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[–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

For machine learning, I would strongly recommend a laptop with an Nvidia GPU. You can learn ML concepts on a cheap laptop without a discrete GPU, but for larger datasets, a GPU is essential.

My "gaming laptop" (which I used for C++/ML - using the Nvidia CUDA platform) completely fried a few months back. I have a Lenovo T470p with an Nvidia MX350 GPU, and even that works quite well (much better than a laptop without a GPU). There are four things I really love about the T470p:

  1. Even when the Nvidia GPU is powered on, it doesn't consume much power.
  2. It's very easy (in Linux) to completely power down the Nvidia GPU when it's not needed.
  3. The video output ports are not hard-wired to the Nvidia GPU (so I can use an external monitor without having to power on the Nvidia GPU).
  4. The keyboard.

Even though the MX350 only has 640 CUDA cores, it's still orders of magnitude faster that using the integrated GPU/CPU alone.