10th Generation Intel Core i9-10980HK or AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX?

[James_Smith]

I'm buying a new laptop to replace my 2017 dinosaur and I'm at the point of deciding between these two processors. What do you think?

[Petermint]

For me, processors across the two brands do not offer a lot of difference. I would look at the CPU plus support chip. My recent purchase was Intel Gen 11 with the new support chip as it worked out similar in price to Gen 10 and has USB4 plus, the big thing for my use, faster single thread speed.

Locally, some AMD CPUs are cheaper but the motherboards are more expensive by about the same amount you save on the processor. There is more competition on Intel motherboards and there are more options. I find I can config Intel with more money spare for a better SSD.

Whatever your choose, it will depend on what you want to run. Blender? Doom2? What do you want the speed for?

[gittiest personITW]

Also look at the chipsets. Do the motherboards have enough slots/ports/SATA/M2 etc for your use?
As well as looking at power consumption of the cpus = heat+money+melty icecaps, all so we shave a second or two off boot times.

[Petermint]

Chipsets as used on motherboards: My notebook has the right chipset to run an NVMe SSD at gen 4 speed but the motherboard is fitted out as 2 * gen 3 NVMe slots.

[Hoser Rob]

Tried searching "linux <intel or amd make/model>"? Search engines are your friend.

Doing so tells me that you're going to need a 5.15 series kernel for the AMD one, does Mint 20.3 support that series? I don't run 20.x.

On the Intel search I got no relevant hits I could find, which tells me it'd be too new for me to consider in Linux.

Bleeding edge hardware is a bit of an issue in Linux. It takes about 6 months for the Linux kernel drivers to come out, and then they may not work in long term support distros like Ubuntu or Mint because the supported kernel versions aren't recent enough.

Bleeding edge distros like Arch have much newer versions of software/drivers but they are just not suitable for beginners.

[CyberCodeDroid]

AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX

[Oraticus]

I go along with broader picture views rather than just the processor on its own.

How tactile does it feel? Good keys action, touchpad/trackpad things work smooth?

Then on to the innards - does the CPU sit well with its chipset?

Ram to a reasonable level?

It really is a system decision based on your interaction with the device

Personally I favour iNtel over AMD

[vince77]

Honestly it depends upon your use-case. But, for most parameters AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX wins. Be it single core performance, power efficiency or the overall performance.

[Petermint]

Intel Core i9-12900KF is currently the top of the single thread list but the power usage would require a desktop size cooling system. I cannot see a notebook computer fitting in my backpack with an Alphacool Eisbaer 420 cooler attached.

That prompts the question of notebook versus laptop. I look at the big heavy laptops as only desktop replacements. For portability, I look for thin light notebooks. I started with the Toshiba notebook that Apple copied when they "invented" thin notebooks. There is no room for actual cooling air. Everything depends on copper pipes. Unfortunately most of them fail to cool the SSD. When you have a CPU burning through megawatts and the SSD writes adding more kilowatts, everything crashes into thermal shutdown. That is why the paid "reviews" run their tests for a very short time and leave out anything that is disk write intensive.

Are you looking at a big gaming laptop with monster fans? Will you write massive files to the SSD? You could be better off with the 12th gen CPUs that have a mix of performance and lower power cores. When Linux gets the code to manage distribution of workloads over the different cores, that will make a huge difference.

[axrusar]

To give an answer to the OP.



AMD wins here..
but the whole thread is pointless without knowing what you want to do with the computer, and besides the valid pointers suggested previously, there might be a zillion other reasons to consider one over the other. Your 2017 "Dinosaur" might be all you need for the next 10 years of computing at least you work on something really intensive, which a laptop may actually not be the wisest idea in the first place due to limitations in cooling.

[Petermint]

In our location, for the same price as the AMD, you can get an Intel Core i9-12900F with almost double the speed. The $20 you save on the Intel CPU and the $20 you save on the Intel motherboard would help pay for the massive extra cooling required.