I am trying to shop around for a new gaming laptop, but I’m having a hard time finding something that is Linux friendly and has AMD CPU and GPU, and is of the highest end possible so I don’t have to upgrade it in a year (and if it’s expandable, even better). I’ve looked at the Framework, and before you spout off about how great it is: have you actually owned one? I’m finding more and more that they are flimsy and just aren’t quite “there” yet, but I hope that changes soon because the concept is what we need in laptops. Anyway, I can’t seem to find anything on the higher end that has both CPU and GPU from AMD. If anyone has a link, feel free to drop it.
Despite what people say, Nvidia is certanly the one with most complete support for Linux… if support for a OS is defined by how Windows is supported.
The way GPU are supported on Windows is this: Microsoft pick your whole experience, then you install the setup.exe with a bunch of bloat and some advertisement from the OEM (Nvidia or the Nvidia’s GPU resellers like EVGA, ASUS…)
If you stick with the most popular distro which have the exact Linux kernel Nvidia support… yeah, nothing can beat Nvidia. You have amazing support for nearly every feature your GPU offer (cuda, ray tracing etc), but if you want to try some kind more exotic flavour of Linux, expect problem.
AMD, being much more OpenSource friendly, it mean you can have the top notch 3D acceleration on basically anything, even Puppy Linux ( a ~200MiB Linux live distro), but if you’re looking for more advanced features (like OpenCL of LLM support)… well, good luck with that: eventually, someday, they also will work (if meanwhile AMD don’t drop support your card if too old).
There’s no perfect answer. Despite the flaws, people in the Linux community love AMD because they give drive support in the “Linux’s way”. Nvidia support is better, but it’s the “Window’s way”, and you need to stick to the rules on what Nvidia consider “Linux” (which, for short, is “Canonical’s Ubuntu”)
Snapdragon X Elite
AMD wins on gaming and only is a little slower on productivity benchmarks for which the Intel CPUs require a nuclear reactor and they conclude that intel wins?!
OP title says “Winner:AMD” ?
back from the article: looks like Toms HW gives a winner per section and it goes back and forth. Matching/winning gaming with less power, I personally agree with OP title that it’s AMD. But article goes into a whole bunch of sections.
As someone with recent platforms from both Intel and AMD, man, I do not like my 7700x’s platform.
It’s just sporadically unreliable: sometimes it posts, sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes the memory decides it needs to reset back to jedc standards instead of the expo settings, sometimes it doesn’t. Even a successful POST can take upwards of a minute sometimes, and the system may or may not reset in the middle of it, resulting in two extended delays.
Perfectly stable once the OS gets booted (memtest is fine, prime95 is fine and it boosts like crazy up to about 5.5ghz all-core), but getting there is such a pain on occasion.
I realize more than a little of this is probably attributable to the motherboard manufacturer/efi settings, but the last few AMD platforms I’ve had are just wonky and less than 100% reliable compared to the last several Intel ones, which have typically just worked, correctly, every time.
For a while Intel’s QuickSync was I think one of the better for transcoding (e.g., for Jellyfin). Didn’t see mention of this in the article, I wonder if AMD is on par now?
On Linux VA-API works really well for AMD video encoding. I have a small home server with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600G and my experience has been excellent.
The only downside is that some companies decided hardware decoding violated some patent and disabled hardware encoding in the default va-api package. You just need to switch to the freeworld version of va-api and everything works well.
