TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 Continues Running Well As A Powerful AMD Ryzen 7 Linux Laptop
The past two months I've been testing out the TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 laptop as a new AMD Ryzen laptop from this Bavarian Linux PC retailer. It's been working out very well under Linux (as would be expected of TUXEDO Computers) and quite adaptable for power and performance. For those needing a capable Linux laptop the TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 has proven quite stable and reliable under both their in-house TUXEDO OS distribution as well as Ubuntu Linux.
The TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 is built around the Ryzen 7 7840HS SoC with 8 cores / 16 threads featuring a 3.8GHz base clock and 5.1GHz boost clock and a 16MB L3 cache. The cTDP is from 35 to 54 Watts. As shown in the prior Phoronix articles, it depends upon having the TUXEDO driver packages installed and toggling via the command line or TUXEDO Control Center for expressing your desire from better power efficiency or maximum performance for how the Ryzen 7 7840HS responds to different workloads. The Pulse 14 Gen 3 is making use of the SoC's Radeon RX 780M integrated graphics, which are plenty suitable for desktop use with the RDNA3 graphics and working well atop the open-source upstream Linux driver stack.
While there is the Ryzen 8000 series mobile processors now, the main selling point there is better NPU performance albeit the software support for Ryzen AI remains limited. It was just in January that AMD published an XDNA Linux driver for enabling Ryzen AI. That XDNA Linux driver so far is just validated for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS while recommending a Linux 6.8 kernel. User-space software able to make use of the Xilinx XRT interface on the Linux desktop is extremely limited at this point. With that said, the Ryzen 7000 series with Zen 4 remains a great option for Linux laptops and battling the new Intel Core Ultra "Meteor Lake" processors still for leading CPU and graphics performance.
The TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 ships with 32GB of RAM (4 x 8GB LPDDR5), 500GB NVMe SSD (upgradeable to 4TB options), Intel AX210 WiFi 6E, and is priced starting at 1,238 EUR.
TUXEDO OS remains based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS for now and using the Linux 6.5 kernel, similar to the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS HWE kernel more recently. This combination is new enough to give a great Zen 4 / RDNA3 laptop experience without any fuss. Testing on Ubuntu 23.10 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS has also been without issue besides needing to install the TUXEDO driver DKMS package if wanting to tap the full 54 Watt potential of the SoC. It would be nice if the TUXEDO drivers were maintained upstream in the Linux kernel for easy deployment on other Linux distributions.
For putting the TUXEDO Pulse 14 Gen 3 into perspective, besides the earlier benchmark articles, I ran some additional tests comparing the Pulse 14 Gen 3 with the Ryzen 7 7840HS compared to the previously-reviewed TUXEDO Aura 15 Gen 2 with Ryzen 5 5500U SoC. For additional reference was also the Acer Swift SEP15-43 laptop with the common AMD Ryzen 7 7840U Zen 4 SoC, which is found in quite a few different laptop models. All three laptops were freshly (re)tested using TUXEDO OS with the Linux 6.5 kernel.
I also wanted to test the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H "Meteor Lake" with the Acer Swift Go 14 laptop, but it wasn't able to successfully boot and run with TUXEDO OS since Meteor Lake really likes a Linux 6.7+ kernel. But in any event the Core Ultra 7 155H is interesting for its Arc Graphics performance but when it comes to CPU performance the Ryzen 7 7840 series tends to deliver better performance as shown in various Phoronix benchmark articles looking at the Linux capabilities.