I agree that most people won't care but take issue with calling them "dumb". Everyone has a limited amount of time on this planet to build skills and chase hobbies. A lot of people on this site have tech-related jobs and hobbies, so of course this matters to us. I might expect someone who buys pre-built gaming PCs to keep this on their radar, but the vast majority of folks who use computers as email and social media machines, including those who only use it for data entry type jobs, have little reason to care about the specifics of their CPU or any other single component of their computer. If their computer breaks, that's annoying, but that's life. They'll spend the same amount on a new laptop as we might spend on a new CPU and get on with their day.
I don't know what brand of spark plugs are in my car, and maybe a mechanic or car enthusiast would find that dumb. But hey, I'm too busy caring about my CPU to spend time worrying about my car unless it breaks.
So that's the thing, realistically. If this affected just consumer chips that you can buy off the shelf, sure. A bit of market lost, but the OEMs and the data center clients are still there.
But this time it's all different. Intel fucked everyone's stuff up, and said they're not doing anything about it.
You don't really have much of a choice in the high end laptop world. Maybe this will be enough to push manufacturers to put AMD CPUs into high end workstations. I'd kill for a Thinkpad P1 with AMD.
I'd love an AMD P1 as well. I just bought a P1 after looking at their offerings for a while and while I did look into their AMD offerings they just seemed to have intentionally neutered them.
I got a Gen 5 - 21DDS70700 from Newegg shortly before the Gen 7 was released. I originally bought a refurbished higher end model from their outlet store but they sent the wrong model so I returned it. It is built and performs well and has a great screen and keyboard.
Have you done any stress tests on the system? And if you did did you monitor CPU power?
I have a gen 4 and at least whenever the CPU and GPU are active the CPU runs absurdly slow. I havent tested just CPU loads, but rendering a video where the CPU was 100% loaded and the GPU was about 5% loaded my CPU would drop to only 25 watts and throttle hard. With throttlestop I'm able to get 35 watts at the very most out of my CPU for long loads. I'm curious of they've done anything for the newer models so the CPU can actually stretch it's legs. It really sucks buying this i9 but having it perform worse than an i5. Even if there's PLENTY of thermal headroom.
I have not. I'm mostly doing webdev on it and it works fine for that. I honestly don't even need the dedicated GPU. If there's something you'd like me to run lmk and I'll see if I can find time for it. I'm running Debian stable on it and it's the i7-12700H with an RTX A1000 and 32GB 4800MHz RAM version.
Honestly I think any CPU stress test is enough for it to start to choke sooner or later. It's just faster with the GPU active. If you have video editing software you could render a long video with CPU rendering. If not I'm sure any furmark like stress test + yes > /dev/null a number of times is plenty.
The biggest thing is that it takes time. Sometimes it starts after 5 minutes, sometimes it's 20 minutes, sometimes it could be longer depending on the load. Since you're on linux IDK if lenovos tuning of TDP would apply, so you might get higher 35 watts like I can if I manually override their power limits.
I pretty much only use the GPU if I'm traveling and want to play a game. Normally I just want the CPU to do things and it's fine using 55+ watts for short loads, but I tax the shit out of my CPU for long periods of time and only 25 watts sucks on 11th gen Intel.
I stopped in 2007 and haven't looked back, and advise friends and family to do the same. This is just more ammo for the "but why" rebuttal speech, and baby, "wanting your cpu to not die" is an awfully juicy bullet.
Watching Intel fuck themselves the last decade has been an absolute delight, but this, I could almost fap to this news.
The worst part is Intel honestly could've have spun this into something of a win if they actually handled it properly. They've got over $25B in cash reserves, they could easily afford to do a recall and a big PR campaign about how good they are at accepting responsibility and fixing mistakes.