Should I buy the Intel Core Ultra 125H or the AMD Ryzen 7640U?
I’m deciding between the Intel Core Ultra 125H and the AMD Ryzen 7640U, and would appreciate some help making the choice. I will also be buying the 2.8K display.
First I’d like to define my use-case, I will be running Linux on it, and my main uses would be development and some light office work (mainly Microsoft Office — unfortunately required by my school, which mandates Windows for compatibility). I’m also interested in some occasional light gaming (no FPS titles, and on Linux), and 3D work in Blender, maybe in Fusion 360 with PCIe passthrough.
Here is my first question between the two, as from what I’ve read, the 125H supports splitting the integrated GPU so that it can be used by both the Host and Guest via PCIe pass-through, I’m planning to run Windows in a VM using KVM/QEMU.
My second question is which there seems to be conflicting information about is the graphics performance, since on paper it seams like the 125H wins but people say that the drivers are better for the 7640U.
One concern I have is that the laptop does not have enough battery life for my use-case 5 to 6 hours. And I have a question in that regard, as I would think that the 125H is better because it has the Efficiency cores, and I assume the scheduler has been improved since the last topics on similar questions.
Lastly, when would the Danish keyboard layout possibly be back in stock, sometime this week?
Hi,
first a disclaimer: I’m team red, so if you see bias in what I write, you’re probably correct.
If you’re open to consider the AI 5 340, that has “e-cores” (zen5c) too.
Scheduling isn’t only a scheduler issue now, userspace needs to help the scheduler by telling it whether it needs more power or not. And AFAIK that isn’t done yet. you can configure wireplumber to have a static performance level, but that’s all I know)
vGPU is only available on Intel. So that’s a big + for Intel in your case.
With AMD your only option is VirGL and, in the future, Venus. And I don’t know how this woks with a Windows VM.
Keep in mind that running a VM will be a bit power hungry…
Performance - what do you mean “on paper”? number of cores/units?
Benchmarks I saw put the 760M (7640U GPU) about 5-10% above the 125H GPU.
The battery life under linux with my HX370 lasts about 5 hours. Online tests say it can last up to 9 hours. And the tests say almost 10 hours for the Intel version
TBH it sounds like vGPU technology (graphics acceleration in the VM) should be your decisive functionality…
The amd “e-cores” are also way more space efficient than they are power efficient but at least they have the same instruction set as the full fat cores.
Actual power efficiency e-cores (a 3rd tier) may come with zen6.
The 340 really needs to be a lot cheaper to be worth it unless you have an actual use for the npu and are willing to sacrifice most of the gpu for it.
Something is probably still not fully baked software wise there. The 7x40u series is somewhat more baked power wise but I expect the ai 300 series to improve over time too, the early days of the 7x40u series were pretty rough too.
5-6h would be like 10w continuous which is pretty doable for even moderate use at least on my 7840u if you don’t absolutely blast the display birghtness. Also keep in mind pd powerbanks exist.
That is indeed a killer feature if it actually works and is required for the use case.
Hi,
I’m also team red (desktop: 7600x + 7800 xt), but i’m open to the Intel one for multible reason the most important one for me would be battery life and maybe for the GPU performance (this is only one source but it’s the only one with a direct comparison)
I can always just dual boot, but that’s a bit tedious and Windows will sometimes nuke the Linux boot partition, or make it disappear from the boot menu.
And I would not have anything against buying a AI 5 340 config if it weren’t for the increase of 200$ and the reduction in GPU performance from the 760M.
Yeah I think I might just buy it because of this since that will save me from needing to reboot every time I want to do something in Windows.
Edit: Sorry for the late reply.
Right, I forgot it has a smaller GPU. And the difference in price with the 360 is a lot bigger.
Also, do check very carefully that SR-IOV is actually supported.
I honestly don’t know… I want to guess (by my matching of generations) that actually no.
I have no idea, seems like people say it’s supported and have got it working but then again intel says it’s not supported?
Maybe you could ask on these forums for a Linux user to test for you if it works or not.
Might do that when waiting for the Danish keyboard to come back in stock.