I’m thinking of pre-ordering the new 13 in Framework with the AMD Ryzen™ 7 7840U CPU, but I’m concerned about thermals and battery life, considering my experience with the desktop Ryzen CPUs running hot.
If I pre-ordered one now, I’d be in batch 3, which is slated to ship in late Q3. The initial deposit is only $100, so I’m thinking I could go ahead and pre-order now, and if the reviews show battery life and/or thermals end up terrible I could always cancel.
When are the batch 1 laptops due to arrive? Can we expect professional reviews to be released at that time too?
There are no devices with the 7840U out yet. AMD just published their own performance benchmarks a few days ago (which of course coming from the manufacturer should always be viewed as cherry-picked compared to independent reviews) but did not provide specifics on battery life.
AMD claims it can do all that while delivering “leadership efficiency for exceptional battery life,” but unfortunately, it’s not offering even the vaguest idea of what that battery life might be like. It’s possible the company doesn’t yet know: all these benchmarks were run on a reference board rather than a laptop. (Apple’s M2-powered laptops are reigning battery life champs, so it’s kind of important to know!)
That said, Hurwitz said we can expect more information about battery life and gaming FPS to be forthcoming, and AMD hasn’t been a slouch of late in the Windows realm. He says Framework (which recently announced its first AMD-powered laptop), Razer, Acer, HP, and Lenovo will use these chips, among others.
Ah, thanks. Somehow I missed those. I’m going to be using it for coding and virtualization, so I’ll have to wait and see how non-gaming workloads to in a laptop form factor.
@Sean_Whalen It looks like it’ll perform well for multi-core workloads, so I imagine compiling will be quick. I hope the battery life is better than the 11th gen Intel-i7. If you’re worried about heat, I would apply some PTM7950.
Some other users here have reported 10-15 C difference and less thermal throttling with Intel boards.
Desktop zen4 runs hot because of thick integrated heat spreader.
Laptop apu doesn’t have ihs.
7040u is used in handheld gaming console which means it will runs cool on laptops
It also runs way higher on the power/performance curve on desktop. Pushing 120W through the same 8 cores as the 30ish on a laptop tends to yield somewhat higher temps.
Also doesn’t help that the boosting algos these days tend to be primarily temperature based, espeically with some of the practically uncoolable high end intel chips. If reading high numbers bothers you you can just turn down the temperature target.
Here’s the thing, chips keep getting denser which makes getting the heat away harder so the temperature deltas tend to be higher.
AMD: “We beat a potato chip designed to run in a passively cooled laptop or iPad thats sometimes overvolted be compete with an i5.”
Everyone: “good for you?”
So if you want to go Apple comparisons looks like its about M2 Max [which thermal throttles in a 14" chassis] in terms of most capabilities with it falling to M2 Pro in other areas (accelerators with faster memory is handy at times). Beats intel 12th/13th gen most of the way too (AMD has really good power efficiency this generation once you drop the voltage).
My 12th gen Framework was going toe to toe with my M1 Pro based MBP with only the ginormous battery on the mac making battery life noticeably different. Considering how good my AM5 platform desktop goes when undervolted I expect really good things with a better binned and travel optimized 78xx mobile chip.
I pre-ordered the AMD one because my old ultrabook was starting to show it’s age but was still usable for what I needed. So I wasn’t in a hurry for this to ship, and figured I could comfortably wait for any early adopter issues with it regarding Linux if they happened. Yeah… Then my old laptop died. >_<
Well crap… I hope they ship sooner than later in Q3 and that Linux runs smoothly. lol… oh well. I guess I’d still rather wait than to rush into something else.
I have been trying to form a clear idea based on the little information floating around. Here is my take (I will update it as more info comes). The majority of the current reviews are based on handheld gaming devices [1], the main differences compared to PC: everything is soldered, smaller screen and less peripherals.
The closest baseline to 7X40U is the AMD 6800U, which has already showed a way better battery life than Intel 12th Gen [2][Youtube v=3bSetglEPOY] (16.5h vs 13h on light load, 4h vs ~3h on heavy load) with comparable CPU performance.
The benchmarks from the handhelds show a +10% CPU performance for the 7640U and +20% for the 7840U over the baseline.
The AMDs shine in the iGPU department, as they are roughly equivalent to a GTX 1660 in performance (not TDP) and I doubt the Intel 13th could compete in that department.
Intel 13th is not looking bad either, with some claims of +30% battery life on the framework laptop [3] (+10% might be due to the larger battery capacity, with no reference to the baseline whether it was 11th gen or 12th gen).
There is also the question of choosing between 7640U and 7840U. For a 10% gain on performance, the price might not be worth it for some. Could these CPU beat M1/M2? The current benchmarks say they can’t. You either have to choose between battery life or performance, the M1/M2 performance/Watt is at least 2x the AMDs on heavy load. On light load (browsing and coding), I think we’ll finally be able to go +12h with the 7x40U.
In the end, it will depend on how optimized the framework motherboard. I’m looking forward to upgrading my 11th gen framework, but I prefer to wait to find out as I’m not into buying fish while it’s still in the sea.
The power is heavily capped on handhelds. That is one hell of a strange comparison, OP laptops run hot and always will. The fan when under load will hit at least 40 decibels, fact. You can go into windows power management thought and cap the boost to like 99% or something. The 16" version, that will likely be super loud, in case you were wondering.
It’s definitely not worth it for everyone but the difference of having 33% more cpu cores (8 vs 6) that can clock slightly higher and 50% more gpu cores (12 vs 8) that can also clock slightly higher is only 10% there is someting fishy going on. In single threaded loads the difference won’t be huge but in multi threaded ones and gpu bottlenecked ones having more cores that can run at lower clocks for the same power level the difference will be a lot bigger.
Definitely looking forward to reviews, the 7640u hasn’t really shown up in the wild at all afaik but the 7840u kinda did (z1 extreme is a rebranded 7840u) in the rog ally and the performance there is pretty nice.
Though the 7640u very likely has better performance per $
I’ve already come across that one. It uses Asahi Linux, which, as far as I know, isn’t even in the alpha stage for supporting M2.
From that same review:
there isn’t yet any PowerCap/RAPL or HWMON type driver for the Apple M2 to be able to expose the real-time CPU/SoC power consumption data under [Asahi] Linux
