Planning on upgrading my 11th gen i5 soon, but caught between AMD’s top spec board and Intel’s middle option core ultra. Any strong opinions one way or the other? Thanks!
Considerations at the moment:
linux battery life (with original screen or 2.8k, both on 61Wh battery)
CPU multicore (programming) and single core (gaming) performance
internal GPU improvement relative to 11th gen Iris Xe
Thunderbolt vs USB4 gotchas
I’d need to buy a new WiFi card for the AMD (need new ram either way)
My use case:
notetaking
fullscreen YouTube videos (if one board has advantages on higher res decoding, please let me know)
TB3-compliant eGPU (although depending on what people say I could purchase the newly released USB4 equivalent to my R43SG)
To me if performance and efficiency are paramount over stability and Thunderbolt then the AMD is the clear winner. However if you value Thunderbolt and a somewhat more polished (in this case this means not as buggy) experience then Intel would be the way to go.
However, honestly, outside of the battery life, your 11th gen is still more than capable of doing everything you use your computer for. Maybe hold off on upgrading until a much more impressive reason to upgrade comes?
I don’t know if it helps, but I have a sonnet 10g adapter that is a thunderbolt device and it works in ports 1,4 of a FW16 amd.
It appears to the OS as a pcie device showing in lspci.
So, the FW16 amd might not be thunderbolt certified, but the thunderbolt type features that come with usb4 do actually work in this case.
I would expect the usb4 ports on the FW13 amd to work in a similar way.
My FW16 amd usb ports have been problematic with regards to usb compatibility, so you might have better compatibility with an intel main board.
An i5 binned cpu at 11th gen boost clock is bottlenecking me for intensive single core workloads because of eGPU overhead, unfortunately. That’s why I’m looking to upgrade right now. More cores would also be nice.
Nothing too serious but if you just look on this forum you’ll see that the drivers for AMD are a bit more buggy than what we are seeing from Intel. AMD is putting a lot of effort into it and it seems like only a temporary bump in their domination of the market.
tl;dr give your money to Framework any way – no firm recommendation but check benchmarks for the games you play as well as compile times … for representative power envelope of these laptop devices.
USB4 makes thunderbolt much less of an issue. My AMD FW13 and Linux 6.x kernels are much better for external thunderbolt devices.
Peak single-core speeds for games would be the clincher. I think the problem is going to be package power configuration on the AMD limiting the boost so that the Intel configuration gives a worse chip higher temperatures but more throughput.
I think it’s worth finding a specific recorded benchmark for the 7640U (6 cores trading for larger thermal budget and higher peak speeds) against the promise of the Intel Core Ultra series for the games you’re already playing. You may then look at the compile benchmarks (Zen4 and DDR5 are a step forward even over DDR4 on Zen3 but you got to enable ZRAM!) and pick whether you can wait for builds with higher FPS or have good-enough FPS and wait less for builds to complete.
I’d personally go for the Core Ultra. This is somewhat biased towards Linux usage though.
Your Thunderbolt accessories should work well enough with either since Framework’s USB4 implementation on AMD is quite good.
Meteor Lake’s raw performance (FLOPS and so on) matches or beats AMD from what I saw in benchmarks (Geekerwan (极客湾） mostly), so despite absolute performance being equal or worse right now it should theoretically age better.
Meteor lake also just has a really nice hardware media engine which is great for everyday use.
Both are great chips though that are quite well matched. I’d recommend you watch some benchmarks for the most informed decision instead of trusting us
Have you found any specific linux benefits from core ultra? I hardly ever use Windows (it’s only still on my drive for exam software, really), so I’m very interested in hearing what specifically makes it good or better than AMD. I was historically hesitant to upgrade on the Intel track after 11th gen, even after thread director was merged, because there was apparently still some linux mismanagement of the package cores. If that’s changed, I’d love to hear it.
AMD has been somewhat troublesome on Linux due to the amdgpu driver being somewhat buggy. This can sometimes cause glitches.
At least on the Framework 16, there have been multiple reports of glitching and crashing due to amdgpu issues on the dGPU, and a few on the iGPU (which is the same as the Framework 13).
I’ve historically had better experiences with Intel drivers on Linux then AMD. Especially hardware video acceleration and to a lesser extent graphics.
I have heard some bad things about Intel’s management of non-heterogeneous cores on Linux though! Needs more research maybe?
You probably mean 12th gen, 11th gen has been relatively spotless (speaking as a fellow 11th gen Framework user)!
On Linux I’ve experienced annoying instability from the amdgpu drivers on Ryzen 7040. Not enough to make the system unusable, but I’ve considered trying to find a Windows user with a Core Ultra board who wants to trade for the slightly better performance in benchmarks.
I can’t say I have any real issues with my AMD version. The only problem that I had was the WLAN adapter being wonky after resuming from sleep, but that has improved considerably after switching to iwd as backend for network manager.
I’m mostly browsing, watching videos and compiling stuff, with a bit of light gaming now and then (Path of exile, Horizon: Zero Dawn). No issues or instabilities from the GPU itself lately, so I can’t say anything against the AMD version.
I’m not up to speed when it comes to Intel’s current iGPU performance, but back then the additional power from the AMD iGPU was one of the reasons I went with AMD vs 13 gen Intel
