In response to a post about my latest laptop I had someone ask why I chose an Intel CPU. I’ve been a fan of the Thinkpad series of laptops since the 90s. They have always seemed well constructed (given the constraints of being light etc) and had a good feature set. Also I really like the TrackPoint. I’ve been a fan of the smaller Thinkpads since I got an X-301 from e-waste [1] and the X1-Carbon series is the latest and greatest line of small Thinkpads.
AMD makes some nice laptop CPUs which appear to have low power use and good performance particularly for smaller numbers of threads, it seems that generally AMD CPUs are designed for fewer cores with higher performance per core which is good for laptops. But Lenovo only makes the Thinkpad Carbon X1 series with Intel CPUs so choosing that model of laptop means choosing Intel. It could be that for some combination of size, TDP, speed, etc Intel just happens to beat AMD for all the times when Lenovo was designing a new motherboard for the Carbon X1. But it seems more likely that Intel has been lobbying Lenovo for this. It would be nice if there was an anti-trust investigation into Intel, everyone who’s involved in the computer industry knows of some of the anti-competitive things that they have done.
Also it would be nice if Lenovo started shipping laptops with ARM CPUs across their entire range. But for the moment I guess I have to keep buying laptops with Intel CPUs.
Boycot Lenovo!
You should look at the T14s AMD G3. This is quite similar to the Carbon X1. I have also read somewhere else that the X1 will stay an Intel exclusive.
Vincent, amd laptops come with a radeon graphics, which never plays well with linux…
Scorpio: Is this due to the Chinese government being generally bad, Lenovo selling to Russia, or something else? Boycotting all Chinese stuff doesn’t seem viable and I don’t think that buying used Lenovo gear helps Russia, it doesn’t even help Lenovo much.
Vincent: T14s is a few years newer than the Carbon X1 Gen5 I’m currently using and the cheapest one on eBay costs a lot more than I paid and also has an Intel CPU. The ones with AMD CPUs are all more expensive at the moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThinkPad_T_series
https://psref.lenovo.com/syspool/Sys/PDF/ThinkPad/ThinkPad_X1_Carbon_5th_Gen/ThinkPad_X1_Carbon_5th_Gen_Spec.PDF
According to the above references the T14s is slightly larger than the X1 Carbon Gen5 and therefore won’t fit in the pocket of my Scottware jacket.
As an aside it would be better if Lenovo named laptops like Soviet tanks. Call it the T20s because it was released in 2020.
Alex: My experience is that AMD and previously ATI video cards are significantly more reliable on Linux and I have paid extra for them on many occasions.