System76 has been offering AMD-powered Linux laptops for a few years now and before rounding out 2024 they have announced the new Pangolin “Pang15” laptop with an updated SoC, 2K display with 16:10 screen ratio and 120Hz refresh rate, and other refinements to this all-aluminum build Linux laptop.
The updated System76 Pangolin laptop features an improved 2K display with 120Hz refresh rate and 100% sRGB color rating and an all-aluminum body for a nice build quality compared to some Linux laptops from long ago.
The updated AMD Ryzen Linux laptop is powered by an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS 8-core / 16-thread SoC with integrated Radeon 780M graphics. The AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS is still a mighty powerful laptop SoC by today’s standards even with being based on the older Zen 4 cores, but given the timing of this launch for late 2024 it’s a bit unfortunate that they weren’t yet able to deliver any newer AMD Zen 5 based laptop. The AMD Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Point” SoCs have been out for several months now in a few laptops with using Zen 5/5C cores with improved power efficiency and the nice RDNA3.5 graphics. AMD is expected to also showcase their new Strix Halo SoCs in just a few weeks at CES 2025 too. So from that perspective it’s a bit unfortunate that System76 isn’t on the leading-edge with a Zen 5 Linux laptop but at least the Zen 4 SoCs continue holding up well and also enjoy more mature Linux support for those not wanting to run very up-to-date kernels/distributions.
The updated System76 Pangolin laptop can be configured with up to 96GB of DDR5 RAM, up to 16TB of NVMe storage, and the laptop is rated for up to a six hour battery life. There are privacy kill switches for the web camera too if that’s of interest.
Pricing on the System76 Pang15 starts out at $1299 USD for this Ryzen 9 8945HS laptop with 16GB of RAM, 500GB PCIe4 storage, and one year warranty. Pop!_OS 22.04 and Ubuntu 22.04/24.04 are the pre-install Linux OS options currently offered for this new AMD Ryzen powered laptop.
More details on this new AMD-powered System76 Linux laptop via System76.com.
