12 ms·
Linus Torvalds has switched to AMD
- everybodyknows 6y ago>AMD Threadripper 3970x Curious to know about the rest of the box ... but he doesn't say.
- antisthenes 6y agoWell, we already know what he thinks about NVIDIA.
- saagarjha 6y agoI'm pointing to this the next time someone thinks Hacker News is above celebrity tabloids.
- Fluid_Mechanics 6y agoWell at least this isn’t teamblind
- rvz 6y agoWell we already had the John Carmack fans going wild over him 'contributing to OpenBSD', so this isn't the first time HN has this celebrity programmer affection. Also he should have got a AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper™ 3990X instead. 64 Cores / 128 Threads to compile the kernel in ~30 seconds.
- ccmcarey 6y ago3990x does have more cores and threads, but it also has lower clock speeds than the 3970x.
- jez 6y agoPhoronix has actually benchmarked compiling the Linux 5.4 kernel on all three of the 3990X, 3970X, and 3960x[1]: - 22.48s, 3990X - 23.64s, 3970X - 27.54s, 3960X But keep in mind that the 3970X is USD $2,000, while the 3990X is USD $3,990... can't speak for Linus but that extra 1.1s per compile isn't worth $1,990 to me. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3990x-threadripper-linux&num=8 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3990x-th...
- dboreham 6y agoSomehow I'm thinking of IBM mainframes reading this.
- colejohnson66 6y agoWell, double the cores, double the cost...
- phonon 6y agoIt's only about 15% faster...not really worth it. https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-review-64-cores-for-a-workstation/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-linux-kernel-compile-benchmark/ https://www.servethehome.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-re...
- melling 6y agoI’d say it’s more of a celebrity endorsement: “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.”
- pathseeker 6y agoA celebrity tabloid talks about the personal life of celebrities. This is a technology focused forum and the article is about a big name in technology choosing a new technology.
- saagarjha 6y agos/celebrity/technologist/g s/sports team/company/g
- Dylan16807 6y agoA sports team choosing a new technology sounds quite interesting! Please do post content like that.
- Skunkleton 6y agoYou mean like when then NFL started peddling Microsoft Surface? Those were funny times. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/18/13320664/bill-belichick-patriots-microsoft-surface-tablet-nfl https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/18/13320664/bill-belichick-...
- asveikau 6y agoSo a sports team produces something with analogous utility to a CPU? People buy sports gear or tickets and expect to run computations on them? What kind of workload can the Packers handle? I think for the project leader of something like a kernel, which needs to care about the details of a CPU, it's entirely appropriate to set an example and remind people that they aren't building for a hardware monoculture. With Linus I start to think of old writings he used to have about Alpha, or his prior employment at Transmeta (I know no details about it, would not be shocked if it was at least in part a PR move) ... If he's not willing to give some less common hardware a good sanity check, what example does that set for maintainers of various pieces? Similarly, I remember the old stories about Stallman's free software MIPS rig. He ran that to prove a point that was important to him.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- joncp 6y agoThe whole origin of HN is from PG fandom, isn't it?
- qzw 6y agoThis instead of the site that collects PG's parenting tweets? It was on the front page a few weeks ago.
- raldi 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191261 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=191261
- vijucat 6y agoUnpopular opinion: This is how git rose to where it is today. If people were less blinded by celebrity status, they'd see that Linus' lack of exposure to paradigms beyond C such as OOP or FP (due to deliberate disdain; his loss) meant that C pointers were the primary abstraction on which he built git, and that it suffers greatly because of this. Not to mention that good UX is a rare skill among developers in general. See https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/ https://stevelosh.com/blog/2013/04/git-koans/ Mercurial should have won. And Plastic SCM is awesome, designed conceptually from the ground up to build on lessons learned from git (and by an Associate Professor in CS). In fact, the whole concept of DVCSs is ridiculous in 99% of corporate contexts where you can't use your laptop / desktop at home without logging in into the VPN. Why do we even need distributed version control in such a setting? Subversion is perfectly enough and even non-developer users can actually understand and use Subversion effectively. See https://svnvsgit.com/ https://svnvsgit.com/ Mind you, I'm not a blind hater: I love that Linus did well in life. I'd be thrilled if his net worth was a billion instead of just $150 million. Surely, he contributed much more than that.
- theamk 6y agoCan we stop with the conspiracy theories? Git rose where it was today for a multitude reasons, most of them technical: it is very fast, rebase is well supported, if it breaks it’s easy to fix and so on. (Yes, some of these are fixed now, but it is too late) I mean, many people had the exposure to bit git and hg at some point in their life - especially the kind of people who make decision which vcs to use. Celebrity endorsement may be good to convince me to try something, but it cannot convince one to use something over alternatives, if they had enough experience with both.
- dannyw 6y agoIt also doesn’t really matter. Git is good enough. Hg is good enough.
- mikekchar 6y agoSpeed was definitely a big deal when git first came into being. However, as far as I remember, the main thing that made git popular was actually Github. Before Github, various souce repository sites were awful (and in the case of what SourceForge became, more than awful).
- tinus_hn 6y agoThis isn’t about some guy getting a new car, right. At least it’s about tech related to a person important in tech.
- ksec 6y agoI think in modern day it is called News from KOL. And since it is a Tech Person talking about a piece of Tech. I thought it was quite relevant. Hopefully more people will purchase AMD as the result of this. Its financially figures are not good. ( As I have been saying in every AMD thread )
- jeroenhd 6y agoWhile you're right to a certain point, more Linux developers on the AMD platforms will eventually lead to less AMD-related bugs in the kernel. From what I've seen of AMD, the hardware is often excellent but the software leaves something to be desired. AMD GPU drivers, for example, are stable for some and unstable for others. The more people involved with building Linux use AMD hardware, the fewer AMD-only bugs find themselves into the kernel. It might also help with optimizing the software for higher core counts now that 32 cores without NUMA is feasible for workstations. In the end I think parts of the core team switching to AMD will make the hardware platform more attractive for people browsing for workstations. AMD provides great value for money but if you want stability, you buy Intel. Now that probability of instability is decreased with major kernel developers testing out changes and encountering some of the same potential bugs, Threadripper becomes more attractive to certain groups of power users. This is celebrity news that might affect a lot of people in their day-to-day business down the line, which is different from the typical "Paul Graham ate breakfast" or "Linus Torvalds flips off nvidia" celebrity news cycle.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y agoHe didn’t just switch to AMD, he switched to the 32 core Threadripper 3970x.
- Medicalidiot 6y agoI'd love to have one of these in my gaming rig, but even with my 1700 I rarely have cpu bottlenecks.
- threeseed 6y agoMost games aren't that multi-threaded. So it would actually end up being a lot slower than a 10900k.
- klyrs 6y agoI mean, he wasn't about to splash for an AMD9080ADC...
- Arnavion 6y agoSame as Greg K-H's new computer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37RP9I3_TBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37RP9I3_TBo
- dzhiurgis 6y agoWonder why not 64 core Threadripper 3990x?
- mattbillenstein 6y agoNot blazing single-thread perf, but pretty high up the total perf list... https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
- starky 6y agoI mean, how silly would you have to be to buy a 32 core/64 thread processor if single threaded performance was a consideration at all. There is obviously going to be some sort of tradeoff in single core performance to obtain that density of cores.
- phonon 6y ago3970X has a maximum single core turbo of 4.5GHz, with a similar/better IPC than Skylake. You're not missing much at all. The tradeoff only exists when thermally limited when multiple cores are running, but given how many more cores there are in the first place, you are still way ahead.
- mattbillenstein 6y agoPassmark numbers seem to say -15.5% - but I guess that's maybe not that big of a deal in most things. I use my desktop for playing games, so having 4-8 cores is enough, I'd much rather have fast cores for things that don't parallelize well. That being said, I am pushing a pretty old cpu - i7-4770k - and I haven't been able to convince myself to spend the money on the upgrade since I'm down ~32% from the best thing you can get considering single thread perf. Maybe the next round of cpus - Zen 3 et al. I'll be doing nvme pcie-4.0 ssd as well in the next build which should give a big boost over the sata ssd I'm using now.
- threeseed 6y agoNot surprised. There is no equivalent from Intel for the 3970x except from the significantly more expensive Xeon line. And the closest Intel 10980xe part is 18 cores with availability close to zero. Also I can't imagine Linus is going to be interested in OC which is where you get most of the value from the Intel chips.
- klingonopera 6y ago...it's funny, because if anyone can write code that wouldn't require 32 cores to run, Linus would certainly be one of them. Don't forget to keep in touch with reality, a bunch of people on this globe still have to get by using dual-cores.
- colejohnson66 6y agoSo because a lot of the world is running dual core, programmers shouldn’t attempt to improve compilation time with more cores?
- tinus_hn 6y agoI think he wants Linux to just remove most drivers from the kernel so this guy can compile it with everything enabled on his slow computer.
- klingonopera 6y agoNo, it completely makes sense on the compilation aspect, I don't deny it. But where do you test the compiled software? If I use an analogy from the Internet, it's like web developers using hugely uncompressed pictures, but nobody cares, because everyone's got broadband. But then, the guy with a mobile data rate wants to view the page. Or the poor sod, who for some reason is still stuck on 56k. And except for bloated pictures, I mean system services, tasks and processes, and no one realizes what a drag they may be causing, because everyone's got at least four cores nowadays, anyways. That's a very real danger for any developer, to "lose touch with reality" when it comes to their users.
- sithadmin 6y agoAMD's core density is a huge deal, and it's not just for gamers anymore. Lots of enterprise software companies are rethinking or have restructured their licensing agreements to prepare for a future where per-socket licensing (which pretty much implied 2x sockets per server) will be undercut by 2nd and 3rd gen Epyc making single-socket servers at scale relevant again.
- TwoNineA 6y agoCore count is not that important for games.
- Nursie 6y agoIt's becoming that way, raw single core performance is becoming less of a bottleneck over time.
- Koshkin 6y agoI’d be wondering why, though. From my experience, much of what a game engine usually does looks embarrassingly parallel.
- colejohnson66 6y agoIt’s parallelized on the GPU, but I/O isn’t really something you can parallelize that much.
- willis936 6y agoMost of the CPU work in games is in making draw calls, which can be parallelized. Interesting that the meme that games are ST bound persists when that hasn’t been the case for several years (see: DX11+ and Vulkan). The problem is game devs and engine makers don’t spend the effort to parallelize in the main loop everywhere they can. You can get extra fps by having a faster single thread. Even still, if you had a 6 GHz single core CPU with a contemporary architecture then you would have an abysmal frame rate in a contemporary game. Those cores are used.
- terrywang 6y agoI've been running Fedora (21 - 32 as of now) on HP MicroServer N54L Gen7 since 2014, it has a relatively weak AMD Turion II Neo N54L Dual Core processor but it's been working reliably over the years, still strong (not really when compiling, e.g. ZFS modules via DKMS). DIYed a AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton) + Epox 8RDA3+ (AVC 112C86 fan) desktop, overheating was a headache, overclocking even made it worse, finally that motherboard didn't survive overheating problem (so AMD CPU cooling has always been my concern lol). Good to see consumers are more willing to accept AMD after all those Intel Meltdown & spectre, etc. drama (I was working as Tech Lead for XenServer support team, to some extent I knew how bad it negatively impacted from that specific PoV). Personally I'll prefer AMD when buying new hardware.
- threeseed 6y agoIt's actually going to be a great era for consumers. AMD and Intel in strong competition improves the quality and diversity of the CPUs and most importantly reduces their prices. We saw this almost immediately when the 10980xe which is largely identical to the 9980xe was sold for 50% of the price as a result of the 3950x/3960x. In the server space however AMD will likely remain as a minor player as ARM inevitably starts to find its way in as a result of its far superior price/performance ratio.
- dannyw 6y agoARM doesn’t do x64. I have no doubts that it will get higher, but if you don’t wanna introduce a new CPU architecture, it’s Intel or AMD.
- saagarjha 6y agoAt some point you’ll recompile for ARM…
- Rantenki 6y agoThat's not ... entirely true (edit: I see I misread you, it doesn't do X64, but there is 64 bit ARM in the form of AARCH64): https://www.edn.com/arm64-vs-arm32-whats-different-for-linux-programmers/ https://www.edn.com/arm64-vs-arm32-whats-different-for-linux... You can get Arm64 linux workstations now. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15733/ampere-emag-system-a-32core-arm64-workstation https://www.anandtech.com/show/15733/ampere-emag-system-a-32...
- andai 6y agoIs he still working on the kernel?
- wolf550e 6y agoYes, he is in charge of merging changes from ~200 subsystem git trees into the new release, every week. Every ~8 weeks they do a major version with big changes, and then they do weekly releases with bugfixes, and then they do a major version with big changes again. The major releases are then maintained by Greg Kroah-Hartman (the number 2 person in Linux), who cherry-picks fixes from mainline that should go to stable. Distros have kernel teams that also maintain their own stable trees, with or without help from upstream stable maintainer. Linus can't code review all the changes queued for the next major release, but he does make sure that in case the subsystem maintainer says "this is safe to merge, it has been tested" but actually it doesn't compile, then Linus will yell at him and call him bad words in Finnish. Because the subsystem maintainer is an important job, people rely on them, they have years of experience, they know better than to do pull requests with junk. He is also involved with resolving disputes and fixing things that affects his own workflow.
- andai 6y agoThanks, that's great to hear.
- m0zg 6y agoI switched to the same CPU (+128GB of RAM) a few months back. Amazing value, IMO. Truly a fire breathing workstation. Costs less that the base config of Mac Pro, as well. In addition, while the first gen Threadripper boards were picky AF with respect to memory choice, the new TRX40 board took 128GB in 4 DIMMs like a champ, and is 100% stable at the memory's "XMP" settings. I'm pretty impressed with this and don't regret spending $1800 on the CPU. It's really a no-brainer for anyone who does deep learning or works with C/C++, or both, especially if you can write it off as a business expense.
- dannyw 6y agoAre you doing deep learning on the CPU?
- rvz 6y ago> I'm pretty impressed with this and don't regret spending $1800 on the CPU. It's really a no-brainer for anyone who does deep learning I hate to ask this but, why would this CPU be any good for Deep learning, especially for training purposes? That doesn't make any sense. Sure if I needed a workstation that can build large software like Rust, LLVM, Chromium or Linux in ~30s then either the 3970 or 3990X are worth getting. For Deep Learning? this will perform very poorly or even end up permanently damaging the CPU, which is a very expensive investment to waste on. You might as well get the TITAN RTX for that, which is a no-brainer for deep learning use-cases.
- m0zg 6y agoBecause augmentation is done on the CPU, and a slower CPU can't keep up if you have 4x 2080ti's in your workstation training in fp16, which is how I prefer to run things. Moreover, a SATA SSD also can't keep up, so you need NVMe. And for that you need an extension cable, since NVMe stick will overheat in its default location (right under the GPU). Found out the hard way. This is also why AWS sucks so bad for deep learning workloads: on some workloads it's very easy to bottleneck on CPU, and unlike with Google Cloud, you can't just drag the slider and give your VM more cores when needed. Jeff Bezos determined that 4xV100 should get 32 hyperthreads, so you get 32 hyperthreads.
- Someone1234 6y agoI just upgraded from an 2015 i7 4/8 Core/Thread CPU to a Ryzen 7 3700X 8/16. When I first starting using the new CPU the most striking thing was how /few/ of the cores were under-load during my compilations due to several bottlenecks in my build I didn't realize I had. Over half of my cores were near idle. I was able to reduce compilation times by 75% (126~ sec to under 31~ sec), just by allowing several processes to run concurrently, and changing the order of a few others, so they weren't fighting over file system locks. I went back and tested it on the old i7 machine, and still got a 30%~ improvement. My point is: Upgrade away, but make sure your tooling and scripts are designed for that type of concurrency otherwise you'll be wasting a lot of the potential. Mine weren't.
- keyle 6y agoAre you saying that the AMD stuff doesn't do hyperthreading?
- 411111111111111 6y ago... Considering hyperthreading is a proprietary Intel system: no, AMD doesn't do it. Not sure how that would be in any way relevant to the parents point though.
- gen3 6y agoIt should be noted that AMD has SMT, which is pretty much the same thing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_(microarchitecture) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_(microarchitecture)
- willis936 6y agoWhile shoring up nomenclature: I believe “simultaneous multi-threading” (SMT) is the generic term and “Hyperthreading” is Intel’s branding of their SMT implementation. Calling AMD’s SMT “hyperthreading” is like calling all tissues Kleenex. It’s fine imo, but it doesn’t hurt to know these things.
- 6y ago
- graton 6y agoI guess Greg Kroah-Hartman is also switching or has switched to AMD. A video from the person (Level1Techs) who built him a new machine. Building a Whisper-Quiet Threadripper PC For Greg Kroah-Hartman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37RP9I3_TBo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37RP9I3_TBo
- aorth 6y agoCool! Honest question: what's he doing for graphics then? Intel chips have had integrated graphics with superb Linux driver support for years. Does this AMD ThreadRipper 3970x have an integrated graphics?
- Jnr 6y agoI wonder the same thing. Intel probably has the best graphics drivers for Linux. I am currently using Nvidia with proprietary drivers and it works fine for now but I probably won't be able to switch to Wayland any time soon. But other than that it works great. Including gaming. And I also have media box with AMD Ryzen 5 2400G APU and that thing has been a bit of a problem. GPU drivers ted to crash, GPU performance on Linux is poor, and it took about half a year of kernel updates to finally make it not crash every day. Are there are any AMD graphics cards that have good Linux drivers?
- green7ea 6y agoI've been running a Radeon RX 470 for a few years now and the Linux drivers are superb. Better than the intel ones that I have in my laptop. It took ~6 months after launch for it to get stable but it has been rock solid ever since. It is a dedicated GPU though so it also lets me play most games using proton. That has also been amazingly solid (Metal Gear V, etc.)
- majewsky 6y agoI have an AMD card from 2015 (an R9 Nano to be exact). I had to use fglrx for the first few months, but ever since amdgpu entered mainline, it's been rock-solid with good performance. Vulkan works great as well. (Footnote, I don't care about OpenCL, so cannot comment on that.) Based on this positive experience, when it was time to replace my notebook, I got one with a Ryzen 2 APU. The GPU part of that also works great. There were some problems with the IOMMU, but those were resolved by a firmware update from Lenovo a few months in.
- blinkingled 6y agoI'm sure he is not a running Nvidia GPU - that would be a giant pain for kernel development work. There are many AMD discrete GPUs (APUs are problematic a little) including newer ones that work well with modern Linux kernels, so that's probably what he is running.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoIntel is till more convenient for user like me, who dislikes external videos. Most of AMD do not have integrated video, an those who have, show problems working in Linux and BSDs. AMDs also have higher idle consumption. Other than that, AMDs are clearly better CPUs.
- beezle 6y agoYou raise an interesting point. I've been considering upgrading to threadripper from an older Xeon system but am put off by the cooling requirements (cpu, video, system) and how negative that will be on background noise.
- washadjeffmad 6y agoThreadripper with a be quiet! Dark Rock or Noctua cooler will run almost silently. With two GPUs, 8x DIMMs, and a X520-DA2, my home system pulls 380W under full load and is whisper quiet. That said, if you don't need very high core counts, the PCIe lanes, or the memory bandwidth, I'd build on Zen2 Ryzen instead.
- vetinari 6y ago> That said, if you don't need very high core counts, the PCIe lanes, or the memory bandwidth I'm on 1900X because it has the PCIe lanes and memory bandwidth, but do not need the cores. The bonus is, that the fewer cores are clocker higher, becuase they still have the same temperature budget as the higher models.
- wyclif 6y agoThe YT link above to the L1 Techs build is like that. They wanted to optimize for quiet, so if you're like that too you should watch that video.
- washadjeffmad 6y agoRyzen G series includes integrated graphics. There also aren't any major bugs for Zen/Zen 2/TR4 on Linux/BSD. Ironically, the largest stability issue with 1st/2nd gen Ryzen is caused by idling too efficiently. Older power supplies sense this sub-5W idle as being suspended or powered off and throttle their 12V rails, leading to system hangups. An option in BIOS must be set to raise the idle wattage for these PSUs. The demographic most affected by this, first time and budget builders, were also the least likely to be able to diagnose it, leading to its prevalence in forums. Search for "power supply idle control" to learn more about it.