proves you don't know what the discussion is about.
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My exact criteria was that ARM could not be more powerful than x86[_64]. The thread proves you don't know what the discussion is about.
You said: "If all you ever do is websurfing then it probably won't matter, so it will serve the needs of most people okay. But this is Slashdot, and we are nerds, and many of us want more computing power than you can get with an ARM device."
Are you changing your criteria or do you not remember what you said? Professional video editors use M1 Macs. I am pretty sure they need more computing power than the average person. As for "more computing power", you do know that the top supercomputer in the world [top500.org] right
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Most people can get by with an ARM, and even get good performance for most tasks. But if you want something that can handle any unpredictable task then you want a big ugly PC processor that can provide more single thread performance than any ARM. So far ARMs have never scaled up in that department and PC processors have never managed to scale down to where they got as much done per watt in the low end, though AMD was kind of close for a second when Geode was new. Maybe both of these things will change in th
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. But if you want something that can handle any unpredictable task then you want a big ugly PC processor that can provide more single thread performance than any ARM.
Aw, you are now trying to add new criteria, "single thread performance", which you never mentioned that before. But yet again, you're wrong: [imore.com] "New benchmarks for the M1 Apple silicon chip reveal Apple's first attempt at a processor is faster than every single AMD processor and all but one Intel i9 chip in single-thread performance." The M1 did not beat the flagship 11900k however considering the 11900k costs $599 just for the chip and a entire M1 Mac Mini desktop was $699, that was a lot to ask.
So far ARMs have never scaled up in that department and PC processors have never managed to scale down to where they got as much done per watt in the low end, though AMD was kind of close for a second when Geode was new.
Fujitsu says
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Why has this chip had its head stomped in during every other single thread benchmark but it's victorious on this one? I can shop for flawed benchmarks, too.
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Why has this chip had its head stomped in during every other single thread benchmark but it's victorious on this one? I can shop for flawed benchmarks, too.
Please cite the these tests where the M1 “head-stomped" in “every other single thread benchmark" because multiple sites [techradar.com] proves you do not know what this discussion is about. [tomsguide.com]. There is no question that the M1 can beat x86 chips in some performance tests. The question is despite more and more evidence, are you going to continue your denialism?
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For example, a M1 took 3 mins, 27 seconds [techjourneyman.com] to render something using Blender compared to an Intel i9-12900K/RTX 3080's blazing 27 seconds.
Keep in mind that the "M1" is actually a 32-core M1 Max, which you're comparing to Intel's 16-core chip. Even if achieved a comparable time, more cores at lower frequencies will always be more energy-efficient, even with the same architecture. So this alone doesn't tell you anything about ARM.
Furthermore the integrated memory chips on M1/M1 Pro/M1 Max alone are going to save you *a lot* of power compared to the DIMMs on the Intel system, so that's another thing that makes this an apples-to-oranges comparis
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Slashvertisement (Score:1)
Lenovo does make some decent laptops, though. My old 7th gen i3 laptop is getting a bit long in the tooth and I'd eventually like to upgrade. These inflated pandemic "everything shortage" prices aren't winning me over, though. I'll be holding out for a nice budget model on a Black Friday sale.
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I could get excited (Score:3)
But only by Linux support.
Windows on ARM is even less interesting than Windows on x86.
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I think you are being short-sighted my online friend. Windows on ARM offers up a whole new exciting world of new exploits, bugs, crashes, software (in)compatibility and driver issues! /h
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I don't expect Linux support to appear overnight, but it will land. And when it does, I am sure it will show the same way support for the C630 did: In AArch64-laptops [github.com]. Most patches have been upstreamed, and mainline support is almost to the level of the project's. When I got my laptop, the latest supported kernel was 5.10; I'm now running 5.16, compiled at most a couple of weeks after upstream released.
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How's the GPU support? Serious question. IME that's always the sticking point.
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I am very very very not into highly performant graphics but Xorg was terrible.
I switched to Wayland, and at least the casual YouTube video or Jitsi videoconference works quite well. I use Sway, that does 3D compositing (for a quite flat layout, yes, but it's 3D textures).
But I don't really know if I am using any of the Adreno cores at all.
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I don't know which CPU you have, or exactly how up to date the OSS Adreno driver is at this point. I know there is one. AFAIK though the only ARM-paired GPU cores with official rather than reverse-engineered OSS video drivers are Mali and Tegra. But I don't know anything about official Adreno Linux drivers, if any?
Can it... (Score:2)
Have 8-10 programs open, with 20+ tabs, Word, Excel, and two external monitors?
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And does it run Zoom? I want at least one monitor capable of 4k 120hz. Right now, I'm just doing the internal monitor (2k) and one 1080p, but in my new office, I'll do the laptop's screen (2k), an external 1080p, and another external that will be 4k or 1080p. It hasn't been determined yet. Might even do two of those eventually. There is no such thing as too much real estate.
I'm looking forward to alder lake and maybe the lenovo x1 nano, but I'm not against a RISC chip. I am against Mac OS. I think it
Zoom (Score:2)
I have used Zoom via the web client for Linux on ARM. I never liked Zoom (I prefer WebRTC implementations)... But it works reliably enough for my standards.
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As for the programs open, yes. Its older sibling, the C630, can do it.
But not with external monitors: The device tree does not yet have support for displayport-over-USB-C. It should not be too complex... but it requires somebody knowledgeable to put more effort into it :-(
I am now going back to in-person teaching at the university, and am carrying along a Raspberry, to connect to it via Ethernet, using VNC, so I can beam my slides to the students :-(
No Longer Interested in Lenovo (Score:3)
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It's not that they do it, lots of manufacturers do and it's a good thing for customers who want it (ensures that the CPU isn't tampered with during shipping etc).
The issue is that they don't mention that they do this on the product page.
That said, it's irreverent for ThinkPads because the CPU is soldered in anyway.
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lots of manufacturers do
Gonna need a source for that, because only Lenovo has been in the news for it.
ensures that the CPU isn't tampered with during shipping etc
If someone actually capable of "tampering with a CPU" (i.e. basically reproducing a black-ops version of TSMC's lithography process) is after you, you have MUCH MUCH MUCH bigger problems. This feature is there for planned obsolescence and nothing more. The security benefits are speculative at best.
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Dell and HP both offer this feature. If you buy servers from them in light of the Snowden leaks, it's probably best to have it enabled.
A Real ThinkPad ... (Score:2)
A Real ThinkPad:
* Has a great keyboard, with a big blue Enter key
* Has a 16:10 or 4:3-aspect ratio screen
* Has a TrackPoint
* Has user-upgradeable RAM and harddrive
* Has a replaceable battery
* Has a good selection of ports, including HDMI for a projector
* Has long-term support
* Runs Linux and BSD just as well as it runs MS-Windows
I'm sorry, but the X13s satisfies only two of the requirements. Only one more from last years models don't cut it. ...
Qualcomm and long-term support? Bwahaha
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and do you take bets on horses?
(Asking for a friend).
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Yes except for user replaceable RAM. The Carbon X1 series (at least the model I know) does all of that while being thin and light with the exception of RAM. Unlike my W510, you need a screwdriver to replace the battery, but they even have captive screws in the back cover so you can't lose them. Now that is the kind of attention to detail I love.
it's not a laptop (Score:2)
Soldering on RAM means it is an appliance.
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No. SODIMM doesn't support LPDDR4. You can't get light (i.e. small battery) with socketed RAM.
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Deep technical arguments aside. If the the device is obsolete the day it is built and cannot be upgraded, then it's probably not a general computing device.
An example of an appliance is a kiosk with soldered in RAM and eMMC and CPU. Once the software stops fitting in the original design, the hardware is obsolete. Goes to the landfill, like every other appliance.
The other extreme is a mainframe. Where upgrades and manufacturer support can persist for decades. (at a steep price)