[plug] Ryzen

[Richard Meyer]

On Wed, 2017-03-29 at 21:16 +0800, Brad Campbell wrote:
> I've got a bigish box here with an FX-8350 in it. It's about 5 years old 
> at this point and desperately in need of an upgrade (about 2 years ago). 
> I heard about AMD's new processor about 2 years ago, so I decided to 
> forego the upgrade and wait to see what they had in store.

Glad to hear someone still likes AMD. I tend to regard AMD as the Linux
of hardware - y'know, the underdog. Pity they didn't keep the lead they
had when Intel was telling everyone that 64bit would never come to the
desktop. (I paraphrase here).
> 
> The 8350 running on a RAID10 of SSD's capable of about 1.3GB/s does a 
> kernel build of "allyesconfig" in about 21 minutes (make -j 8). The 
> Ryzen on a single SATA2 SSD that is 6 years old does the same 
> "allyesconfig" in a whisker over 8 minutes (make -j16). Times are a 
> worst of three.
> 
> This thing goes like a cut snake. Use a recent kernel, make sure you 
> have your config straight for SMT, Multi-core and enough processors 
> (mine was originally limited to 8) and let it loose.
> 
> Bollox to the reviews all based on windows 10 and game frame rates. 
> Ryzen on Linux is quick. Xeon crushingly quick. Unless you have a 
> dedicated AVX 256/512 workload, this thing is bang for your buck.

Yeah - although to be fair (and I have no intention of doing that), the
sort of people who read those sorts of articles are gamers rather than
professionals, so framerates and so on are of interest, rather than
ability to get real work done.
> 
> The latest it87 git tree has a workable hardware monitor module. AMD 
> still hasn't released the details to enable proper hardware monitoring, 
> but it's only a matter of time.
> 
> If you buy an Asus motherboard with "Languard" on it, don't plug it into 
> a PoE enabled switch or you might : A) kill your switch, or B) let the 
> magic smoke out of the motherboard (I did both). But other than that, 
> just do it!

That sounds like a talk in the making   :)


> 
> Brad.
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-- 
Richard Meyer

As the ghost of a sceptic, I tend to stay pretty quiet.

Linux Counter user #306629