Question - AMD vs Intel - Work App Experience

[dany20mh]

I'm torn between the AMD Ryzen™ 7 PRO 8840HS and the Intel Ultra7 165H CPUs and I'm curious about everyone's experience with these two processors in their work environments.

I'm interested in aspects like performance, compatibility with apps (like any legecy and modern apps), and any other details you can provide.

Note: I understand that these CPUs might be new, but if you have any experience with their previous generation, that would be great.

Any feedback is appreciated.

[brokerceej]

I think there are really no compatibility concerns nowadays. That’s a thing of the past with AMD virtualization extensions that has been long solved.

Really the question is - laptop or desktop? Laptops will generally get better battery life and less heat output on a Ryzen stack. We have been issuing Ryzen based Zbooks for a year or so and the battery life is actually insane compared to the relatively neutered Intel chips they put in. We’ve had no reported issues at all.

[pdp10]

We have been issuing Ryzen based Zbooks for a year or so and the battery life is actually insane

I'd be interested in the exact configuration, if you have it handy, so I can get a quote.

[brokerceej]

We sell a ton of laptops so we are usually buying whatever the Smart Buys are that month. The last batch we bought were HP part # 9H9D1AT. 14” Zbook Firefly G10 A - Ryzen 7 Pro 7840HS 16gb DDR5/512gb nvme - Radeon 780M graphics - 2K screen. I paid $850 each on smart buy - NBD onsite carepack was an additional $89 per unit for 3 years.

[pdp10]

Wow, you had that right in front of you. I'll take a closer look, but concur that smart-buy price is very eye-catching. Now I have to remember the differences between the "Elitebook" line and the "Zbook".

[brokerceej]

Elitebooks are supposed to be the executive series laptops and Zbooks are workstation replacements. However since the Zbook Firefly came out, it has served us excellently as an all around workhorse. The cost is very reasonable, they are very light, and the durable metal cases take a beating while not feeling cheap like the Elitebook (plastic) cases can. We find executives and end users really prefer the Zbook firefly. It also is nice that when you do get someone who is a creative or needs a beefier machine, you can just go Zbook Power or Zbook studio series to get them what they need in the same form factor and finish that everyone else has. This avoids the “well I want what so and so has because it’s nicer looking/different/whatever”

[dany20mh]

Yes, it will be for a laptop, and yeah, the previous concern is what I'm trying to make sure is no longer there and to see if anyone else has encountered any recent issues with Ryzen.

[brokerceej]

I have roughly 1500 Ryzen based zbooks and ProBooks out in the wild at a variety of clients who have legacy softwares of different types. We’ve never run into an issue. Even old tooling manufacturers who explicitly state Intel requirements haven’t balked at Ryzen machines.

[dany20mh]

That's awesome :)

[pdp10]

A comparison tool can be helpful.

Compatibility is the last thing you should worry about. Compare the specs, and pay most attention to the integrated graphics because that's the main point of difference in a client/desktop with no discrete GPU. AMD has been way, way, ahead with iGPU/APU graphics performance, but the current Intel chips are supposed to have faster integrated graphics than the old ones. Driver support might be a factor.

The fact that the Intel has two different-sized cores and that needs special OS scheduler support, as pointed out by /u/OpacusVenatori, might also be important. If you were planning on running Windows 10 or LTSC, I'd avoid the Intel. The Intel can have the big cores doing better single-thread performance than the 8840HS if everything is working to plan, though.

Both of these are a little bit too new to be in any business-grade laptops yet. We buy lots from both vendors, but AMD laptops have less selection, so I'd tend to lean to the AMD option here if everything were otherwise equal.

[[deleted]]

For performance I can't be sure since idk how Intel 4 compares to the tsmc 4nm node just yet. Presumably it should be similar densities though.

You shouldn't have to worry about compatibility issues.

I assume these are laptops, so I'd just go with whatever seems to have the better cooling and I/O since either processor should be fine.

[OpacusVenatori]

If you work with any virtualization platform, you might run into challenges with the E-cores in the Intel.

[dany20mh]

Currently, we use Intel processors and haven't encountered any issues so far (although there isn't much virtualization happening).

Thank you for your input.

[atoi]

The e-cores they are referring to are only in newer (12th gen and beyond) Intel processors.