- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
for anyone who wants to offer actual advice: its a lenovo thinkpad t450 with a soldered i5-5300U that hits over 90C when running cargo compiles. I have changed the thermal paste and it didn’t do much.
It’s a really old SMT2 processor with just two physical cores. Even a physical quad-core with SMT2 struggles in 2024, especially if you’re trying to build from source (I use Guix, btw). You need a workstation processor - the U series isn’t going to cut for the task you’re trying to do. Maybe a H, HQ, K or KF-labelled processor? Something like a 6700HQ, 6820HQ, or a Xeon 1505/1535 v5/v6? The P5x series (not the P5xs) is what you need, minus the dGPU. They’re still quite expensive, and at this point, you’re better off getting a A485/T495/T14 Gen 1/2.
I’ve started looking more into getting an ARM laptop. I know a bloke who has an M1 Macbook and it has indescribable battery life without sacrificing performance. Apple is out of the question due to their walled garden, though (I don’t want to get sucked into their ecosystem and end up with an iPhone, Apple Watch, and who knows what else), so Snapdragon X series it is for me.
About the Qualcomm processors, I’d advise you to wait. There’s a lot of hype going around, and apparently, it isn’t as good as Apple’s ARM processor. Honestly, AMD processors are almost what you’re looking for - low-power processors, highly performant iGPU, bang for buck. In fact, if you look at the newer processors, they also provide power-efficient chips, which is almost similar to the big.LITTLE in Arm - Zen4, paired alongside Zen4c. This pattern is also visible with their newer Strix Point - having both the Zen5 and the Zen5c chiplets.
Not from what my searching shows, the X1P curbstomps the M1.
I’ve used a laptop with a (i think it was) Ryzen 5 5500u and it was the complete opposite of that. Lags on midnight protocol (game), it cost almost 1000euros, aka the same price as the Surface Pro 11 here, and it hit peaks of 101C, averaging at 70.
The M1 came out in 2020
Shouldn’t you be comparing newer processors? The M4 was released in 2024. Comparing it to top-of-the-line X1E-84-100 (X1E-00-1DE benchmarks aren’t available yet, I believe), the M4 destroys them. I mean, we can debate about the price, if we just limit ourselves to an Arm architecture, but a 12-core, 24-thread CPU getting it’s ass whopped by a 9-core, 18-thread CPU tells us clearly who is in the win here.
Oh, and mind you, thermals for the Qualcomm processors are far terrible than the x86_64 CPUs. The AMD processors, especially the 7040/8040 is the clear winner here, when it comes to price-vs-performance - also being equipped with some of the best iGPUs. Intel’s efficiency cores are garbage - they gave up on long-sough processor technologies, like hyper-threading, for instance, and then there’s this oxidation fiasco, so I’d not recommend them anymore. The M4 does really well for a premium-segment processor - obviously, it is expensive, but it is really good at what it does.
The X1, along with poor emulation support, terrible thermals, and lack of software support isn’t the best choice, unless you’re okay with going all-Linux - which again, and let me tell you, Rust support for Arm is bad. I’ve tried using a Jetson Nano, it was the worst Linux experience I’ve had - yes, Nvidia sucks balls, but Arm isn’t that easy to work on with.
As a RISC fanboy, x86_64 is still a good pick, at least if you’re not a dev and a tinkerer. There’s a lot of work pending, even after the existence of Arm PCs for almost a decade.