Re: Laptop replacement

On Wed, 3/26/2025 1:34 PM, Theo wrote:

FYI there was a typo in the uk.d-i-y in the newsgroup line of your post:
 
Chris J Dixon <chris@cdixon.me.uk> wrote:

Most of my computing is done on my desktop PC, but I have a
laptop which is handy for occasional use, and also as a fallback
in case of failures.
>
My Lenovo Thinkpad T450, which I bought refurbished 5 years ago,
now has a bulging removable battery pack, which has been taken to
a safe place. Additionally, the fan is making noises, which I
hope I have addressed by cleaning. It will run on the internal
battery.
>
It seems that Lenovo do not support Windows 11 on this machine,
so its safe life is limited in any case. Apparently there are
ways to get round this, but each new Windows update could
introduce fresh issues.
>
In this context, and accepting that I want to remain in the
Windows environment, I am unsure that spending money on
replacement parts is justifiable, and am considering a new
laptop.
>
My use is mainly MS office applications, no gaming, and I do not
anticipate removing it from the home. Therefore I want something
which is OK with Windows 11, and has appropriate capability.
However, size, weight and battery life are much less important.
Reasonable warranty is desirable.
>
I would welcome any pointers and recommendations.
>
Chris

That's a 4th or 5th gen Intel CPU (4th gen being Haswell).
It has a TPM, but it might be the first generation one,
not the TPM 2.0 that W11 calls up.

While your computer is perfectly good as a computer, it's not
the best choice for the W11 thing. I have W11 running on
4th gen hardware right now, across the room :-) But it's
not much of a victory.

If you don't get one with an NPU on it (NPU being for Artificial Intelligence),
then it could be close-to-reasonably priced. Since no significant software
runs on the NPU yet, we don't really know whether the current NPUs are
worth buying.

An RTX5090 is 1000 TOPS. The best laptop NPU at the moment,
is 50 TOPS of AI performance. The Microsoft "minimum" is 40 TOPS.
The NPU can have things like multiply-accumulate blocks, and have
ten thousand of those. Some designs apparently are arranged like
systolic arrays. The main problem with the current generation,
is the memory bandwidth holds them back. One in design right now,
may have additional memory and a "side connection" of some sort for it.
(And just for the record, that has never worked well in the past.
The ICs don't have sufficient electrical contacts for that method.)

This leaves a challenge for the customer. "Buy the compliance" and
end up with a turkey, or "buy a computer" and deal with not having
the logic block the OS company seeks to monetize. I would sooner
have a computer with a decent CPU, than worry about anything else.

As a rule of thumb, if the software for a feature is not already
shipping, it might well never be delivered. That's why you can
only "buy what is in front of you". If there is no AI today,
there might never be a compelling story later on. It's like
Full Self Driving, or Flying Cars. It works the same way
with your new laptop purchase. "Promises" are worth nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Lake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_Lake_%28microprocessor%29

AMD Strix Point
https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-launches-ryzen-ai-300-and-200-series-chips-for-laptops

AMD Strix Halo (likely to be expensive)
https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-ai-max-300-strix-halo-apus-bring-up-to-16-zen5-cores-and-40-rdna3-5-compute-units

For consumer purposes, the single-thread peak performance, is a measure
of how "snappy" a machine feels. The OS uses scroll throttles, and graphics
animations to slow down the machine, but the basic feel of these is on
the upper edge of the envelope, so their performance should show through.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html#laptop-thread

Intel Core Ultra 7 265     4,750     5.3Ghz Turbo, 2.4/1.8 Base
Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX   4,749     5.4GHz Turbo, 2.7/2.1 Base

AMD Ryzen AI 7 350         3,977     5.0GHz Turbo, 2.0     Base
AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 375      3,935     5.1GHz Turbo, 2.0     Base

When they cluster closely like that, the pairs likely have the same
peak clock (which you can check when you look them up). Some of the
laptop benchmarks, could be affected by thermal issues (whereas
desktops get monster coolers for these sorts of runs).

The multithreaded performance, is not as important (with exceptions of course).
When I need to compress files with 7ZIP, the core count matters. If I'm
running Cinebench (a perfect scaling benchmark for multi-thread) or
Blender or something, these might use more of the cores. The Microsoft
Flight Sim might run on eight cores (one of the cores does pre-fetch
of graphical textures for the map). Taking ratios on the AMD ones,
suggests eight cores are contributing to the total number.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html

Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX   61,098    8P 16E, no hyperthread  (24 threads)
Intel Core Ultra 7 265     47,945    8P 12E, no hyperthread  (20 threads)

AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370      35,123    4P  8E,    hyperthread  (24 threads)
AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375  32,453    4P  8E,    hyperthread  (24 threads)

NPUs do get benchmarked, but "standard" benchmarks or favored ones,
don't seem to exist yet.

I suspect any of those four would be just fine. One pair, has more
GPU and NPU than the other. So the "balance" of the designs is
different, under the hood (that's if you were wondering why the
CPU part seemed so skimpy on one pair). But that doesn't matter when
you are editing MSWord. Which is why I did not dwell on that aspect.

You can spend hours and hours at this stuff.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/242293/intel-core-ultra-9-processor-275hx-36m-cache-up-to-5-40-ghz/specifications.html
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/241068/intel-core-ultra-7-processor-265-30m-cache-up-to-5-30-ghz/specifications.html?wapkw=265

https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen/ai-300-series/amd-ryzen-ai-9-hx-370.html
https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/laptop/ryzen-pro/ai-300-series/amd-ryzen-ai-9-hx-pro-375.html

One product is using 4nm silicon, the other 3nm silicon.
That helps drive the price up (perhaps deep UV patterning).
In the room here, is 5nm silicon. The CPU in my old
Optiplex 780 is 45nm (E8400 right now). My first PC has 130nm
silicon in it right now (Tualatin), while the first CPU in
that box was 250nm. Of about 60 times the dimensions of the
silicon gates today (FINFET). A single core processor
in the year 2000 at rest, burns as much power as all the cores in
the above ones... when they are at rest.

   Paul