AMD Ryzen 7840U

Hah, yes, I have stuck to relatively classic 2.5D and 3D games that work on current iGPUs. It's nearly a nostalgia thing since I met Doom in college. I struggle with the gaming hardware ROI, when I see how things become obsolete. E.g. my work bought me a Titan-X in 2015 for numerical/image processing work. Ten years later my Ryzen 7840u had nearly the same GFLOPs, though of course with less memory bandwidth. It also does it with vastly less heat/noise. I know I would enjoy immersive VR. But I don't hink I would use it often enough to justify all that dedicated gear and the computer strong enough to drive it.

I'm still using Xorg after all these years, on a laptop with 150% scaling, which I occasionally plug into an external monitor with 100% scaling. Somewhat surprisingly, it works great. (Cinnamon desktop, Ryzen 7840u integrated graphics. And also a desktop machine with Radeon RX 6800XT, but it's not surprising that still works great.)

I've had the same experience with an 8600G on Linux. Very frequent graphics driver crashes and KDE/Wayland freezes, on old and new kernels alike. I've been submitting error reports for months, and the issues still persist. The RAM passes MemTest, and the system otherwise works fine, but the graphics issues are very annoying. It's not like I'm gaming or doing anything intensive either; it happens during plain desktop usage. Yet I also use a 7840U in a gaming handheld running Windows, and haven't had any issues there at all. So I think this is related to AMD Linux drivers and/or Wayland. In contrast, my old laptop with an NVIDIA GPU and Xorg has given me zero issues for about a decade now. So I've decided to just avoid AMD on Linux on my next machine. Intel's upcoming Panther Lake and Nova Lake CPUs seem promising, and their integrated graphics have consistently been improving. I don't think AMD's dominance will continue for much longer.

Although it's a higher SKU, I have a laptop with the AMD 7840U CPU and it's quite fast, even for some light/medium gaming. The 7735U doesn't look too far behind it, for the purposes you listed I think it would feel quite snappy. The only thing to keep in mind is a 4K OLED screen will be taxing on the battery, so you may not get more than a few hours. But if you're plugged in/docked most of the time it is likely not an issue!

In my opinion AMD is on a good way having at least comparable performance to MacBooks copying Apples architectural decisions. Unfortunately their jump on the latest AI Hype Train did not suit them well for efficiency. Ryzen 7840U was significantly more efficient than Ryzen AI 7 350 [1] However, with AMD Strix Halo aka AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (PRO) there are Notebooks like the ZBook Ultra G1a and Tablets like the Asus ROG Flow Z13, that come close to the MacBook power / performance ratio[2] due to the fact, that they used high bandwidth soldered on memory, which allows for GPUs with shared VRAM similar to Apple's strategy. Framework did not manage to put this thing in notebook yet, but shipped a Desktop variant. They also pointed out, that there was no way to use LPCAMM2 or any other modular RAM tech with that machine, because it would have slowed it down / increased latencies to an unusable state. So I'm pretty sure the main reason for Apple's success is the deeply integrated architecture and I'm hopeful that AMD's next generation STRIX Halo APUs might provide this with higher efficiency and hopefully Framework adapts these chips in their notebooks. Maybe they just did in the 16?! Let's wait for this announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZRG7Og61mw Regarding the deeply thought through integration there is a story I often tell: Apple used to make iPods. These had support for audio playback control with their headphone remotes (e.g. EarPods), which are still available…