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One thing intel does have going for it is by and large excellent linux support for systems built on their hardware. While I haven't worked with the server side

by lumost 6y ago

One thing intel does have going for it is by and large excellent linux support for systems built on their hardware. While I haven't worked with the server side AMD gear, the state of AMD laptops and linux leaves a lot to be desired. It'll be expensive for AMD to close the software gap between both Intel and Nvidia.

uncledave 6y ago
Surprisingly the only laptop I’ve ever had work reasonably well on Linux was an AMD based one (T495s).
dharmab 6y ago
When was the last time you used AMD on Linux? The intree amdgpu driver is so much easier to deal with than the out of tree nvidia driver and gets support for new hardware much faster than the nouveau driver. There was even a period of about of month last year where nvidia didn’t support the new kernel.
- danieldk 6y ago
  And when comparing to Intel, which is usually well-supported by Linux: the kernel-side Intel GPU support had several nasty bugs that persisted through the first few 5.x kernel releases leading to graphics lockups. https://linuxreviews.org/Linux_Kernel_5.5_Will_Not_Fix_The_Frequent_Intel_GPU_Hangs_In_Recent_Kernels https://linuxreviews.org/Linux_Kernel_5.5_Will_Not_Fix_The_F... My Intel NUC8i5BEH would regularly have GPU lockups and it took them several months to fix the issues.
  - bavell 6y ago
    I still get these lockups to this day, even on 5.11 and my i5 6600k. Looking forward to a 5950X when I can find one!
- mywittyname 6y ago
  How are data centers with large CUDA offerings handling the situation with nVidia driver on Linux? Running them on Windows?
  - dharmab 6y ago
    At my company we run LTS kernels and rebuild the driver ourselves every time we push a kernel update. On home systems, Arch Linux provides a system to automate the module generation [0], however features like CUDA break sometimes. [1] [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Support https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_S... [1] https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-45528-is-incompatible-with-linux-59/ https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-45528-is-incompatible-with...
klelatti 6y ago
One anecdote: I've been using AMD's CPU OpenCL SDK for a while now as the Intel equivalent was a pain to install. Intel have now made it a lot easier so moved to Intel and the performance increase has been ... very material. And of course that would mean that I'm more likely to use Intel hardware in future as reasonably sure the Intel drivers don't work with AMD CPUs - so sadly no EPYC for me!
danieldk 6y ago
One thing intel does have going for it is by and large excellent linux support for systems built on their hardware. While I haven't worked with the server side AMD gear, the state of AMD laptops and linux leaves a lot to be desired. What? I have a Thinkpad T14 AMD and even though it has only been on the market for a few months, it's Linux support is excellent. Everything, including the GPU, works perfectly fine.
olau 6y ago
I ran Intel on desktop for many years partly for that reason, partly due to much lower idle consumption, but to be honest, while full of features the Intel graphic drivers were for a long time (several years) a little bit buggy. I wasn't super impressed with that. I recently switched to integrated AMD graphics, and the only problem I had was occasional render artifacts. Yes, a bit scary, but in practice only an occasional cosmetic problem. I think those disappeared completely some time ago. This is on a stock kernel. The only graphics-related problems I have these days are with Wine and some old games, where it looks like there's a difference between what Wine emulates and what it expects to get directly from the 3D driver, e.g. with regards to old 16 bit color modes that I suppose the AMD driver simply doesn't bother with.

by lumost 6y ago

uncledave 6y ago

Surprisingly the only laptop I’ve ever had work reasonably well on Linux was an AMD based one (T495s).

dharmab 6y ago

When was the last time you used AMD on Linux? The intree amdgpu driver is so much easier to deal with than the out of tree nvidia driver and gets support for new hardware much faster than the nouveau driver. There was even a period of about of month last year where nvidia didn’t support the new kernel.

danieldk 6y ago
And when comparing to Intel, which is usually well-supported by Linux: the kernel-side Intel GPU support had several nasty bugs that persisted through the first few 5.x kernel releases leading to graphics lockups. https://linuxreviews.org/Linux_Kernel_5.5_Will_Not_Fix_The_Frequent_Intel_GPU_Hangs_In_Recent_Kernels https://linuxreviews.org/Linux_Kernel_5.5_Will_Not_Fix_The_F... My Intel NUC8i5BEH would regularly have GPU lockups and it took them several months to fix the issues.
- bavell 6y ago
  I still get these lockups to this day, even on 5.11 and my i5 6600k. Looking forward to a 5950X when I can find one!
mywittyname 6y ago
How are data centers with large CUDA offerings handling the situation with nVidia driver on Linux? Running them on Windows?
- dharmab 6y ago
  At my company we run LTS kernels and rebuild the driver ourselves every time we push a kernel update. On home systems, Arch Linux provides a system to automate the module generation [0], however features like CUDA break sometimes. [1] [0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_Support https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dynamic_Kernel_Module_S... [1] https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-45528-is-incompatible-with-linux-59/ https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-45528-is-incompatible-with...

klelatti 6y ago

One anecdote: I've been using AMD's CPU OpenCL SDK for a while now as the Intel equivalent was a pain to install. Intel have now made it a lot easier so moved to Intel and the performance increase has been ... very material. And of course that would mean that I'm more likely to use Intel hardware in future as reasonably sure the Intel drivers don't work with AMD CPUs - so sadly no EPYC for me!

danieldk 6y ago

One thing intel does have going for it is by and large excellent linux support for systems built on their hardware. While I haven't worked with the server side AMD gear, the state of AMD laptops and linux leaves a lot to be desired. What? I have a Thinkpad T14 AMD and even though it has only been on the market for a few months, it's Linux support is excellent. Everything, including the GPU, works perfectly fine.

olau 6y ago

I ran Intel on desktop for many years partly for that reason, partly due to much lower idle consumption, but to be honest, while full of features the Intel graphic drivers were for a long time (several years) a little bit buggy. I wasn't super impressed with that. I recently switched to integrated AMD graphics, and the only problem I had was occasional render artifacts. Yes, a bit scary, but in practice only an occasional cosmetic problem. I think those disappeared completely some time ago. This is on a stock kernel. The only graphics-related problems I have these days are with Wine and some old games, where it looks like there's a difference between what Wine emulates and what it expects to get directly from the 3D driver, e.g. with regards to old 16 bit color modes that I suppose the AMD driver simply doesn't bother with.