System76 Thelio Ramps Up AI & Creator Performance With New AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPUs

[AlanTuring69]

*shakes his head at all the nonsensical comments*

Wall of text

Don't worry, I had ChatGPT translate it for me

This paragraph discusses specialized workstations designed for specific professional applications, not for casual or gaming use. These workstations are aimed at industries and sectors that require extensive computational power or multi-threaded input/output capabilities, but don't need large-scale high-performance computing or supercomputing setups. Examples given include companies needing to run complex simulations like Monte Carlo simulations or analyzing large data sets. The paragraph highlights the convenience of having such powerful systems in-house for tasks that would otherwise require remote supercomputer access.

The text also notes the target audience for these workstations includes labs, businesses, and private engineering and research firms that require an intermediate solution between a regular PC and a high-performance computing farm. System76 is mentioned as an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) that builds and sells these systems. The advantage of these workstations is their ability to handle complex tasks quickly and efficiently, which is essential in professional settings where time is a valuable resource.

Additionally, the paragraph touches on the appeal of these workstations to the open-source community, particularly for build farms like FreeBSD’s Poudriere and OpenSUSE’s Build Service. It emphasizes the benefits of OEM-built workstations, such as reliability, compatibility, warranty service, and professional support, over self-built systems.

In essence, the paragraph argues that while these high-end workstations are not for everyone, particularly not for casual users or gamers attracted by superficial features like LED lights, they are crucial for certain professional, research, and engineering tasks where high computational power and efficiency are paramount.

[sophisticles]

The HP Dev One was not discontinued. It was a limited run product to begin with, and they sold out of stock quicker than expected. All machines were produced before the first laptop was shipped. They may choose to work on the HP Dev Two at any point in the future, but they're likely waiting for the economy to get better.

So you admit that it's a tough economy and your solution is to sell computers with limited appeal that have an identity crisis?

System76 believes in GPL'd OS, GPL'd firmware and then builds their computers to target AI featuring Nvidia GPUs.

Here's a news flash, you need Nvidia's proprietary drivers for CUDA and you need CUDA if you plan on doing AI on Nvidia GPU's.

Which makes the whole GPL thing kind of lame.

[mmstick]

So you admit that it's a tough economy and your solution is to sell computers with limited appeal that have an identity crisis?

System76 believes in GPL'd OS, GPL'd firmware and then builds their computers to target AI featuring Nvidia GPUs.

Here's a news flash, you need Nvidia's proprietary drivers for CUDA and you need CUDA if you plan on doing AI on Nvidia GPU's.

Which makes the whole GPL thing kind of lame.

Due to high interest rates and inflation, the economy is moving slower for all industries. This is irrelevant to the discussion though. In fact, the economy has hurt consumer Windows PC OEMs, like HP, much harder than those selling professional Linux workstations and laptops, such as System76. Likewise, while the consumer market is down, the AI market is stronger than ever, and most developers are using Linux to develop their projects and models with open source AI frameworks.

You seem to forget that both Pop!_OS and System76's main clients are professionals and companies who use Linux, as well as those who need CUDA and ROCm Linux workstations for their simulations and AI projects. System76 is in a unique position where they have talent working on all levels from open firmware to the operating system and its desktop environment. Pop!_OS is designed for these target audience in mind. Who else are you going to turn to other than an OEM that exclusively focuses on selling Linux systems for this exact purpose? Why wouldn't you want to buy systems with the latest built-in AI accelerators for the task?

I don't understand why you keep throwing around "GPL" in your arguments. Why do you think there is an issue with using NVIDIA drivers with CUDA on Pop!_OS or Linux as a whole? There is no legal problems with packaging or installing NVIDIA drivers in Pop!_OS, or any other proprietary blobs included with every installation of Linux today. Additionally, we develop software using a handful of open source licenses, based on the purpose of the project in question. Including MIT, MPL-2.0, and GPLv3.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Followed the link.

"Arriving soon!"

"Coming soon!"

"Sign up now!"

"Notify when available"

No sign of prices, even on the suggested configurations.

System76 were founded in 2005 and haven't collapsed yet, so they seem to be doing something right, even if it's not something which is going to make them the next Apple or Microsoft or Dell. It might conceivably make them the next RedHat... whether that is good or bad has yet to be seen, if it occurs at all.

But the maximum CPU offered is the 7980X? And a maximum of 512GB of RAM?

I'm sort of interested in Threadripper 7000 for Zen 4 (AVX-512) plus a ton of PCI-E lanes which I can have on my office desk. But unfortunately, due to budget timing, I went with a 5995WX and 512GB of RAM in a Fractal Design chassis. Next big purchase will likely be next year.

Although I'm interested in seeing if an 8700G can handle 128GB of 192GB of RAM at half-decent speeds, as AVX-512 in my home/work box would be nice with a bit more RAM than one of the little NUC-clones can handle.

[Anux]

Although I'm interested in seeing if an 8700G can handle 128GB of 192GB of RAM at half-decent speeds, as AVX-512 in my home/work box would be nice with a bit more RAM than one of the little NUC-clones can handle.

There are 48 GB DDR5 6800 modules out there so it should be doable with 4 modules but https://www.amd.com/de/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-8700g says only DDR5 3600 with a 4 module config. You most likely can set it 5600 without problems in your BIOS but it's not officially supported/guarantied to work especially since 48er modules are always double ranked that tend to not overclock as well as single rank.

[spicfoo]

System76 is in a unique position where they have talent working on all levels from open firmware to the operating system and its desktop environment. Pop!_OS is designed for these target audience in mind. Who else are you going to turn to other than an OEM that exclusively focuses on selling Linux systems for this exact purpose?

FWIW, as a potential customer investing resources into a custom desktop environment doesn't encourage me. Quite the opposite. I have not heard a clear business justification for it. I would encourage an official blog post explaining this so I know whether to move forward.

[rmfx]

FWIW, as a potential customer, investing resources into a custom desktop environment doesn't encourage me. Quite the opposite. I have not heard a clear business justification for it. I would encourage an official blog post explaining this so I know whether to move forward.

Well, I didn't know System76 at all before they started doing Pop. Now they do cosmic-epoch, the probability that I buy my next workstation from them skyrocketed by 10000%.
I work in a company where they buy HP Linux workstations, and I would definitely advise choosing S76 instead because of firmware support and for better expertise.

[mmstick]

FWIW, as a potential customer investing resources into a custom desktop environment doesn't encourage me. Quite the opposite. I have not heard a clear business justification for it. I would encourage an official blog post explaining this so I know whether to move forward.

It's been explained multiple times in the past, but the tl;dr is that the justification is the same for why we created Pop!_OS and open source firmware/EC. We are uniquely positioned in the space because we sell systems directly to Linux desktop customers. For any issue that a customer experiences, they will create support tickets that are handled by our dedicated support teams. They also regularly fill out surveys, and provide a lot of positive and negative feedback on different areas of the experience. We've been in the business long enough that we've accumulated a lot data on what our customers want and need. Which then directly influences what problems we work on.

Pop!_OS gave us the ability to resolve many commonly-reported paper cuts and rough edges in the user experience for installation, first time setup, and configuration. The more we invested into Pop!_OS projects, the greater our capacity to enact changes to fix fundamental problems or improve the overall desktop experience. We performed a lot of packaging and optimization work to ensure that users have the best out of the box experience possible, whether they're playing PC games on a hybrid graphics laptop or running CUDA apps. We could backport newer kernels, drivers, firmware, Mesa, etc. and test every update against the hardware in our QA lab. As well as package commonly-requested applications such as Lutris, Slack, Discord, etc.. It's for that reason that Pop!_OS has become quite popular over the years.

Open source firmware and EC brought that same level of care to our laptops. It enables us to significantly enhance system integration with Linux, and address critical problems at the firmware level from the source code without needing to rely on a third party firmware vendor in Taiwan or China to listen to our Linux support issues. Now we can consistently develop and maintain firmware support for a wide number of systems we've ported to coreboot for years to come.

COSMIC is a culmination of all of that and more. It began as a set of GNOME Shell extensions to address pain points such as the lack of tiling in GNOME. Both the development team and many of our customers wanted tiling window management. Many customers have ultrawide and multi-monitor display setups, which were unusable with GNOME for those who've tasted tiling window management. As we continued deeper into addressing common pain points in the desktop environment with shell extensions, it was evident that we were merely biding time until we had the resources to develop a proper desktop environment from the ground up.

The need to create COSMIC increased as we became more and more frustrated with the limitations in extensions, the direction that GNOME is taking with their desktop, and the difficulty working with a platform built on legacy languages like C and JS. Meanwhile, the Rust ecosystem was advancing rapidly in the desktop GUI space. They only needed the helping hand of a company that's willing to glue everything together and push it across the finish line. Thus we were able to leverage top tier projects like Smithay, Iced, Winit, and WGPU to create COSMIC, and in turn we've been developing the missing pieces to the puzzle, such as cosmic-text, while building a modern Wayland desktop environment in Rust from the ground up.

[spicfoo]

It's been explained multiple times in the past.

Which is why I suggested offering an explanation of all of this in the website rather than in adhoc posts in forums so decision makers can evaluate all this. What happens if the corporation standard is Debian or CentOS Stream? Does the org efforts go into playing well with the ecosystem of broadly used tools like fwupd and are all relevant h/w support in upstream or do you carry distro specific or DE specific patches?

[mmstick]

Which is why I suggested offering an explanation of all of this in the website rather than in adhoc posts in forums so decision makers can evaluate all this. What happens if the corporation standard is Debian or CentOS Stream? Does the org efforts go into playing well with the ecosystem of broadly used tools like fwupd and are all relevant h/w support in upstream or do you carry distro specific or DE specific patches?

https://blog.system76.com/post/open-up-contributions-and-collaborations

This is three years old, but you should be able to get a glimpse of what we've done in the past, despite having only a few developers at the time. Anything that was possible to be upstreamed was upstreamed long ago. That doesn't mean that all of our work is possible to upstream though. And when we develop software from scratch, we are the upstream by definition. All of our software is open sourced, so other distributions are free to use our software. Some do package and use some of our software, such as system76-scheduler, system7-power, or the pop-launcher.

Our development team has grown since then, and our capacity to develop and contribute has grown significantly thanks to COSMIC. As I mentioned above, our cosmic-text library is now universally adopted by most GUI projects in the Rust ecosystem, including wgpu via glyphon, bevy, iced, lapce via floem, theo, vizia, cushy via kludgine, etc. We're now members of the winit windowing group, and have merged improvements for window creation in Rust. We've contributed a handful of improvements to iced since we started building our platform toolkit with. We hired Smithay's maintainer/developer, and all developments to cosmic-comp are also simultaneously boosting smithay's development.