This year at CES, we have a series of announcements from AMD before the company’s keynote presentation. Addressing the company’s mobile offerings, AMD is launching the first parts of the Ryzen 3000-series of processors, focused around the Ryzen Mobile 2nd Gen family for both the general 15W market as well as the high-performance 35W market. On top of this, AMD is also making an announcement regarding how it will address graphics drivers for these platforms, and then some icing on the cake comes from AMD’s venture into Chromebooks.
AMD continues its hot streak, and now we even have several new inexpensive Chromebooks running on AMD hardware, a market segment the company wasn’t active in. The future is looking bright for AMD.
It is curious that the 35 watt chips are identical in specs otherwise. Likely they can boost longer but it would be nice to have clarity on that.
Provided they can do a good 15.4″ laptop with good CPU horsepower (min 4 cores and a good OpenCL GPU), FullHD matte screen (or more), backlit keyboard with full numpad, working gigabit ethernet (because Dell Vostro’s Realtek based are not working), integrated DVD/BR writer, plenty of ports (hdmi, vga, dp, usb, eth, …), good battery life (at least a day, like extended 8000mAh or more), magnesium casing, no more than 3 or 4 kilos (not interested into 1 kilo ultra portable form factor, I want something rugged and reliable in the long run, like the Dell Vostro), count me in.
I was thinking more like a Dell Precision, or Lenovo A or P series.
One major annoyance with Dell’s Precision 7530 is thier 2.5 boot drive option is blocked by the larger battery that is extremely annoying and without the 2.5 drive you don’t have an option for bulk storage…. otherwise an AMD H series version of it would be perfect.
The Thinkpad P52 gets right what dell misses at least in the battery and drives area…
> integrated DVD/BR writer
And a floppy drive, of course.
> vga
And RCA connectors for composite video and audio. Maybe a SCART port to connect to the VCR.
+1
I still have some vga screen around I might use instead to dump. DVD and BR are still of use too.
But why have the BD/DVD writer built-in?
To save place, instead to carry an external one around ? It’s not like a slot-in takes a huge part of a laptop …
It might save space, but how often do you actually use it?
@The123king : It depends, it’s depending on your usage. Perhaps manufacturers can offer two versions, for those who use and for those who don’t. But sure, USB keys have improved so much that even 4GB are considered obsolete now and can be found for less than $5, with faster transfer speed in USB3 than burning a DVD.
Guys like msundman may make fun, but no joke I just bought some HDMI to VGA adapters for this very reason. They’re 3 bucks on ebay and so far so good. I prefer HDMI when available, but no reason to throw away perfectly good VGA LCD monitors.
Most software/movie distribution has been replaced with streaming, but some people seem ignorant of the fact that even today broadband internet isn’t universal and some consumers still rely on physical media . My parents are a prime example, they live in an area previously served by ATT DSL, but ATT has been killing off it’s DSL network the past decade in favor of more profitable markets, leaving millions of subscribers without any residential internet options. I care less about physical media than I used to (though I still use it on occassion), for some users physical media is not optional.
https://consumerist.com/2012/05/16/att-upgrades-dsl-customer-to-u-verse-slower-internet-static/
Yes, there are exceptions, but for those cases there are adapters, as you said. I’m perfectly fine with using, say, a small usb-to-ethernet adapter when I want to connect a laptop directly to my switch.
And if they decide to integrate something then I’d be happy to have the PSU being built-in, so I don’t have to lug that one around.
msundman,
Personally I find dongles are extremely irksome, IMHO.
I don’t demand a VGA port because any modern conference room (or TV) will support HDMI. I only bought a dongle to give my VGA monitor new life, but to be perfectly clear I would not want to carry one around with me. As long as my laptop has an HDMI port, then I’m good. No extra adapters to lug around!
In the same vein I don’t demand DVD drives because they’re mostly superseded by faster & bigger USB3 flash drives when we need external media. However manufacturers who thought it is a good idea to remove all type-A USB ports are really not doing users any favors. It just requires more dongles to interact with the rest of the world.
With ethernet, I still use it frequently and I don’t appreciate manufacturers who tried to eliminate it prematurely by pretending a dongle is good enough.
I’ve seen some peers get bitten by missing ports and not having their dongles with them…that’s not for me. I just make sure to spec a laptop that has those capabilities built in up front so I don’t have to worry about dongles later on. Some people and manufacturers don’t care much about built in interoperability, they sacrifice that for thinner and lighter, and that’s fine for them. It depends on what you do. But personally I’m more with Kochise on this: interoperability and performance are more important to us.
Just to remember people, there are caddies to replace your useless CD/DVD/BR drive :
https://www.amazon.com/SATA-2nd-12-7mm-Universal-DVD-ROM/dp/B00NJN55KA/
Like a new SSD could be some improvement for people around. Until it fails and you loose all data on it.
+2
Oh com’ on, is an optical drive considered obsolete for a full-featured laptop now? If I want to “give out” information, I don’t feel comfortable uploading important information to the cloud because people expect the data to be up forever (aka the link to work forever), and I don’t like giving out USB sticks I could use for myself.
Yes, optical drives have been obsolete for a long time already. And if you want to give out something that would last then FFS don’t give a written DVD! If you give out a lot then get a box of USB sticks or even microSD cards (with SD adapter). Or use some file transfer service where they can’t view it online, but only download it, and where it’s clear that the download link will expire.
(Only 2 weeks ago I wrote a program to merge several ddrescue images made with different drives, in an attempt to rescue as much data as possible from my friend’s CDs and DVDs, because she thought that it’s enough to keep them in a dry, dark place, but unsurprisingly 96% of them had unrecoverable blocks. Even the newest ones.)
I stopped counting how much I lost data from failing flash USB, SD or micro SD cards. From brands like Sandisk or Verbatim, not just nonames. So please don’t put all faults on laser recording media. If people burned them at lowest speed in the first place, they would be less surprised from the data loss.
Kochise,
Hm, wasn’t that an urban ~myth? …for me media recorded at its rated speed was always fine.
So you look for a desktop with build-in screen.
No, not really, looking for something like this:
https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/hp-pavilion-laptop-15t-touch-optional-3bc70av-1
https://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/omen-laptop-15t-3ns58av-1
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-15-5000/spd/inspiron-15-5575-laptop
…
I’m not asking for parallel and serial port.
Kochise,
You’re not wrong at all. but these days we need to be thankful manufacturers haven’t all followed apple in dumping USB 2/3 ports. Hell, every single peripheral I own would require a dongle, even the standard HDMI monitors can’t be used without a dongle. I try to vote with my feet when I can, and I certainly don’t buy apple, but it’s sure difficult when the trend is for manufacturers to follow apple in selling less for more. At least there’s a shimmer of hope in that decreasing sales may convince apple to revisit their earlier decision to relegate pro users to the curb.
You can get used old ThinkPads on ebay for peanuts these days. That seems to be what you’re looking for.
With Ryzen processor ?
Yes, the AMD Zen 2 architecture is expected in 2019 with desktop CPU models that provide up to 4,5GHz (estimate) and up to 16 physical CPU cores.
The original AMD Ryzen 1000 and Threadripper 1000 modes where the introduction of the Zen architecture, with 2000 series being the Zen+ “refresh” generation.
Zen 2 should provide higher instructions-per-clock performance boost than what the refresh Zen+ delivered. Considering the new Zen 2 CPU models will be made with 7nm TSMC manufacturing process it is a reasonable expectation.
The actual announcement for the release date is expected at 2019 CES. Speculations about the release date can be made, but it is hard to tell when exactly, though yes we do expect 2019 release, albeit may not be a full CPU portfolio release.