Bad time to buy a laptop?....Spectre and Meltdown news

deadanonymau5 · 06-01-2018 12:30AM #1

Hi

Ive a MBP but its pretty slow these days and needs a new (and expensive battery) saw some good deals on Windows 10 laptops in the sales.

Just curious is it a bad time to buy a laptop now with the recent news of Spectre and Meltdown? Do you think it would be better to wait for the next gen of Intel chips as the fixes are supposed to dramatically slow down all computers affected by the "Spectre and Meltdown"?

Alanstrainor · 06-01-2018 12:38AM

Yes I was considering this in the last couple of days. We will all find out how it affects our laptops in the coming days when windows and apple push their fixes for these issues. It's very specific in what type of processes are effected by the fixes by all accounts. So not all apps will see performance hits.

At the same time we could be waiting quite some time for new hardware without this flaw. Gen 8 processors are just out really, will there be fixed gen 8 Intel processors, or will we have to wait for next gen? It's anyone's guess at this point.

ixoy · 06-01-2018 12:42AM

I wouldn't worry too much about a performance hit, from what I've read. It'll depend on what you plan to use the laptop for really.

TerrorFirmer · 06-01-2018 12:36PM

I don't think Ryzen mobile will be that revolutionary, depends what you're looking for.

Intel already have mobile Coffee Lake i5 available for as low as €550-600. They're a game changer compared to the previous Intel offerings in that bracket which were the dual core i3/i5/i7 ULV cpus, but the new Coffee Lake are all quads, even ULV.

Ryzen was revolutionary in the desktop market because it offered a viable alternative to Intel for the first time in about a decade. Intel has countered that since with Coffee Lake on desktop and mobile, so while AMD are now a great viable alternative in both markets, there isn't going to be some miracle revolution in laptop performance/pricing really.

Where Ryzen mobile will shine is graphics performance. AMD's integrated graphics have always been better than Intel's, but at the cost of weaker CPU's. Finally now we'll have AMD on par with Intel, but with considerably superior graphics performance.

07-01-2018 06:09AM

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

I don't think Ryzen mobile will be that revolutionary, depends what you're looking for.

Intel already have mobile Coffee Lake i5 available for as low as €550-600. They're a game changer compared to the previous Intel offerings in that bracket which were the dual core i3/i5/i7 ULV cpus, but the new Coffee Lake are all quads, even ULV.

Ryzen was revolutionary in the desktop market because it offered a viable alternative to Intel for the first time in about a decade. Intel has countered that since with Coffee Lake on desktop and mobile, so while AMD are now a great viable alternative in both markets, there isn't going to be some miracle revolution in laptop performance/pricing really.

Where Ryzen mobile will shine is graphics performance. AMD's integrated graphics have always been better than Intel's, but at the cost of weaker CPU's. Finally now we'll have AMD on par with Intel, but with considerably superior graphics performance.

i'd try to get the quad-core i5 paired with nvidia mx150. in tests that's more powerful graphics wise than the amd ryzen mobile which hasn't lived up to the promise, performing very similar to intel integrated graphics current gen in real-world gaming fps at the bottom of this link. definitely a way short of i5 and mx150.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/HP-Envy-x360-15-Ryzen-5-2500U-Radeon-Vega-8-Laptop-Review.266614.0.html

Bad time to buy a laptop?....Spectre and Meltdown news

Comments