AMD put out a bios fix for the soft lockup at idle which seems to have fixed the issue for the minority of users that see it. Best guess is, it really is a power supply issue where some power supplies freak out when current draw is too low. AMD has not made any statement yet. I had the issue and the bios fix seems good. Now with 5 weeks of uptime, but then that is not really special for a Linux box. When it gets to a year I will will let you know. Best I ever had was a year and a half or so, and then only stopped it to upgrade the kernel.
Note that Intel is hardly free of processor issues. I had to RMA an intel chip for the floating point divide bug, which I hit in practice. It was far from theoretical as Intel claimed. And Meltdown is more than enough reason to steer clear of Intel for now.
Ryzen single core performance is perhaps not amazing, more like great. More cores for less dollars easily erases that, and of course it depends what single core benchmarks you run. Intel has done a great job over the years of stacking the review site benchmarks in favor of its FPU.
Your comments on processor upgrades make sense if you only thing about Intel. The enthusiast sector has massively shifted towards AMD recently, with good reason. Unlike Intel, AMD designed their high end desktop socket to be stable for several generations and they have already delivered on that with the 12nm Ryzen refresh. Re binned chips: they are binned for a reason, usually because they failed tests at high clocks, unless the manufacturer is running into price resistance at the higher price points, then Intel has been known to push higher-binned chips into the low end market, hence the Celery phenomenon. But this is a crapshoot: there is a very real likelihood you will end up with a real binned chip, and you will waste your time trying to make it do something it isn't physically capable of it. How much is your time worth? If you hit this once, it wipes out your savings and way more.
In the AMD world this is way better. First, the processors are a lot cheaper, so you hardly gain anything by lowballing. Second, AMD expects their fanbase to overclock and they support it. A lot. Just go wandering through the overclocking support options in a recent AM4 motherboard, they are endless. There is a big, supportive community behind it.
As far as power supplies goes, the big paradigm ships already happened: modular cables, high efficiency, low noise. I had no problems migrating power supplies from the Piledriver/i5 over to Ryzen. I will be keeping these power supplies for a while, I think. They are designed to support ridiculously power hungry GPUs, and I will be moving to lower power components if anything. I expect my next GPU to be way more power efficient than the current one. At least a year out by the way, because AMD already earmarked their next gen Navi parts for the GPGPU market, and NVidia can fuck themselves. Doesn't bother me, my primary interest is processor throughput anyway.
In the Ryzen/AM4 world you can build a highly respectable machine for $1k if you are cheaping out, or you can live in the lap of luxury for $1500. Or you can build a really cheap machine, but what enthusiast ever does that?
Now, if you are a serious enthusiast, you are just going to whet your appetite on a Ryzen box, and you will be soon thinking about Threadripper. Socket stability? Who cares. Your are going to drop $2k on a build that HP would happily sell you for $10k, if built with Intel. Your are definitely going to be the coolest kid on the block with your 16 cores, 32 threads, 64MB overclocked beast.
The only way to beat that as of today is an EATX server motherboard with a 32 core Epyc. Don't hold back, get a two socket board for 64 cores. But be warned: AMD was apparently just testing the market, and the market wants way more than they produced. The price shot up to $4500 a chip. Now eased off a bit to $3600. When it goes below $1500 you will see a large influx of enthusiasts, I will be one of them. Want to get an idea what this scene is like? No audio output, how about that. When you start to see audio chips on these EATX motherboards, you will know that the enthusiasts have arrived in force. To take the sting off, you tend to have a stupidly large number of slots and lanes. And you get dual 10 Gige, that might liven up your lan party.
Your post made it clear that you have been out of the enthusiast loop for a while, if you were ever in it. Because you did not mention the word "gaming". The gaming sector is why we have such a great selection of inexpensive but high specced motherboards, why we have beautiful, practical boxes to put them in, and why high end coolers are so cheap. Because of this, I can build myself a high end development workstation that also looks great and is nearly silent, for what I used to pay for a brand X white box for grandma.
Today, the x86 decoder is a minuscule portion of the chip.
Dunno. The last time I saw the decoder outlined on a mask was in Opteron days and it looked like a pretty big chunk of chip to me. But too lazy to go hunting for photos now.
Most on-board graphics suck and you have disabled it away and buy a good graphics card to play modern games.
AMD's integrated Vega doesn't suck and will be the right solution for many laptops and midrange desktops. It so doesn't suck that Intel is licensing it.
Which costs power and chip real estate, even if throughput is the same and latency only increases slightly. But AMD has exactly the same issue.
ARMS do front end translation as well, especially if running the thumb instruction set, but it is much less, hence a modest power efficiency and cost advantage.
the move from 22nm to 14nm to 10nm has been AWFULLY slow
It's because production costs increase exponentially with number of multi-patterning steps to work around the resolution issue, and EUV is really nasty stuff, it won't go through lens for one thing.
Except for not sucking like Atom. Core arch (basically, P3) is just better than Atom. They should kill Atom, it only exists for political reasons. There is no niche where Atom outperforms core arch in performance/watt except by market manipulation.
The indicators point at process issues. Each shrink is a crapshoot, engineering-wise, and after many years of boxcars, Intel finally rolled snake eyes. In other words, Intel bet on some process technology that didn't perform to expectations, requiring expensive and time-consuming backtracking. Meanwhile, TSMC, Glofo and Samsung are moving more cautiously. AMD made a great call by focusing on multi die SoCs.
Maybe this means the era of Intel developing its own process tech and running its own fabs is coming to a close and future revenue would be better optimized by throwing in with the rest of the industry instead of trying to maintain a lead by doing its own secret thing. A similar thing happened as the auto industry matured: even the big boys stopped making their own parts long ago.
In 2 years a $400 computer will be better than yours.
Just sayin'.
Doesn't happen quite that fast these days, which has the side effect of making it actually worth the effort to build a performance machine, hence the rise of the enthusiast sector.
Android is a Linux distribution. If you don't think so, then open up a terminal and go exploring. Notice that the proc directory is there, with all the usual Linux-only interfaces. Notice that the sys directory is there, again, with all the usual Linux-only interfaces. Notice that/sbin is there, like any Unix clone. In fact, Google just made a few arbitrary changes to filesystem layout, such as removing usr, but what remains is clearly Linux. Many Linux binaries run without modification on Android because all the syscalls are the same, and only a few libc calls are missing, such as the ones that assume/etc/passwd is there, which Google removed for no good reason and (inexplicably) a few of the posix pthreads synchronization calls. What remains is clearly Linux, running mostly but not exclusively Android libraries and applications.
Android is an operating system in the same sense that KDE is an operating system. In other words, it isn't. Only in the minds of the marketing department. If you can't see that, then please hand in your geek card.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone could vote for it in the House, and then it will go to the president. Veto. Dead and done.
I'd love to see Drumpf veto it. Last nail in his coffin, dead indeed.
Stay and help retire the rednecks.
Maybe to nerds and people who get all their "news" from HuffPo...
Maybe to millennials and kids who are well aware of these shenanigans through Buzzfeed and such. Guessing you don't keep in touch much?
WTF happened to good government in the USA? Sense of decency in 96% of republicans?
An SEC page? Doesn't sit right. Personally, I pronounce it "sehk", so "a SEC page". Tough one.
AMD put out a bios fix for the soft lockup at idle which seems to have fixed the issue for the minority of users that see it. Best guess is, it really is a power supply issue where some power supplies freak out when current draw is too low. AMD has not made any statement yet. I had the issue and the bios fix seems good. Now with 5 weeks of uptime, but then that is not really special for a Linux box. When it gets to a year I will will let you know. Best I ever had was a year and a half or so, and then only stopped it to upgrade the kernel.
Note that Intel is hardly free of processor issues. I had to RMA an intel chip for the floating point divide bug, which I hit in practice. It was far from theoretical as Intel claimed. And Meltdown is more than enough reason to steer clear of Intel for now.
Ryzen single core performance is perhaps not amazing, more like great. More cores for less dollars easily erases that, and of course it depends what single core benchmarks you run. Intel has done a great job over the years of stacking the review site benchmarks in favor of its FPU.
btw, TSMC now has more resources than Intel, because the smartphone market is much bigger than the PC market.
It's all done with mirrors. :)
Your comments on processor upgrades make sense if you only thing about Intel. The enthusiast sector has massively shifted towards AMD recently, with good reason. Unlike Intel, AMD designed their high end desktop socket to be stable for several generations and they have already delivered on that with the 12nm Ryzen refresh. Re binned chips: they are binned for a reason, usually because they failed tests at high clocks, unless the manufacturer is running into price resistance at the higher price points, then Intel has been known to push higher-binned chips into the low end market, hence the Celery phenomenon. But this is a crapshoot: there is a very real likelihood you will end up with a real binned chip, and you will waste your time trying to make it do something it isn't physically capable of it. How much is your time worth? If you hit this once, it wipes out your savings and way more.
In the AMD world this is way better. First, the processors are a lot cheaper, so you hardly gain anything by lowballing. Second, AMD expects their fanbase to overclock and they support it. A lot. Just go wandering through the overclocking support options in a recent AM4 motherboard, they are endless. There is a big, supportive community behind it.
As far as power supplies goes, the big paradigm ships already happened: modular cables, high efficiency, low noise. I had no problems migrating power supplies from the Piledriver/i5 over to Ryzen. I will be keeping these power supplies for a while, I think. They are designed to support ridiculously power hungry GPUs, and I will be moving to lower power components if anything. I expect my next GPU to be way more power efficient than the current one. At least a year out by the way, because AMD already earmarked their next gen Navi parts for the GPGPU market, and NVidia can fuck themselves. Doesn't bother me, my primary interest is processor throughput anyway.
In the Ryzen/AM4 world you can build a highly respectable machine for $1k if you are cheaping out, or you can live in the lap of luxury for $1500. Or you can build a really cheap machine, but what enthusiast ever does that?
Now, if you are a serious enthusiast, you are just going to whet your appetite on a Ryzen box, and you will be soon thinking about Threadripper. Socket stability? Who cares. Your are going to drop $2k on a build that HP would happily sell you for $10k, if built with Intel. Your are definitely going to be the coolest kid on the block with your 16 cores, 32 threads, 64MB overclocked beast.
The only way to beat that as of today is an EATX server motherboard with a 32 core Epyc. Don't hold back, get a two socket board for 64 cores. But be warned: AMD was apparently just testing the market, and the market wants way more than they produced. The price shot up to $4500 a chip. Now eased off a bit to $3600. When it goes below $1500 you will see a large influx of enthusiasts, I will be one of them. Want to get an idea what this scene is like? No audio output, how about that. When you start to see audio chips on these EATX motherboards, you will know that the enthusiasts have arrived in force. To take the sting off, you tend to have a stupidly large number of slots and lanes. And you get dual 10 Gige, that might liven up your lan party.
Your post made it clear that you have been out of the enthusiast loop for a while, if you were ever in it. Because you did not mention the word "gaming". The gaming sector is why we have such a great selection of inexpensive but high specced motherboards, why we have beautiful, practical boxes to put them in, and why high end coolers are so cheap. Because of this, I can build myself a high end development workstation that also looks great and is nearly silent, for what I used to pay for a brand X white box for grandma.
Video tan.
It's Washington Times. Infect your brain with this fluff at your peril. Zero hours indoors indeed.
Yep, still a pretty big chunk of chip.
Today, the x86 decoder is a minuscule portion of the chip.
Dunno. The last time I saw the decoder outlined on a mask was in Opteron days and it looked like a pretty big chunk of chip to me. But too lazy to go hunting for photos now.
Most on-board graphics suck and you have disabled it away and buy a good graphics card to play modern games.
AMD's integrated Vega doesn't suck and will be the right solution for many laptops and midrange desktops. It so doesn't suck that Intel is licensing it.
Speak for yourself. I need as much fast, cool and cheap as I can get.
the amount of effort required to get to the next die shrink is high enough that there's considerable room for others to appear to catch up
It's not just that, it is also that they all buy their lithography equipment from the same supplier. Nobody gets ahead of that.
How interesting that the Dutch still dominate printing technololgy 600 years down the road.
Ryzen single-core performance is more than decent, especially with the 12nm refresh.
just a decoder stuck on the front of the CPU
Which costs power and chip real estate, even if throughput is the same and latency only increases slightly. But AMD has exactly the same issue.
ARMS do front end translation as well, especially if running the thumb instruction set, but it is much less, hence a modest power efficiency and cost advantage.
the move from 22nm to 14nm to 10nm has been AWFULLY slow
It's because production costs increase exponentially with number of multi-patterning steps to work around the resolution issue, and EUV is really nasty stuff, it won't go through lens for one thing.
Except for not sucking like Atom. Core arch (basically, P3) is just better than Atom. They should kill Atom, it only exists for political reasons. There is no niche where Atom outperforms core arch in performance/watt except by market manipulation.
The indicators point at process issues. Each shrink is a crapshoot, engineering-wise, and after many years of boxcars, Intel finally rolled snake eyes. In other words, Intel bet on some process technology that didn't perform to expectations, requiring expensive and time-consuming backtracking. Meanwhile, TSMC, Glofo and Samsung are moving more cautiously. AMD made a great call by focusing on multi die SoCs.
Maybe this means the era of Intel developing its own process tech and running its own fabs is coming to a close and future revenue would be better optimized by throwing in with the rest of the industry instead of trying to maintain a lead by doing its own secret thing. A similar thing happened as the auto industry matured: even the big boys stopped making their own parts long ago.
In 2 years a $400 computer will be better than yours.
Just sayin'.
Doesn't happen quite that fast these days, which has the side effect of making it actually worth the effort to build a performance machine, hence the rise of the enthusiast sector.
Not everyone needs to cough up $1900 for a CPU to have a computer that is usable to them
How right you are, when a Ryzen Threadripper will blow it away in throughput for half the price. :-)
Android is a Linux distribution. If you don't think so, then open up a terminal and go exploring. Notice that the proc directory is there, with all the usual Linux-only interfaces. Notice that the sys directory is there, again, with all the usual Linux-only interfaces. Notice that /sbin is there, like any Unix clone. In fact, Google just made a few arbitrary changes to filesystem layout, such as removing usr, but what remains is clearly Linux. Many Linux binaries run without modification on Android because all the syscalls are the same, and only a few libc calls are missing, such as the ones that assume /etc/passwd is there, which Google removed for no good reason and (inexplicably) a few of the posix pthreads synchronization calls. What remains is clearly Linux, running mostly but not exclusively Android libraries and applications.
Android is an operating system in the same sense that KDE is an operating system. In other words, it isn't. Only in the minds of the marketing department. If you can't see that, then please hand in your geek card.
So, your legacy collection. That's the point.