I'm currently evaluating two new AMD laptops, a Lenovo Thinkpad X13 with a Phoenix Pro 7840U and a Lenovo LOQ 15 with a 7435HS Rembrand-R, basically a Zen 3+ APU with the iGPU disabled sporting an RTX 4060m instead.
And even if I've tried to follow AMD's CPU and APUs, it's become rather confusing over the last couple of years to keep track of what is what.
Now imagine what happens when vendors combine these dozens of chips with several dozens of accessories and create thousands of products every year.
Lenovo alone has more product lines than I could ever name and then nearly every permutation of CPU, APU and GPU and again each with different power allocations whereby an RTX 4070 is easily eclipsed by a 4060 in some cases, but might be twice as fast as another 4070 in a different system.
I keep hearing that one of the main reasons for all this pre-installed junk on laptops is how little money vendors make on these machines. That doesn't quite seem to apply to Thinkpads, but when the very same base hardware comes on an even slimmer model with higher resolution at half price (as can be the case with Lenovo), it becomes more believeable.
I grabbed the X13 for €880 with 32GB of RAM and the LOQ with its RTX 4060 was only €750: at Nvidia list prices that wouldn't leave a lot for the laptop...
Sure they cheaped out on the storage, 500GB on the X13, because an extra 500GB would cost the equivalent of a 2TB Samsung 990 or WD Black 850X, 1TB but QLC in a 2242 form factor on the LOQ.
Both machines are not just very solidly built, but incredible value at their current prices, probably half of what they launched with, and probably sold way below production cost today. If laptop vendors cannot sell them fresh, they need to clear them out for pennies a year later, because that RTX 4060m cannot be reallocated to a Strix Point or Lunar Lake.
The real cost may well be total lack of support. For the cheaper product lines, Lenovo software support is perhaps six months, on Windows. With Linux, you're just left to fend with whatever volunteers may come up with, none of the OEMs seems to invest anywhere but in niche premium products.
The AMD engineers have built phantastic chips, but fail to provide the type of support to many OEMs those need to build great laptops.
Yet a few e.g. from Lenovo manage and then their engineers build phantastic laptops out of these AMD chips, but without years of proper software support, consumers won't be able to use them productively over years.
The diversity is eating scale and without scale all those engineering cost cannot be recovered: it's a true chicken and eggs effort.
In the server and desktop market AMD can make do with far fewer support engineers for far bigger sales than laptops. Intel may have had huge advantages there, but considering how their ax has been swinging, that may not hold for long.
Yet AMD really would need to change dramatically for laptops: while it seems nice at first glance that they were able to churn out so many new laptop chips with so relatively small changes to existing ones, they clearly didn't budget for the support that OEMs would need to turn them into products. These SoCs may be console chips with few changes technically, but they aren't console volumes.
In the past Intel put them under pressure offering the hugest spread of products at every price point imaginable, but I believe fewer variations may be needed going forward to avoid choking the engineers with too many and too small batches of products to create and consumers with too many choices to choose from and falling quality.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram