[adrian_b]

"Fire breathing" is completely inappropriate.

Strix Halo is a replacement for the high-power laptop CPUs from the HX series of Intel and AMD, together with a discrete GPU.

The thermal design power of a laptop CPU-dGPU combo is normally much higher than 120 W, which is the maximum TDP recommended for Strix Halo. The faster laptop dGPUs want more than 120 W only for themselves, not counting the CPU.

So any claims of being surprised that the TDP range for Strix Halo is 45 W to 120 W are weird, like the commenter has never seen a gaming laptop or a mobile workstation laptop.

[bmicraft]

> The thermal design power of a laptop CPU-dGPU combo is normally much higher than 120 W

Normally? Much higher than 120W? Those are some pretty abnormal (and dare I say niche?) laptops you're talking about there. Remember, that's not peak power - thermal design power is what the laptop should be able to power and cool pretty much continuously.

At those power levels, they're usually called DTR: desktop replacement. You certainly can't call it "just a laptop" anymore once we're in needs-two-power-supplies territory.

[adrian_b]

Any laptop that in marketed as "gaming laptop" or "mobile workstation" belongs to this category.

I do not know which is the proportion of gaming laptops and mobile workstations vs. thin and light laptops. While obviously there must be much more light laptops, the gaming laptops cannot be a niche product, because there are too many models offered by a lot of vendors.

My own laptop is a Dell Precision, so it belongs to this class. I would not call Dell Precision laptops as a niche product, even if they are typically used only by professionals.

My previous laptop was some Lenovo Yoga that also belonged to this class, having a discrete NVIDIA GPU. In general, any laptop having a discrete GPU belongs to this class, because the laptop CPUs intended to be paired with discrete GPUs have a default TDP of 45 W or 55 W, while the smallest laptop discrete GPUs may have TDPs of 55 W to 75 W, but the faster laptop GPUs have TDPs between 100 W and 150 W, so the combo with CPU reaches a TDP around 200 W for the biggest laptops.

[bmicraft]

You can't usually just add up the TDPs of CPU and GPU, because neither cooling nor the power circuitry supports that kind of load. That's why AMDs SmartShift is a thing.

[bloomingkales]

People are very unaware just how much better a gaming laptop from 3 years ago is (compared to a copilot laptop). These laptops are sub $500 on eBay, and Best Buy won’t give you more than $150 for it as a trade in (almost like they won’t admit that those laptops outclass the new category type of AI pc).