3 ms·

Here's a bad question from someone who doesn't really understand the differences of CPU architectures and is therefore apprehensive about making related decisio

by pen2l 7y ago

Here's a bad question from someone who doesn't really understand the differences of CPU architectures and is therefore apprehensive about making related decisions: Will I be hurting myself if I buy a computer with an AMD chip, in that I might end up in a situation where certain programs won't work for me? E.g., if I do fancy 3d modeling (Cinema4d, fancy renderers), if I do multi-threaded programming (in matlab), if I do physical simulations ( in COSMOL), etc.?

eyegor 7y ago
Nope, with 1 possible caveat. Amd doesn't have support for avx512 instructions in any of their cpus as far as I know, but avx512 is very uncommon. Most of the Intel chips don't even support avx512. This won't be a "it won't work" scenario, but in case the developer has written code which uses avx512, any cpu that supports it will run the operations substantially faster.
londons_explore 7y ago
As someone who has just tried to run tensorflow and found out that for my specific CPU I can't use prebuilt docker images and have to build my own from scratch, yes, it's certainly a headache.
- cmcd 7y ago
  The only time I could imagine this being the case is if there was code already compiled for a specific architecture. In these cases you would have compatibility issues between different intel CPUs as well so I do not think it is a reason to avoid AMD.
cmcd 7y ago
No, programs do not interact with the CPU directly so there is no difference from that perspective. Rendering and anything multithreaded will definitely favor Ryzen as you will have more cores/threads at the same price point.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
NicoJuicy 7y ago
The only real negative one is that rr ( https://github.com/mozilla/rr https://github.com/mozilla/rr ) is not available on Ryzen for now. Other than that, you are safe.

3 ms·

Here's a bad question from someone who doesn't really understand the differences of CPU architectures and is therefore apprehensive about making related decisio

by pen2l 7y ago

eyegor 7y ago
Nope, with 1 possible caveat. Amd doesn't have support for avx512 instructions in any of their cpus as far as I know, but avx512 is very uncommon. Most of the Intel chips don't even support avx512. This won't be a "it won't work" scenario, but in case the developer has written code which uses avx512, any cpu that supports it will run the operations substantially faster.
londons_explore 7y ago
As someone who has just tried to run tensorflow and found out that for my specific CPU I can't use prebuilt docker images and have to build my own from scratch, yes, it's certainly a headache.
- cmcd 7y ago
  The only time I could imagine this being the case is if there was code already compiled for a specific architecture. In these cases you would have compatibility issues between different intel CPUs as well so I do not think it is a reason to avoid AMD.
cmcd 7y ago
No, programs do not interact with the CPU directly so there is no difference from that perspective. Rendering and anything multithreaded will definitely favor Ryzen as you will have more cores/threads at the same price point.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
NicoJuicy 7y ago
The only real negative one is that rr ( https://github.com/mozilla/rr https://github.com/mozilla/rr ) is not available on Ryzen for now. Other than that, you are safe.