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   clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Saturday, 16-Aug-2025 08:51:16 JST clacke

   The AMD E1 was a disaster of a CPU to put in a laptop, and anyone contributing to such actions should have been prosecuted for some form of criminal negligence. In AMD's defense, they were aiming for something below 10W power consumption, for embedded purposes. But of course people put them in laptops to squeeze every last penny.

   This post brought to you by me touching one of these doorstops again. Somehow even HP was still allowing itself to sell them as late as 2014.

   "Wow, this is amazingly slow, I haven't seen a computer this slow since that stupid E1 laptop I had ... ah. It's an E1 laptop."

   • Linux Walt Alt (@lnxw37a2) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Saturday, 16-Aug-2025 09:05:48 JST clacke

     in reply to

     For your reference, a MacBook Pro or an HP EliteBook from 2012 would have cost 5-10 times as much to buy, but you would have a laptop that is *still* of good enough performance for everyday use in 2025. The E1 laptops were frustrating to use on the day of their release.

     Vimes Boots Theory strikes again?

     #AMDE1

     Linux Walt Alt (@lnxw37a2) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} likes this.
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     clacke (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Saturday, 16-Aug-2025 09:05:49 JST clacke

     in reply to

     In 2010 laptops had reached the point where I would tell people "if you want a laptop, just buy the cheapest thing you can find, the entire range of machines on the market are performant enough for anything you'll do, and have been for years". And then in 2012, AMD launched the E1, proving me wrong, no, turning my statement wrong.

     On paper it's a 64-bit dual-core CPU with a built-in 3D GPU and a clock frequency a bit below 2 GHz, sounds pretty decent, baseline for its time, can't go wrong. But in practical use, it performed worse than a 32-bit single-core Intel Core from 2006. It was some kind of engineering miracle, but in reverse. Was it a disastrously small L1 cache? Horribly low memory bandwidth? Slow instructions? I don't know how they did it, but even if you run Debian with Mate on it, it's sluggish. Windows XP would have been slow on it. And yet it would run in a laptop that shipped with Windows 8, as that was the MS OS of that year.

     Selling one of these laptops should have qualified as a scam.

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     Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864} (lnxw37j1@gnusocial.jp)'s status on Saturday, 16-Aug-2025 09:18:04 JST Linux Walt (@lnxw37j1) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}

     in reply to
     @clacke Honestly, I never heard of the AMD E-1 until you just posted about it. I know that when everyone started getting excited about ARM's lower power consumption, both Intel and AMD started working on reducing consumption on certain models. But I haven't ever purchased any computer or CPU based on lower power consumption. I still want a screen I can see and Wi-Fi that stays connected.
     clacke likes this.