Why would you buy a Mac mini for performance critical work? I could see being bound to a laptop for some workflows, but is that Ryzen available in laptops?
Yes, but only the zen 2 flavor which is significantly slower per core. The M1 competitor with similar thermals, close IPC per core, and on board GPU is widly rumored to be announced in Jan at CES.
> The M1 competitor with similar thermals, close IPC per core, and on board GPU is widly rumored to be announced in Jan at CES.
Ok, so what you’re saying is that AMD is wildly rumored to have a processor that you might be able to find as an option on a niche (term not used in a negative sense) brand laptop in Summer 2021 that directly competes with Apple’s M1 processor available in Fall 2020 on their highest sold models which are their lowest price point machines?
Have you looked at the laptop market lately? AMD has had quite a few design wins. Brands like Lenovo (including the Thinkpad, flex, and legion), HP (pavilion), Dell (including inspiron, gaming, and Alienware lines), Asus (Studiobooks, zenbooks, TUF, and ROG), Acer Aspire, and MSI, and the Microsoft Surface.
I wouldn't call all of those "niche". AMD has made a surprisingly quick move from the bargain basement laptops to the Thinkpad and Microsoft Surface lines in a single generation.
The nice thing is the new chips are pin compatible, so every current design win should move over to the new chips quickly. In fact half of the Ryzen 5000 laptop chips are renamed and slightly tweaked zen 2 chips from the previous gen. Based on the number of leaks, benchmarks, photos, etc it seems like the channel might well be full.
So I'm comparing laptops available in Nov (although people I know couldn't get theirs till Dec) to laptops I expect to be available in Feb, but that's speculative of course. Even the previous gen (zen 2) APUs are getting similar write ups to the M1. Things like benchmarking against the I9-9980KH and i7-1075H and winning. The zen3 is quite a bump vs the zen2 so I'm optimistic it will go well.
I'm hoping to get a few, maybe a mac mini like widget and another for a NAS. I don't expect them to crush a M1, but to be reasonably competitive, and while I contributed to the patreon to get linux on the M1, I expect the Zen 3 chips to have much better linux support.
> AMD has made a surprisingly quick move from the bargain basement laptops
I specifically called out niche as not a negative term for this reason. I didn’t mean to imply bargain basement, but more that high end processors like this would only be included on a few models. Things like gaming or developer focused machines vs something built for a wider audience (like the current M1 machines are).
> So I'm comparing laptops available in Nov (although people I know couldn't get theirs till Dec) to laptops I expect to be available in Feb, but that's speculative of course.
I walked into an Apple store in November and walked out (in under 3min I might add) and had an M1 13” MBP. I think them taking my temperature at the door took almost as long as checkout. Having closely followed CES announcements over the years, I respectfully disagree that there will be laptops in February available for delivery/pickup using the processor just announced the month before, but there is a slim chance so I won’t bet against it. Much more likely to be May/June/July based on past experience.
Wow, lucky. I needed to arrange for some family travel on short notice and wanted a MBP (13", 16GB ram, 1tb storage). Current delivery times start on Jan 21st.
Possible, and I've seen similar. Just seeing a surprisingly wide number of announcements, leaks, and multiple brands with multiple different Zen3 APUs.
