4 ms·

They don't have a lot to brag about there. I'm on an expensive Thinkpad with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H, less than a year old... no AVX512. Chip was released Apr

They don't have a lot to brag about there. I'm on an expensive Thinkpad with an AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H, less than a year old... no AVX512. Chip was released Apr 2022, with AVX&AVX2 but no 512. (Also completely garbage unstable and unreliable driver & firmware support from both AMD and Lenovo, but that's another story). I've been messing with SIMD optimizations recently in a datastructure library I wrote, and as tantalizing as the AVX-512 is, it'll be years before it can be used in production software on a real scale. Introduced in 2017, and still totally unusable in the wild.

leeoniya 3y ago
> Also completely garbage unstable and unreliable driver & firmware support from both AMD and Lenovo, but that's another story as a counterpoint, i'm on a P14s Gen 2 Thinkpad (Ryzen 7 PRO 5850u) and have zero issues on EndeavourOS (Arch, KDE/Plasma). most of my time is in VSCode, SublimeMerge, Chrome, MPV. i did have to rip out the realtek (or mediatek?) M.2 wifi card and swap in an intel one tho.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Lenovo straight up broke the USB-C ports support for external displays (and other things) in the latest BIOS update for my machine -- for both Windows and Linux -- and there's no way to roll back and there's not a peep from them on any kind of attempt to fix or even acknowledgement of a problem. Requires a hardware ("pinhole" not power cycle) reset every time I want to switch between external monitor use and laptop only. My bug report/forum post here: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Z-series-Laptops/External-USB-C-display-stopped-working-1-57-BIOS-Update-Z16-AMD-Gen-1/m-p/5228342 https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Z-series-Laptops/Exter... -- other people are effected. Last year they pushed out a BIOS update which caused the fan to run 100% of the time. Then a "fix" which caused it to overheat. And in-between there somewhere something was pushed that caused me to have to reformat the whole thing. Lid-open-to-awake in Linux used to simply not work 75% of the time, required a hard reset. Now it works, but there's a 5-10 second pause before display turns on (Windows or Linux) vs almost instant on the work issued laptops I've had recently (MBP M1 and some HP Z series thing, running Linux) Waste of cash. Bought this thing to be my dev workstation when I took a contract job last summer, wish I'd never done that. Software quality / support at Lenovo is a real problem.
  - Projectiboga 3y ago
    My Think Pad Tablet has had issues after a bad firmware partial update. It won't stay on past 30 min. It is really souring my former respect for them. I understand it is part TPM issues, but now I have basically a semi-brick. I was able to move the whole os to a VM. I'll try linux and see if it was a Win-Bios interaction bug. And if that doesn't fix it I'll wait six more months and see if it gets a working update. By my former respect for Lenovo is now gone.
  - rewmie 3y ago
    > Lenovo straight up broke the USB-C ports support (...) According to AMD, the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H does not have USB type-C support. https://www.amd.com/en/product/11621 https://www.amd.com/en/product/11621
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      What does that even mean? Clearly the laptop itself has USB-C support (it has 2 USB-C 4 and 1 1 USB-C 3.2).
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  Couple of T14s (one debian, one windows) and a 4800U (both) here, all solid. I haven't tried updating the bios.
kolbe 3y ago
If you're using an llvm-compiled language targeting a new avx512-enabled architecture, you're already using avx512 instructions to vastly accelerate your programs via autovectorization.
- rat9988 3y ago
  Yes but his point still stands.
  - kolbe 3y ago
    He said "Introduced in 2017, and still totally unusable in the wild." I understand his frustrations with his own hardware, but he's using lower end consumer hardware. We could quibble about what it means to be "in the wild," but I operate in a compute heavy space where companies buy good hardware, and they all make effective use of AVX512 instruction.
- ComputerGuru 3y ago
  Hardly. Autovectorization is rarely performed as a percentage of all the cases where it’s theoretically possible, not reliably done (no guarantees - even if it AVs today, the same code may not AV tomorrow), and not something you want your actual hot path to rely on. AV is nice for “incidental” speedups to general code. No serious library touting SIMD acceleration will consider AV sufficient for the core hot loop.
  - kolbe 3y ago
    > Autovectorization is rarely performed as a percentage of all the cases where it’s theoretically possible, This is not my experience. Do you have some justification for this statement? I've found myself far more impressed by autovectorization than disappointed by it. I've found that code most people think is autovectorizable actually violates scalar contracts. But if you write clear code whose scalar implementation won't introduce UB if autovectorized, the compiler is really good. Here's my go-to example. Agner Fog's VCL is a well-respected library. It has vectorized versions of all sorts of useful mathematitical functions. For fun, I rewrote his `exp(x)` function using his exact algorithm, but in scalar code, and it autovectorized, and benchmarks the same. https://godbolt.org/z/TK637PTh7 https://godbolt.org/z/TK637PTh7
znpy 3y ago
I love thinkpads as much as the next person, but pulling in mobile cpus when the topic is massively multicore chips is extremely off topic at best.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Parent comment is the one who brought consumer CPUs into the discussion

leeoniya 3y ago

> Also completely garbage unstable and unreliable driver & firmware support from both AMD and Lenovo, but that's another story as a counterpoint, i'm on a P14s Gen 2 Thinkpad (Ryzen 7 PRO 5850u) and have zero issues on EndeavourOS (Arch, KDE/Plasma). most of my time is in VSCode, SublimeMerge, Chrome, MPV. i did have to rip out the realtek (or mediatek?) M.2 wifi card and swap in an intel one tho.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Lenovo straight up broke the USB-C ports support for external displays (and other things) in the latest BIOS update for my machine -- for both Windows and Linux -- and there's no way to roll back and there's not a peep from them on any kind of attempt to fix or even acknowledgement of a problem. Requires a hardware ("pinhole" not power cycle) reset every time I want to switch between external monitor use and laptop only. My bug report/forum post here: https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Z-series-Laptops/External-USB-C-display-stopped-working-1-57-BIOS-Update-Z16-AMD-Gen-1/m-p/5228342 https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-Z-series-Laptops/Exter... -- other people are effected. Last year they pushed out a BIOS update which caused the fan to run 100% of the time. Then a "fix" which caused it to overheat. And in-between there somewhere something was pushed that caused me to have to reformat the whole thing. Lid-open-to-awake in Linux used to simply not work 75% of the time, required a hard reset. Now it works, but there's a 5-10 second pause before display turns on (Windows or Linux) vs almost instant on the work issued laptops I've had recently (MBP M1 and some HP Z series thing, running Linux) Waste of cash. Bought this thing to be my dev workstation when I took a contract job last summer, wish I'd never done that. Software quality / support at Lenovo is a real problem.
- Projectiboga 3y ago
  My Think Pad Tablet has had issues after a bad firmware partial update. It won't stay on past 30 min. It is really souring my former respect for them. I understand it is part TPM issues, but now I have basically a semi-brick. I was able to move the whole os to a VM. I'll try linux and see if it was a Win-Bios interaction bug. And if that doesn't fix it I'll wait six more months and see if it gets a working update. By my former respect for Lenovo is now gone.
- rewmie 3y ago
  > Lenovo straight up broke the USB-C ports support (...) According to AMD, the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 6850H does not have USB type-C support. https://www.amd.com/en/product/11621 https://www.amd.com/en/product/11621
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    What does that even mean? Clearly the laptop itself has USB-C support (it has 2 USB-C 4 and 1 1 USB-C 3.2).
JonChesterfield 3y ago
Couple of T14s (one debian, one windows) and a 4800U (both) here, all solid. I haven't tried updating the bios.

kolbe 3y ago

If you're using an llvm-compiled language targeting a new avx512-enabled architecture, you're already using avx512 instructions to vastly accelerate your programs via autovectorization.

rat9988 3y ago
Yes but his point still stands.
- kolbe 3y ago
  He said "Introduced in 2017, and still totally unusable in the wild." I understand his frustrations with his own hardware, but he's using lower end consumer hardware. We could quibble about what it means to be "in the wild," but I operate in a compute heavy space where companies buy good hardware, and they all make effective use of AVX512 instruction.
ComputerGuru 3y ago
Hardly. Autovectorization is rarely performed as a percentage of all the cases where it’s theoretically possible, not reliably done (no guarantees - even if it AVs today, the same code may not AV tomorrow), and not something you want your actual hot path to rely on. AV is nice for “incidental” speedups to general code. No serious library touting SIMD acceleration will consider AV sufficient for the core hot loop.
- kolbe 3y ago
  > Autovectorization is rarely performed as a percentage of all the cases where it’s theoretically possible, This is not my experience. Do you have some justification for this statement? I've found myself far more impressed by autovectorization than disappointed by it. I've found that code most people think is autovectorizable actually violates scalar contracts. But if you write clear code whose scalar implementation won't introduce UB if autovectorized, the compiler is really good. Here's my go-to example. Agner Fog's VCL is a well-respected library. It has vectorized versions of all sorts of useful mathematitical functions. For fun, I rewrote his `exp(x)` function using his exact algorithm, but in scalar code, and it autovectorized, and benchmarks the same. https://godbolt.org/z/TK637PTh7 https://godbolt.org/z/TK637PTh7

znpy 3y ago

I love thinkpads as much as the next person, but pulling in mobile cpus when the topic is massively multicore chips is extremely off topic at best.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
Parent comment is the one who brought consumer CPUs into the discussion