How will Ampere scale on laptops?

We have exactly (and almost exclusively) what the lowest common denominators are willing to put up with. And, anyone that dares to question how low the bar can go is a mean, icky, racist, bigot, old-school hater. The exclusivity part is the problem. There will always be bottom-feeders with low standards.

No, I did not think that you were being disrespectful or anything like that. We're good, bro. What I was being hyperbolic about is we have people that drool over the idea of things like flying cars while something as ordinary and easy to get right with a little bit of effort and intelligence, such as laptops, remains a total cluster and gets worse with each generation. The world is overrun with idiots and we need a reality check. There's nothing wrong with flying cars.

 

I can't agree more, but don't you think smaller is better and im talking you know laptops but look at the LG gram super thin and light and when you need the power hook up a gpu

 

No, I don't. Not when you can have whatever you want as long as it's popular and what somebody else wants. I don't like small, thin and light garbage books. I mean, they're OK on an airplane or for a person that is always on the go with no way to connect to the grid... sure, why not. I get that. But, otherwise... no. Not even. Bigger is better to me. People that are like me should be able to have good options to choose from as well. We don't. There are like two. One needs work and the other one is an absolutely hopeless joke.

 

I mean if cooling ecetera caught up...isn't that just the evolution

 

Well, it needs to get caught up, but I doubt it will. Part of it is simple physics. You can't cool a "high performance" product so thin you can cut yourself on the edge of it. It's only the evolution of it because the people endowed with the power of deciding have decided to do only what they want. Not because that's what everyone ways. I prefer bigger, heavier, more powerful, modular. Even when that is extinct (almost currently) I will never like or appreciate what's left. I am not interested in eGPU as an option. I want the full package, not a compromise.

 

thinking of my next girlfriend

 

The reason they are going to small and light is because the vast majority of the market likes it. It's that simple. The PC market is one of the few remaining markets with robust competition among a number of OEMs and that competition has driven prices down to the point that survival depends on building at scale and vertical integration. When you have many competitors in such a market profits per unit are slim; you need to make what people want to buy or you die because they'll just buy the other guys product at the exact same price. People want slim, they want light; this is why the fastest growing segment in the industry is 2 in 1's, the second is all other small and highly portable laptops.

I hate to break it to you but people willing to pay the price, both literally and figuratively, for a big, fat, heavy, laptop, has become slim; too slim for profits. The only good news is that the gaming market is the most profitable per unit but the required scale to attain profitability means that only the lower end of the market can be serviced because sales drop off dramatically at the 1000 dollar price point and go off a cliff by just the 1500 price point. That means only the lower end of the gaming market is going to see much love because the higher end cant reach the scale needed to get a decent ROI.

The reason they are going small is because the vast majority of the market doesn't want fat and the small minority that do don't constitute a market worth investing in. People don't want small because they are stupid, by and large they know exactly what they need and want. It isn't because gamers got together and slept with the corporate bigwiggs wives and now they've got it out for us. I mean, c'mon guys: The world does not revolve around the needs of a few gamers. I hate what the market has become as much as the next guy and I want exactly the laptop Mr Fox describes but you've got to get real here.

 

Cool story, except if you look at Dell's quarterly report, profits in the consumer unit are driven by XPS and Alienware - which, according to you, is the irrelevant high-end part of the market.

 

a little blunt and a little mean...forced a laugh

both are dell and yes name brand plays a big role after all they are consumer cows for a reason....but as a whole aka the entire pizza thin and lights are the new norm

 

Dell is not the market and the majority of those XPS and AW sales are on the low end of their range. There was also no "story" the market is what it is, anyone can look the numbers up.

 

Laptops by the Numbers: Market Share and More - Fortunly


notice how hp and lenovo are tops.....and they almost exclusively sell thin and lights especially lenovo....and yes im aware of the omens but they are roughly 1inch thick and not exactly a 2in beast

 

Is that score being tilted by the AMD processor probably being better than anything Intel can muster?

 

Yep, this is exactly what I've been saying as well.

If the larger high powered notebooks were in demand by customers they would be making them in order to turn a profit. Make no mistake, they are out to make money and if there's money to be made they would be happy to service that market and receive it.

If there is a market for them and profit to be had, they will be offered. If not, they won't. Period.

Most users don't give two squats about benchmark wars and just want to play their games. The $3000-4000+ to dump into a true DTR with an LGA CPU and a high wattage GPU is a diminishing return for all but the fringe of the fringe of edge case users. I'm in that fringe boat myself with my eGPU setup. It just so happens for me I think with Intel adding on-die direct-to-cpu TB4 to seemingly every CPU up and down the line in the 11th gen I might actually get something I want this time.

EDIT: I do still think some boutique vendors like Clevo will pull something together to try to cater to the people who will spend that money to get like a 5950X + overvoltable overclockable RTX 3080

 

LG Gram 17 i7-8565U | 17" 16:10 Panel (2560x1600) | 16GB | Sonnet Breakaway Box 550 + Asus Strix RTX 2070 OC | 500GB WD SN750 + 1TB WD SN750 | Win 10 Pro 20H2 + Fedora 32

this is what people want/desire

 

Dell is one of the largest US tech companies, #7 by revenue IIRC, i. e. they are fairly representative. I am an informational disadvantage here. You must be among the few people who have seen Dell's confidential sales numbers, I am not.

As for reliable public data on global laptop market sales, would you have a link to share with this humble community?

 

XPS and Alienware are all but thin and light now. Krabman's point was regarding price brackets though.

 

Thanks. Just scanned and found no concrete sales/profit data backing up any claims regarding thin and light, 2-in-1, price brackets etc. This is all just high level aggregate data.

 

(moved to the Nvidia Thread)

 

I think a lot of people would be surprised by how low the average laptop sales price is as well as the size of the corporate market.

The rest of it is just modern economics; a lot of competition among large vertically integrated corporations means you're going to have a race to the bottom and very similar pricing when you get there. Trying to sell something people don't want isn't going to work when buyers can just move on to the next thing at an equivalent price.

Laptops are getting thinner and lighter because people like thinner and lighter. You can throw a lot of anger at the various OEMs that they've earned but lighter and thinner isn't on them, the market demanded it and they responded.

 

I'm very resistant to hand-waving and vague references to modern economics, as if it was hard science.

 

Anecdote here

My Alienware 13 r3 wouldn't sell until I removed the goodies and dropped the price. Once it hit a certain number it sold 30 minutes later.

Again just an anecdote.

 

lol we are taking it personal now are we not?

who cares its just an opinion...thin and light on the rise. but maybe your right they are not as big as we think......but its getting there so it appears.....we don't have hard numbers but so what..

 

I'm good with a balance of parts. Why get a DTR if a smaller laptop can get the job done? I don't believe for a second that the GE76 can't handle a 200w 3080M.

If only the GE76 had a overclockable ryzen processor and a 200w vbios, it would have been perfect.

Sure you lose out on socketable cpus and mxm gpus but so what, those have proved to be useless for futureproofing. You can thank the manufacturers for that.

 

For me it doesn't matter if it's a 3 pound difference and it means the thing will last longer, these thin and light laptops are just so much more fragile, have less inputs, are hard/impossible to upgrade like keyboards, run HOT etc Just like cell phones they're just designed for 3 years of use average, disposable is built in and that flies in the face of the green movement faux virtue signalling they do.

An example of better modularity of dtr's was my dead m6700, I'm able to part out the cpu and mxm cpu, which is most of the real salvage and get something back as well as recycle in a real way, bga is almost a total loss in the garbage. Full circle real recycling benefits me and the next user. These are expensive items to normal people but it's just a revenue stream to these guys, nothing to do with lasting. I also think it's a highly dubious the argument that "that's what people want" is universally true, it's more like "this is what's available deal with it plebs". The rest just sounds like techno-babble confusion speak internalized/rationalized, sounds very slick though.

 

Pretty much. Remember what I said about the zephurus S not coming with a 150w 3080M?

Companies only make laptops good enough to compete. Don't expect them to do anything extra if it doesn't benefit them.

 

Don't really see the relevance. It's hardly surprising that lowering the price gets things moving faster on the secondary market for a really niche 13 inch screen size laptop (how old was it again?).

The earlier claim under scrutiny here is that enthusiast, or even premium $1500+ laptop market is low volume and thus not particularly important to OEMs.

Presumably you are not replacing your AW 13 with a $700 Acer?

 

Laptops are becoming more and more like smartphones--disposable appliances. Take the Alienware M17/M15 generations for example. Soldered CPU, soldered GPU, soldered RAM, soldered WiFi. Basically a MacBook with RGB in terms of repairability, serviceability, and upgradeability. Meanwhile, when I purchased my Clevo in early 2018, I configured it with an i5-8600K and GTX 1080 with the intention of upgrading to 9th gen CPUs when they were released. My i5-8600K wasn't the best sample so it needed a bit of voltage and ran hot. 9th gen ended up being hot too, so last year I swapped out the i5 for a cooler and faster i7-8086K and gave the i5 to my brother for his desktop. Can't do that with BGA. Same with the GPU. I can upgrade the 1080 to a 2080, 2080S, or 3080M.

 

You are on point on most of this and it is exactly why I abandoned laptops in 2015. I am not interested in disposable trash that is misrepresented as being something special. It is better to walk away with nothing than it is to lower the bar. Just because the market is overrun by people with lower expectations and those that are willing to go with the flow doesn't mean they need to join the Kool-Aid drinking party. Some people derive tremendous satisfaction from not becoming part of the problem and not contributing to the degradation. It's bad enough all of this trash is disposable. It adds insult to injury that all of it is built to malfunction in order to avoid self-destruction. It's stupefying that there are so many people willing to forgive that and pretend it isn't so just because it's cute.

 

MSI really messed up the new GE76...they give you a MUX switch to choose between Optimus or dedicated GPU and they give you a G-Sync capable screen (at least for 300 Hz), so they give everything on the hardware side for G-Sync to work, but they do not enable it on the software side... WTF ? They left out G-Sync so far because they went with the Optimus route, but why give a MUX switch and G-Sync capable screen if you still cheap out on the software side and do not enable G-Sync ? Doesnt make any sense ...

 

I am so old and petty that the industry wide removal of dedicated touchpad buttons is looking like my breaking point.

They did the same thing with the GE66 and GS66 last year. It's disappointing and MSI is quickly falling out of favor with me.

I'll see where things are at CES 2023 but it's looking like I'm jumping ship.

 

iirc I think I read that the premium product only make higher sales volume with the low end spec models (and thus lower priced). Through my anecdote I can see the logic of that particular line of thinking. Not support for or against, just saying I can understand the logic behind it.

Though without detailed evidence definitely stating one way or the other is not possible with some * modifiers in the explanation.

Correct on that point Its paying for my P750FM laptop. Dont bother googling the model number, its a working name for a project that has been underway for a while.

As for the scrutiny portion of the argument, I imagine Dell cares more about their halo products for its PR value and name brand. The Enterprise at this point sell themselves.

 

Yeah I don't get why they don't offer G-sync. What 30 series laptops still have it actually?

Asus had it last gen but removed it this gen along with the mux switch lol.

 

I have a 2 in 1, love it for what it is but it's terrible at gaming or really anything that keeps it on a boil. Still, it's great for mobile computing in the general sense; sadly for us it's as much computer as a whole lot of people need which is a large portion of the equation that got us here. Of course the one I care about is my gaming laptop and right now I'm seeing nothing that says "buy me." It's not lack of money, it's that no one is offering what I consider a legit high end offering that doesn't hit my personal deal breakers.

I'm going to go on here responding to the thread... No, I don't have special inside information. No, I'm not smarter than the next guy here. Then again I sold my computer business back in the ninties, I was building them for extra ching and it started outearning my day job which was another business that gave me substantial time off. I ended up making a gut call; similar businesses were cratering at an alarming rate and I decided to sell while I still had a working business. That time period would be where a met Mrs Krab although at the time I was still with Mrs Ex-Krab.

In the context of this thread it matters because Mrs Krab (current) is an economics professor and tech is her area of expertise. Yes, her erudition vastly exceeds my own and by no small margin. In any event, yeah, I do have access to information which most here will not but I didn't post such, I posted general numbers in aggregate which are available for those who search.

As to Dell numbers specifically I do not have inside information from any source and that includes the one sleeping next to me but then I don't need them to support my comments; the business model is well known and shared by most other similar enterprises. I could go on here to describe that model in detail but like many old people I fear becoming pedantic and I suspect most would find it boring. If folks are interested I could go there as time allows; I'd like to get Mrs Krab to comment but she normally won't, she thinks the internet is making people stupid one fallacy at a time.

 

Alright, so if I understand correctly, you've determined that the market/OEMs have failed you and are going DYI route based on a product made by an enthusiast brand Clevo. Fair enough, I doubt you are alone given the disappointment that is Ampere mobile.

 

Unfortunately, that kind of incompetence is fast becoming the norm.

But, the MUX switch is something all laptops should have with or without G-stink. Having Optimus as the only option really sucks. With a 300Hz panel, G-stink is of limited value. Much better to have 120Hz or higher refresh rate without it, than 60Hz with it.

 

Last sentence is extremely accurate.

 

Between the idiots running the social media platforms, big tech censoring and manipulation of facts and the biased and agenda-driven "journalism" feeding non-stop misinformation, it's a wonder that anyone can even be sure about what day of the week today is.

 

I regret leaning into that last sentence to take this to politics as there is clearly one side fact based and the other clearly farcical. Hopefully a moderator just comes in and cleans us up and we get back onto Ampere.

 

I think the only scaling Ampere needs to do right now is the manufacturing. I've been on that EVGA queue for 5 MONTHS NOW.

 

You are talking about a desktop card. It doesn't matter how many of these Nvidia manages to push out, they will all be gobbled up on the spot unless crypto crashes deeply. Laptops, on the other hand, offer much less value to miners, hence some are actually available for purchase. 90-150W (+15W!!) is better than nothing

 

We can hope and pray it does. I'd love to see it happen. The world would be a better place. Improved availability of GPUs would be one of the benefits.

 

I've been trying to turn this conversation back from blame, value complaints, corporate skullduggery, so on, as it's come up because it doesn't produce. I do get it, I've my own but they don't produce either.

As to the current offerings I think the matter of form is relevant because it in some respects defines function in terms of scaling a power hungry part. Assigning blame on the other hand... Maybe not so relevant.

 

I loved a quote from one of the miners: "If you can't buy that graphics card, you are not working hard enough. There are people waiting in front of their local Microcenters overnight. What are you doing to deserve those cards more than them?!?"

Well, it's all about Proof of Work to these people!

 

Got to love that irony, LOL. Interesting concept to be lectured about "work" by someone that apparently doesn't.

 

I was looking at the eurocom website, wow. Anyone have something from them? I didn't see Ampere on there but it's got lots of models.

 

Asus g733qs and g733qr has freesync which is as good as GSync.
Amongst 17.3 laptops the alienware m17 r4 has 144 or 360 hz GSync panel.

 

can you say 'catering to the consumer cows'

 

Well, theoretically the EVGA allocation is 100% queue based and you get 8 hours to respond to the notification or it goes to the next person in line. Though it seems like the queue is so deep that by the time I get a notification the cards will be readily available.

 

Yeah, sounds like this queue system has already been severely abused. The thing is that there is no telling when this shortage will end. It could take several months, so you might actually be able to get something out of this. Might queue myself lol.

 

What is not clear is whether you are deep in the queue or if the queue is stagnant and nobody is receiving GPUs because they are not shipping.

What I find interesting (and perhaps a bit sinister) is you can buy a pre-built system from many vendors (ibuypower, cyberpower, etc.) with most of the CPUs and GPUs you want to buy and can't find anywhere. Why they are available to them and not everyone else that wants to build their own could certainly be fuel for conspiracy theories.

I like it better that making them available to miners and scalpers. Their preferred customers get first crack at them, and then only one or two per household. So, there is no opportunity for miners and scalpers to wipe out the stock in one massive bulk buy, and they keep their repeat customers happy. I find it difficult to fault that marketing model. I wish more of their competitors would do the same.