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Not surprised though, with AMD being able to patch the Linux kernel and scheduler to its liking in order to squeeze out the maximum performance for it's archite

Not surprised though, with AMD being able to patch the Linux kernel and scheduler to its liking in order to squeeze out the maximum performance for it's architecture, versus depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime. I'd be curious if the businesses buying these $20k+, 96-core, HEDT workstations actually do run Windows on them in order for this to be that big of a problem for Microsoft worth addressing, or if it's Linux all the way anyway for them so Windows isn't even on the radar. Anyone here in the know? Also, obligatory: "But can it run Crysis?" (in software render)

kelsolaar 3y ago
Epic Games runs mostly Windows Threadrippers for Unreal Engine development. Compiling Unreal faster, or anything really, even Windows itself is a compelling argument.
lostlogin 3y ago
The portion running a hypervisor would also be interesting to know. That’s one hell of a processor.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
One of the major markets for these would be visual art studios. They aren't generally Linux shops.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Funny you mention this because a lot of big visual arts studios use Mac for the artwork in the Adobe ecosystem, and heavily invested in Linux for the 3D rendering pipelines as they moved away from SGI/BSD with Windows almost nowhere on the radar. I'd estimate the number of big-name shops running Windows is a minority with only smaller indie studios like Corridor Digital being all-in on Windows because it's a jack of all trades can-run-anything OS, and managing that one ecosystem without sys-admins and an internal IT department is a lot cheaper easier for small businesses of amateur-professionals.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    "a lot" is nowhere near "all"
    - worthless-trash 3y ago
      And none is nowhere near "a lot".
      - wiz21c 3y ago
        None is nowhere, a lot is somewhere and all is everywhere. sort of.
        throwatacoatme 3y ago
        [dead]
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    My experience is exclusively with small studios, which were Windows shops.
  - gamblor956 3y ago
    The majority of professional movie and television VFX work is now done on Windows and Linux computers, with Linux especially being used for the rendering portion of the process. Mac was the dominant platform for a long time, but Windows caught up and zoomed past Mac about a decade ago. Same or better performance, cheaper hardware, cheaper software, easier to upgrade/repair, and more choice for all of the above. There's a reason that Apple has to pay big bucks to Olivia Rodrigo and others to use Apple products to film and edit their music videos: it's because Apple fell out of favor with creatives and Apple is trying to buy its way back in.
    - steve1977 3y ago
      I think Apple lost a lot of goodwill in the market with the desaster that was the initial release of Final Cut Pro X (and rightly so probably). And now I see quite a few people moving away from Premiere to Resolve, which seems to take a pretty platform-agnostic stance.
- scheeseman486 3y ago
  The improvements coming for Wayland's HDR/color management are likely to help with that, as the features they're aiming for appears to beat Window's more slapdash implementation with per-window color management, where window contents are accurately tonemapped and composited within the widest color space the monitor supports. Adobe would need to be incentivized to port their suite over for it to be taken seriously, but maybe Wine could bridge that gap at first. Ah, the mythical Linux Desktop. One day...
  - jwells89 3y ago
    Will Wayland be able to render mixed HDR and SDR content correctly, with e.g. an HDR video on YouTube rendering with extended range while the rest of the screen renders as normal? Currently only macOS can do that. With Windows you have to choose between SDR and HDR display modes which affects everything on screen regardless of type, which makes SDR content look dingy in HDR mode.
    - kstrauser 3y ago
      On that subject, anyone know why shifting to HDR dims everything that way? My mental model of it is that SDR brightness goes from 0 to 100, and HDR brightness goes from -100 to 100, and that turning on HDR moves everything not HDR-aware down to the bottom of the brightness space. I could look this up, but never think about it outside of conversations like this and figure it might be more fun to talk about it.
      - wmf 3y ago
        It's more like SDR goes from 0 to 255 and HDR goes from 0 to 1024. In SDR mode, 255 = (say) 500 nits while in HDR mode 1024 = 1000 nits and thus 255 = 250 nits so SDR content looks dimmer.
      - dagmx 3y ago
        Consider that your display can only do 0-100 brightness (not really but for sake of argument) In SDR, you map the full SDR range (also 0-100) to that 0-100. When you add HDR, you’re now adding levels above 100 (let’s say 0-200). If your display can only do upto 100, you now need to put all the 0-100 stuff in 0-50. Or you get a display that can also display 0-200. Very few computer displays can do over a standard SDR range of 500 nits.
- jamesfmilne 3y ago
  We sell systems based on these high-end workstations and yes they do run Linux, Rocky Linux 8 at the moment. Still stuck on Xorg because reasons, but for HDR monitoring you're usually using a display interface card with SDI or HDMI outputs anyway.
jackmott42 3y ago
Pretty sure Microsoft is very cooperative on working with AMD and others on this stuff, it may just take a little longer in this case.
- dboreham 3y ago
  > versus depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime. Cutler stated in a recent interview that he had a 96-core machine as one of his two daily drivers. I wondered at the time if he pre-announced that CPU since the press about it seemed to reach me a few days later.
  - vluft 3y ago
    Epyc has had 96-core cpus out for a bit over a year now, so probably that.
chaosbutters314 3y ago
ive worked at companies where we buy these types of workstations for fea/cfd/ML if the company has a overbearing IT, we run windows for "security". at places where we move fast and break things, we run ubuntu and IT says for us to manage it ourselves. for anyone wondering why we done use the cloud or a server, we do too. but model setup, licensing, and small jobs are easier and quicker to do locally.
ThrowawayB7 3y ago
> "...depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime." They don't have to figure it out on their own; everybody maintains close contact. For example, Intel has a field office literally one block away from Microsoft's main campus. One would assume AMD also has a field office similarly near by. (EDIT: they do, a couple of blocks further.)

kelsolaar 3y ago

Epic Games runs mostly Windows Threadrippers for Unreal Engine development. Compiling Unreal faster, or anything really, even Windows itself is a compelling argument.

lostlogin 3y ago

The portion running a hypervisor would also be interesting to know. That’s one hell of a processor.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

One of the major markets for these would be visual art studios. They aren't generally Linux shops.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Funny you mention this because a lot of big visual arts studios use Mac for the artwork in the Adobe ecosystem, and heavily invested in Linux for the 3D rendering pipelines as they moved away from SGI/BSD with Windows almost nowhere on the radar. I'd estimate the number of big-name shops running Windows is a minority with only smaller indie studios like Corridor Digital being all-in on Windows because it's a jack of all trades can-run-anything OS, and managing that one ecosystem without sys-admins and an internal IT department is a lot cheaper easier for small businesses of amateur-professionals.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  "a lot" is nowhere near "all"
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    And none is nowhere near "a lot".
    - wiz21c 3y ago
      None is nowhere, a lot is somewhere and all is everywhere. sort of.
      - throwatacoatme 3y ago
        [dead]
- bryanlarsen 3y ago
  My experience is exclusively with small studios, which were Windows shops.
- gamblor956 3y ago
  The majority of professional movie and television VFX work is now done on Windows and Linux computers, with Linux especially being used for the rendering portion of the process. Mac was the dominant platform for a long time, but Windows caught up and zoomed past Mac about a decade ago. Same or better performance, cheaper hardware, cheaper software, easier to upgrade/repair, and more choice for all of the above. There's a reason that Apple has to pay big bucks to Olivia Rodrigo and others to use Apple products to film and edit their music videos: it's because Apple fell out of favor with creatives and Apple is trying to buy its way back in.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    I think Apple lost a lot of goodwill in the market with the desaster that was the initial release of Final Cut Pro X (and rightly so probably). And now I see quite a few people moving away from Premiere to Resolve, which seems to take a pretty platform-agnostic stance.
scheeseman486 3y ago
The improvements coming for Wayland's HDR/color management are likely to help with that, as the features they're aiming for appears to beat Window's more slapdash implementation with per-window color management, where window contents are accurately tonemapped and composited within the widest color space the monitor supports. Adobe would need to be incentivized to port their suite over for it to be taken seriously, but maybe Wine could bridge that gap at first. Ah, the mythical Linux Desktop. One day...
- jwells89 3y ago
  Will Wayland be able to render mixed HDR and SDR content correctly, with e.g. an HDR video on YouTube rendering with extended range while the rest of the screen renders as normal? Currently only macOS can do that. With Windows you have to choose between SDR and HDR display modes which affects everything on screen regardless of type, which makes SDR content look dingy in HDR mode.
  - kstrauser 3y ago
    On that subject, anyone know why shifting to HDR dims everything that way? My mental model of it is that SDR brightness goes from 0 to 100, and HDR brightness goes from -100 to 100, and that turning on HDR moves everything not HDR-aware down to the bottom of the brightness space. I could look this up, but never think about it outside of conversations like this and figure it might be more fun to talk about it.
    - wmf 3y ago
      It's more like SDR goes from 0 to 255 and HDR goes from 0 to 1024. In SDR mode, 255 = (say) 500 nits while in HDR mode 1024 = 1000 nits and thus 255 = 250 nits so SDR content looks dimmer.
    - dagmx 3y ago
      Consider that your display can only do 0-100 brightness (not really but for sake of argument) In SDR, you map the full SDR range (also 0-100) to that 0-100. When you add HDR, you’re now adding levels above 100 (let’s say 0-200). If your display can only do upto 100, you now need to put all the 0-100 stuff in 0-50. Or you get a display that can also display 0-200. Very few computer displays can do over a standard SDR range of 500 nits.
jamesfmilne 3y ago
We sell systems based on these high-end workstations and yes they do run Linux, Rocky Linux 8 at the moment. Still stuck on Xorg because reasons, but for HDR monitoring you're usually using a display interface card with SDI or HDMI outputs anyway.

jackmott42 3y ago

Pretty sure Microsoft is very cooperative on working with AMD and others on this stuff, it may just take a little longer in this case.

dboreham 3y ago
> versus depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime. Cutler stated in a recent interview that he had a 96-core machine as one of his two daily drivers. I wondered at the time if he pre-announced that CPU since the press about it seemed to reach me a few days later.
- vluft 3y ago
  Epyc has had 96-core cpus out for a bit over a year now, so probably that.

chaosbutters314 3y ago

ive worked at companies where we buy these types of workstations for fea/cfd/ML if the company has a overbearing IT, we run windows for "security". at places where we move fast and break things, we run ubuntu and IT says for us to manage it ourselves. for anyone wondering why we done use the cloud or a server, we do too. but model setup, licensing, and small jobs are easier and quicker to do locally.

ThrowawayB7 3y ago

> "...depending on Microsoft to have the good will to figure it out on their own dime." They don't have to figure it out on their own; everybody maintains close contact. For example, Intel has a field office literally one block away from Microsoft's main campus. One would assume AMD also has a field office similarly near by. (EDIT: they do, a couple of blocks further.)