Linus Torvalds Dumps Intel For 32-core AMD Ryzen On His Personal PC (theregister.co.uk) 235
Linus Torvalds released Linux 5.7 rc7 today, saying it "looks very normal... none of the fixes look like there's anything particularly scary going on."
But then he added something else: [T]he biggest excitement this week for me was just that I upgraded my main machine, and for the first time in about 15 years, my desktop isn't Intel-based. No, I didn't switch to ARM yet, but I'm now rocking an AMD Threadripper 3970x. My 'allmodconfig' test builds are now three times faster than they used to be, which doesn't matter so much right now during the calming down period, but I will most definitely notice the upgrade during the next merge window.
The Register writes: Torvalds didn't divulge any further details about his new rig, but the 3970x is quite the beast, boasting 32 cores and 64 threads at 3.7GHz with the ability to burst up to 4.5GHz, all built on TSMC's 7nm FinFET process... Torvalds has probably acquired a whole new PC, as the Threadripper range requires a sTRX4 socket and those debuted on motherboards from late 2019.
Whatever he's running, it has more cores than Intel currently offers in a CPU designed for PCs. Even Chipzilla's high-end CoreX range tops out at 18 cores. AMD will be over the moon that such a high profile IT pro has adopted their kit and pointed to its performance.
Or, as long-time Slashdot reader williamyf puts it, "Good endorsement for AMD, a PR blow for Intel."
But then he added something else: [T]he biggest excitement this week for me was just that I upgraded my main machine, and for the first time in about 15 years, my desktop isn't Intel-based. No, I didn't switch to ARM yet, but I'm now rocking an AMD Threadripper 3970x. My 'allmodconfig' test builds are now three times faster than they used to be, which doesn't matter so much right now during the calming down period, but I will most definitely notice the upgrade during the next merge window.
The Register writes: Torvalds didn't divulge any further details about his new rig, but the 3970x is quite the beast, boasting 32 cores and 64 threads at 3.7GHz with the ability to burst up to 4.5GHz, all built on TSMC's 7nm FinFET process... Torvalds has probably acquired a whole new PC, as the Threadripper range requires a sTRX4 socket and those debuted on motherboards from late 2019.
Whatever he's running, it has more cores than Intel currently offers in a CPU designed for PCs. Even Chipzilla's high-end CoreX range tops out at 18 cores. AMD will be over the moon that such a high profile IT pro has adopted their kit and pointed to its performance.
Or, as long-time Slashdot reader williamyf puts it, "Good endorsement for AMD, a PR blow for Intel."
I can relate (Score:5, Interesting)
I recently switched my desktop to a new Ryzen 3700X 8-core build which, at its current pricepoint, is almost a steal. Fantastic performance and a TDP of 65w, which likely makes it the most power-efficient x86 CPU ever released. I'm not moving back to Intel any time soon.
If you want HEDT then Threadripper is a no brainer. AMD is trouncing Intel in price, specs and peformance - all at the same time.
$2,000 CPU though.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess if you spend $2,000 on a CPU alone, you've got to brag about it to someone, but that's out of reach of most of us mere mortals. I just replaced my 5 year old i5-6500 with a Ryzen 5 3600, but that's not because of the CPU alone... it's because of the difference in motherboard prices. If you can get the same features on two different motherboards, but there's a $75-$100 price difference between them, it really doesn't matter if the CPUs are the same price, the cost of upgrade isn't. Of course, in real world performance, more cores and threads matter....but for us lowly types, so does price
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but that's out of reach of most of us mere mortals.
Not really, if it's something you really want.
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If it's part of your livelihood, you simply add it as a business expense and depreciate it on your taxes.
No reason not to invest in good tools for your job, especially if they save you time that you are selling.
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Or if you have a hobby. $2000 is nothing for a hobby expense.
Re:$2,000 CPU though.... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess if you spend $2,000 on a CPU alone, you've got to brag about it to someone, but that's out of reach of most of us mere mortals.
Even for a work machine? My workstation costs about $7k (it's a dual-CPU Xeon, the current box has 14 cores per CPU, so 56 cores w/hyperthreading), and gets replaced every three years. It's a lot of money, but even a relatively small productivity boost is well worth the cost to the company.
In Torvalds' case, I'm sure this is the machine he uses for work, and his work likely still involves building the kernel frequently. Compiling is an easily-parallelized task, so lots of cores and lots of RAM make a huge difference.
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You can get yourself 16 cores of sweet 2 thread goodness with Ryzen 3950x, $702 right now on Amazon. I'm going to have to call that a legendary deal and all the performance you will realistically be needing.
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but that's out of reach of most of us mere mortals.
Does that make anyone who plays with their computer as a hobby "immortal"? $2000 is nothing for a component in a hobby, and it's out of reach for basically no middle-low to middle class household.
You just have different priorities. No doubt my PC costs 5x as much as yours did, that doesn't make me rich, I'm willing to bet your car cost 5x as much as mine did.
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My wife bitched and moaned about my 1500$ laptop until I pointed out that she takes the kids on a ski-holiday in goddamn Switzerland 2x per year and run up bills of 250-300$$ per DAY. My last laptop lasted 8 years.
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Yep, it's all relative. My girlfriend moaned about the $10000 watch I wear daily, but thought nothing of the $700 shoes she wears maybe twice a year XD
Some people only see price, they don't see utility.
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I guess it depends on your budget, but I really don't like spending so much money, even for something that I enjoy so much as my hobbies. Linus has a pretty reasonable net worth, so it's not like he really has to make financial decisions on this level, but for a lot of people, spending $2000 on an item that may only cost $1000 if you wait a couple years, or may only save you 30 minutes a day isn't really something they would be willing to spend on a hobby. Most of the probably with my hobbies is finding en
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Huh? I'm not sure what you're talking about feeling good or gloating. Playing with high performance computers is my hobby.
I doubt anyone online gives a shit if I like to play games with raytracing on.
I doubt anyone online gives a shit that I prefer my 3D photogrammetry to process in half an hour rather than run most of the afternoon.
I doubt anyone online gives a shit that processing 100GB of astro-photographery should take an hour rather than leaving my PC crunching away data overnight.
I doubt anyone online
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Yeah, most people don't have a workload that requires that kind of CPU horsepower. If I was compiling the Linux kernel multiple times per day like Linus is, I'd probably want a $2,000 32 core processor as well.
If you're just looking for something to play games on, there are both AMD and Intel options that are much most cost effective. If all you're doing is browsing Slashdot, your existing 5 year old laptop is probably still up to the task.
Slashdot becoming Facebook? (Score:2)
Ok so he bought a CPU. Whoopee... whatâ(TM)s next? We will be notified in detail when Al Sharpton switches toilet paper brands?
This isnâ(TM)t the tech news I was hoping for.. but itâ(TM)s certainly better than all the other âoeslow news dayâ crap on this site. Shame we can get more interesting articles on bbc newsâ(TM)s tech section nowadays.
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Whoopee... whatâ(TM)s next?
Don't worry. We'll get back to your Trump stories shortly. Wouldn't want to upset the news for nerds crowd with a story about an actual nerd or anything.
And what about the fanboys ? (Score:2)
I've been reading reactions at comment pages, and they remind me of how AMD fanboys reacted here at Slashdot many years ago when the first story about Core2 was published. They too didn't appreciate the news and the change of times they would entail. For me personally, a well-sized group of annoyed fanboys is an even stronger endorsement.
But its nice to see Torvalds being excited with his hardware.
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I'm sure it needs a fan.
What did he use 15 years ago? (Score:5, Funny)
Transmeta Crusoe!
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No wonder the Linux Desktop never arrived!
Not news. (Score:5, Funny)
This news just in: Man buys computer.
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This news just in: Man buys computer.
That was no man.
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It was a space station.
Three times faster (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't seen any posts that mention what practical impact this computer has for him.
Here's the key quote from his email:
The new computer is three times faster than his previous one at a build task he has to perform frequently when producing releases. (I believe an 'allmodconfig' build would be a kernel with all modules built, i.e. a 100% full kernel build.)
If we put any kind of sensible dollar value on his time per hour, I'll bet this thing will pay for itself in a short time.
I, personally, don't need a computer like this; he can put it to good use.
P.S. I don't think he was bragging; this is the adult computer geek equivalent of "show and tell". "I'm happy I got this thing" and nothing more. Those of you who think he was bragging: whom was he intending to impress with this announcement? I guess chicks dig the Threadripper but he could easily have afforded a fully-loaded Mac Pro [bloomberg.com] (with wheels! [theverge.com]) if he wanted to flex.
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I haven't seen any posts that mention what practical impact this computer has for him.
Well, the bit you quoted is also quoted in the summary, but I suppose it's traditional not to read it.
Anyway, I wonder to what extent the increase in performance is due to the CPU and how much is faster storage. Presumably he has at least one NVMe SSD, maybe a few in RAID0. RAM presumably got upgraded as well, both in quantity and speed.
Those NVMe SSDs are kind of insane. Bulk read/write performance is on a par with RAM from the 2000s Core 2 era. Of course latency is higher but still.
Going forward ... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm just putting this out there: 640 cores should be enough for anyone.
Math (and electrical) performance (Score:4, Interesting)
How do these high-end AMD CPUs perform on math-intensive work and performance-per-watt? I'd think that a compiler addresses very different properties of a CPU (integers and branching) compared to a numerical calculations (raw throughput of floating-point numbers in matrix operations and Fourier transforms).
At work, our HPC runs with Intel CPUs. Should we consider AMD? One issue with AMD/Intel is that a lot of code (including Anaconda Python and Matlab) uses Intel's MKL math kernel library, which runs in crippled mode when it detects an AMD processor unless you use undocumented tricks [pugetsystems.com] even though Intel claimed that MKL runs fine on AMD [intel.com]. The former link suggests that, even with the trick, a Ryzen Threadripper underperforms an Intel based on a per-core metric, but that was a benchmark for only one particular matrix operation.
And performance-per-watt is of course an important metric for laptop CPUs.
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I may be wrong, but with AMD winning on core and thread count, I believe Intel still has the highest performance per core. If you have single-threaded processes, you can likely get better performance on Intel, but if your process can in any way be parallelised, then you can get heaps more cores and therefore heaps more performance on AMD. I think AMD comes out ahead in performance per Watt for desktop CPUs as well.
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Threadripper uses a smaller process than Intel parts do (Intel is stuck on 14nm) and it shows in performance per watt. AMD also has a better architecture for handling multiple cores that massively reduces the amount of interconnects between them and the latency of transferring data between them, so they can be better utilized by applications that are aware of how they are grouped.
There are other benefits like more PCIe lanes and PCIe gen 4 instead of gen 3 on Intel too. For workstations that means lots of N
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It's not all rosy though. AMD deserves a lot of praise but to present a fair comparison the way the cores interact with the memory controller puts them at a disadvantage to Intel when it comes to RAM I/O heavy applications.
For HPC you will need to do a *lot* of research to determine which is best for your application because the design case varies greatly with what it is you're computing.
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That's true, although it's further complicated by Threadripper CPUs and motherboards being a lot cheaper than similar Xeon ones. At the moment Intel doesn't really have anything competitive in the same price bracket except for very specialist workflows, and even that advantage may disappear for some of them as apps get tuned for Threadripper.
Pretty Well... (Score:2)
https://venturebeat.com/2020/03/05/amds-top-supercomputer-wins-are-a-big-moment-in-heated-competition/
(and many similar links)
From the was there is a big pivot to EPYC in supercomputers right now (often with GPUs beside them, however they are not doing too badly on their own..).
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How much RAM has he got ? (Score:2)
Being able to cache everything would make it faster as well, disk is slow. It sounds like a nice machine to have.
Ryzen fail (Score:2)
Re:Ryzen fail (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes I'm sure that was a "Ryzen" problem rather than a laptop problem. I mean Linux running perfectly fine on every Ryzen chip on the market, every Ryzen chipset on the market, and now the Linux king himself declaring he uses Ryzen is completely irrelevant. Your one example points to a "Ryzen" problem, yessirreee.
Full disclosure: I'm mocking you.
Implications for Linux performane? (Score:5, Interesting)
If Linus' Box new has 32 cores, could he be getting sloppy with overall performance down the line?
Is that thought so outlandish?
I remember him raving about how Git was so super-fast on his 5-year old Laptop.
One of the things I like about Linux is that not only is it not shit, like current macOS, or total shit like Windows, it also runs really neat on older hardware. I wouldn't want that 'feature' to vanish over time just because Linus got himself a desktop with teraflops of processing power.
Just sayin'.
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I didn't realise having a high core count suddenly makes benchmarks obsolete. Also given that his 32 core God machine is only 3 times faster than what he had previously, it would point to his previous machine not being a slouch.
Mind you given that the Linux kernel is incredibly efficient and even when bloated garbage would have very little impact on your userland experience, and given that you declare Windows to be "total shit" despite benchmarks saying that raw kernel related tasks are as just worse, equal
Dumb question (Score:3)
Why doesnâ(TM)t he have some kind of 128/256 core, 1TB memory cluster machine thingo in his basement, doing all the work and he can just continue to do most work on his regular PC while it is busy?
Good to Know (Score:2)
Any update on his preferred toothpaste?
Re:Why are we being told about this? (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, why are we being told about this? It means nothing to any of us.
Given Torvald's cult-like following amongst the glitterati, this is obviously the death blow to Intel.
I mean just the other day I heard Jennifer Lawrence telling Oprah Winfrey all about it. Drake wrote a new rap, "AMD 4 Live", that's hit #1. Even Donald Trump found time to mention it to the press pool covering his recent golf outing!
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I mean just the other day I heard Jennifer Lawrence telling Oprah Winfrey all about it. Drake wrote a new rap, "AMD 4 Live"
If anything is going to get Oprah off of Windows XP that should do it. But how screwed up is this? Drake is running an ancient copy of Mandrake because, get this .... "Drake is the Man!" . . . Really? . . . Really?
Re:Why are we being told about this? (Score:5, Funny)
this is obviously the death blow to Intel.
Its just a little flu.
Re:Why are we being told about this? (Score:5, Informative)
The only thing you and pretty much everyone else remember trump saying before 2016 was "you're fired."
Some of us remember him being a scumbag going back decades.
For example, taking out a full page ad in New York city papers calling for the death penalty for the accused in the Central Park Jogger case
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It's not SJW to be self-reflective instead of being a fucking child who thinks you should be able to treat people however they like.
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The rest of your comment is coming from a mentally unhinged person.
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Basic logic lesson: all bigots are assholes, but not all assholes are bigots.
Linus is not motivated by the same considerations as you, so he came to different conclusions.
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Seriously, why are we being told about this? It means nothing to any of us.
Sorry, I'm sure the next divisive Covid propaganda story is just around the corner... stand by.
Re: Why are we being told about this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: Why are we being told about this? (Score:5, Informative)
What did he switch from 15 years ago when he went to Intel?
Not that I actually remember much from linux development back then, but around that time AMD Opteron [wikipedia.org] was the chip to get. Instead of the IA64 instruction set [wikipedia.org], the Opteron introduced AMD64 [wikipedia.org]. This introduced 64 bit to the standard x86 CPUs, and later became the standard for both manufacturers and was renamed into x86_64. Intel was also behind in performance, due to scaling issues with its Netburst microarchitecture [wikipedia.org].
Re: Why are we being told about this? (Score:5, Insightful)
What did he switch from 15 years ago when he went to Intel?
Not that I actually remember much from linux development back then, but around that time AMD Opteron [wikipedia.org] was the chip to get. Instead of the IA64 instruction set [wikipedia.org], the Opteron introduced AMD64 [wikipedia.org]. This introduced 64 bit to the standard x86 CPUs, and later became the standard for both manufacturers and was renamed into x86_64. Intel was also behind in performance, due to scaling issues with its Netburst microarchitecture [wikipedia.org].
Thank you for a comment with content. Unlike mine, but you know what, I don't care because yours was actually informative.
Re: Why are we being told about this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Why are we being told about this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Threadripper is not for most people, in fact it's targeted at the servers market.
You might want to look into the Ryzen 3/5/7 CPUs (Zen 3 and the upcoming Zen 4), compare the processing power per watt and the cost versus Intel's offerings.
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The problem though, is that most of us don't do computing tasks which can take advantage of all 32 threads. Certainly gamers don't really need more than a handful of threads.
If AMD is to sell its chips, it needs to bust the common notion that 4C/8T is all you need, and get developers to use more threads in things like games. Perhaps this is why so many people seem to be commenting on their new 3970x machines..
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It means Linux will drop support for Intel next.
Re:Why are we being told about this? (Score:5, Informative)
This site is 'news for nerds, stuff that matters'
I would say Linus switching to an AMD rig is pretty big news. If AMD have any quirks or bugs or kinks, he's going to call them out and he has clout.
You'll also be likely to see improvements aimed that platform, potentially more so than normal.
Furthermore, regardless of potential Linux improvements, it's interesting to see someone, who clearly has a use for such high end hardware, switch to AMD - it's indicative of the performance the processor can provide.
I personally find it interesting and I don't have an AMD system, I don't compile linux and I barely use linux - but I do follow tech.
Cmon man.
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Wow, is getting toilet paper still a problem in some places? If it is, the hoarders have to run out of space soon.
Re:Why are we being told about this? (Score:5, Informative)
I wouldn't be the one to try. His wife is a six time national karate champion here in Finland. She'd kick your ass for trying.
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Hopefully not much. I for one appreciate the AMD ad. Thanks slashdot. Informative plus.
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I have almost the same (2990WX -- same specs, one revision older), and it's a disaster for anything but a few selected tasks, one of which is compiling C code (not C++). Ie, only things with very minimal memory bandwidth needs.
The way the CPU is glued from four chiplets, half of the chiplets don't even have their own DRAM, just 16MB of L3 cache each. Every cache miss on those chiplets is cross-NUMA, and besides the usual latency, there's only 15GB/sec bandwidth available for the whole machine for cross-NU
Re: Advertising for AMD? (Score:5, Informative)
But that "one revision older" makes all the difference for Thread ripper, because with the 3000 series which Linus got, they fixed the memory, so that all cores got unified memory unlike the 2000 series which as you said had some interesting ways to access memory.
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This is news because it will reassure a lot of people like me who want to use Linux in (for us) critical environments and who are risk averse.
I recently bought a POP-OS workstation from System76 and went for the i9 because I had not been convinced that AMD had got compatibility and performance nailed but if it is good enough for Torvalds then I would certainly have considered it as the performance on properly multithreaded applications looked very impressive.
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Can you even list one piece of software that runs on intel but not AMD?
Re: Advertising for AMD? (Score:5, Funny)
Sure, the AMD doesn't run Meltdown. ;)
Re: Advertising for AMD? (Score:5, Informative)
Not even the whole 2000 series, just the 2970WX/2990WX because they had 4x6/4x8 cores but only two CCXs with RAM connections. The 2920X/2950X had only 2x6/2x8 cores with a normal configuration. The extra cores worked for some computation-heavy workloads but was definitely a product where it paid off to do your homework.
Re: Advertising for AMD? (Score:5, Informative)
Comparing Zen+ to Zen 2 is like comparing chalk and cheese. Well more fairly it's like comparing that American style cheese to a lovely aged Gouda. There were *major* performance differences between the two architectures.
Zen: Oh look AMD's still exists.
Zen+: Oh AMD's actually making an effort. I guess we can throw them in the ring.
Zen2: Oh no Intel. That's... someone call an ambulance, this place is a mess!
Re: Advertising for AMD? (Score:5, Informative)
How is this "interesting"? It's not even the same cpu. The Threadripper 3970 has been benchmarked to death. It is at or near the top of the heap for many of the usual workloads in tests versus the highest binned Intel processors and comes in at a significantly more competitive price than anything from Intel in that performance arena. I have a mix of AMD and Intel for my work and play machines so I don't really have a dog in this fight.
On the server side of the house, the same is true with the new generation of 64 core/128 thread AMD Epyc processors versus the higher end Xeons.
AMD used to be "credible enough" to keep Intel's prices somewhat in check. Now they are leading in some workloads and trouncing Intel on a cost vs performance basis. Imagine what Intel would be charging if AMD wasn't around. Competition is good.
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Hey mods, see? This was informative.
Well technically it was "Off topic" since he's talking about a different generation and architecture to the one under discussion ;-)
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dude, any idiotic fake news illiterate mr trump spouts gets immediate attention here as it were a big issue, besides nobody in the world except for a few hardliners giving a crap about them, and i've never seen you complaining about that.
linus otoh is quite a tech savvy and well respected guy that has made considerable contribution to the technology world and i find his impressions on technology can be no doubt interesting in a ... er, technology outlet? even if, granted, it's just a little bit of gossip.
intel just does not have good cpus / pricing (Score:2)
intel just does not have good cpus / pricing
They donated a CPU for a build for Greg KH (Score:5, Interesting)
Greg KH's new computer is very similar --- with a CPU donated by AMD:
https://youtu.be/37RP9I3_TBo [youtu.be]
Makes me wonder if this is a PR campaign to get their (admittedly nice) CPUs into the hands of influencers.
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It certainly might help get Linux optimized for AMD parts.
It should help us all generally though. High core counts are the way forward and the more developers have access to them the better. They already donate parts to some games companies too.
didn't they already do that? (Score:2)
nobody actually cares about running x86 code emulated on arm as it's so slow and the only people who buy it are people who don't realize they're buying a machine that is obsolete as they buy it. most potential buyers got burnt with windows rt before anyways and people aren't touching the new windows arm tablets with x86 compatibility.
that it would be x86 or x86-64 compatibility doesn't actually matter, what matters is that it runs like shit and is kinda useful just for old legacy x86 apps as a result.. wh
Emulated slow? DEC Alpha (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember when the DEC Alpha ran windows faster than Intel? They did that without help from Microsoft.
It was not so much interpreted as Just In Time re-compiled. Just the bits that were taking too long, so the JITing itself is not an issue.
I presume the same approach would work for ARM. And JIT technology can beat C technology because it can make use of the actual hardware that is available, extra instructions, registers etc. depending how smart it is.
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Re:Emulated slow? DEC Alpha (Score:5, Informative)
What DEC did was to run JIT recompilation while the app was running. They also looked at metrics of how the code ran - which branches were taken, and how frequently etc. After the x86 app had finished running, the Alpha would grind away for some period of time profiling the code that had been run and optimising the translated version. After running through the app a few times, it would be running 100% native code that had been heavily optimised for the real-world usage of the app that had been observed. This was with Windows NT on Alpha, running x86 code. The system also had the benefit that all calls to win32 APIs were already 100% native, so they didn't need to be translated or optimised. The technology was called FX!32.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Qemu does JIT, but on a fast ARM box running Windows [angband.pl] is not usable.
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Problem is that x86 is more of a macro language these days. All modern x86 CPUs dynamically translate the code into the internal RISC instruction set they use and dynamically optimize it along the way. Obviously their internal workings are designed to maximize performance with x86.
Even if you build an ARM CPU with as much cache and all the modern features like OOE, speculative execution and dynamic dispatch it wouldn't be as fast. Maybe acceptable though.
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Windows NT had several versions: x86, Alpha and MIPS, and as far as I could remember, PowerPC
This was not JIT, it was a native implementation. Microsoft dropped it since it was a ver niche market and the market was already cornered by Apple (which had started running on PPC by then) in any case.
There were quite a few media software compiled for MIPS and Alpha in those days running directly on NT because x86 PCs were too slow for such kinds of work. I remember seeing boxed software in a shop with stuff runni
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As someone posted below, on the alpha at least there was kind of JIT for x86 software running on Windows, but the OS was native. Apple did something similar when they switched from PPC to x86. I ran the jitted PPC version of Photoshop for a while on x86, and it worked fine.
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You mean x86-64 emulated on ARM? That's going to be slower than shit. I doubt Intel is very worried about that.
Besides, has any of the Windows ARM variants managed to get any kind of sizeable user base?
Re:ARM (Score:5, Interesting)
. Intel blew it by refusing to release a decent smartphone CPU. o.
Do you think they had one and then just refused to let you have it?
I worked personally with several people involved with the intel mobile chipset design division over the years. My company ever performed a lot of testing for them.
The did not provide you an amazing chipset, because it's hard to do.
Smartphones are not like computers. They incorporate the radio into the chipset. That radio needs to pass 10's of thousands of certification test cases and that does not even consider the regulatory testing required to release the product.
It's not a question of through money at the problem either. Intel simply did not have the experience to deliver it and the board did not have the patience to allow them the time to get it.
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I think that this is the biggest difference between AMD and Intel and, for that matter, one of the reasons that corporate boards should look towards longer term horizons than short term growth.
Whereas Intel has been focused on immediate ROI with their monopoly positions - shrink die, increase yields with the same performance for years...AMD was focused on producing something innovative and new. This is something that can take as long as a decade to deliver upon. Most boards would choke and sputter at such a
Re:ARM (Score:5, Funny)
Still waiting for that killer Transmeta CPU, any day now...
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You actually managed to get this offtopic part of the thread back on topic of Linus. Well done.
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If Microsoft ever enables x86-64 compatibility on ARM, Intel will be fucked.
Now that x86 has more registers with x86-64, what is really the advantage of ARM over x86?
Re:ARM (Score:5, Informative)
what is really the advantage of ARM over x86?
Reduced power consumption.
Smaller cores, so more of them will fit on a chip.
Deeper pipelines, since all instructions are the same width.
Simpler caching and security model, since neither instructions nor data accesses ever cross page boundaries.
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Cavium/Marvell just announced a 64 core ARM CPU and has a 96 Core part in the pipeline. And all of those cores have 4 Threads, not just 2. This will basically give you a 384 Core CPU running at 150 Watts.
The CPUs are probably not quite as fast as Xeon Gold parts but they have different use cases. Multi-threaded webservers for instance.
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Deeper pipelines, since all instructions are the same width.
Careful, Netburst may have something to say about you declaring that to be an "advantage". Deep execution pipelines are great right until you have a mispredicted branch.
Ultimately the benefit scaled so poorly to the point that the entire architecture was abandoned and Core was ultimately a second successor to P6 as a result.
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For the programmer ARM is a lot nicer. The pipeline is short. You tell it what to do... and that is what it did.
For the most part nobody wants to write x86 code. They want to write the same portable code they'd write for ARM, and have their compiler worry about the x86 bullshit.
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I'm ready to bullseye him with Type II NPD, aka "covert narcissism."
Yeah, accusing someone you never met of being a narcissist, that's not toxic behavior at all. /sarcasm
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You're comparing a $400 Intel laptop CPU with 12 threads and 45 W TDP to a $2000 AMD workstation CPU with 64 threads and 280 W TDP and conclude that 5x the money, 5x the threads, and 6x the watts improve the speed by 5x.
AMD might offer good value, but you'd have to compare it with an Intel Xeon. The Xeon Gold 6230R seems to be comparable in thread count and price, but has less cache. How do they compare in real world performance?
Re:It's just the right CPU :) (Score:5, Informative)
AMD might offer good value, but you'd have to compare it with an Intel Xeon. The Xeon Gold 6230R seems to be comparable in thread count and price, but has less cache. How do they compare in real world performance?
I'm not going to buy either chip so I can't give you real world performance. However, I can give you links to benchmark numbers.
AMD 3970X [cpubenchmark.net] Benchmark number: 62803
Intel Xeon Gold 6230 [cpubenchmark.net] Benchmark number: 25964
Is it plausible that the Threadripper is over twice as powerful for the same cost?
AMD: 3.7 GHz (turbo to 4.5 GHz)
Intel: 2.1 GHz (turbo to 3.9 GHz)
AMD: 32 cores/64 threads
Intel: 20 cores/40 threads
Yeah, looks plausible to me that the Threadripper might be twice as powerful for compute-intensive and parallelizable tasks than the Xeon. And, Linus Torvalds has a perfect use case (compiling the Linux kernel and its modules) where the power can actually be used. Imagine being able to run: make -j 65
P.S. I searched for full reviews of the two chips, and found that Tom's Hardware did a review of each.
https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews/amd-threadripper-3970x-review [tomshardware.com]
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-cascade-lake-xeon-platinum-8280-8268-gold-6230-amd-epyc,6058.html [tomshardware.com]
Weirdly, the AMD review was all desktop stuff and the Xeon review was all server stuff. So that's not very helpful.
I don't know "ServeTheHome" but this site has a review of each that actually runs the same tests in each review.
https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3970x-review-32-cores-of-madness/ [servethehome.com]
https://www.servethehome.com/intel-xeon-gold-6230-benchmarks-and-review/ [servethehome.com]
It looks like in the tests that are somewhat "real-world" sort of tests, the Threadripper easily beats the Xeon but not by a 2:1 margin.
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What he said was: "for the first time in about 15 years, my desktop isn't Intel-based", this is not saying that he has had the same machine for 15 years but that for the last 15 years his machine(s) have had Intel CPUs. I would be surprised if this is his first upgrade in 15 years.