Raven Ridge Desktop APUs Come Out Tomorrow, The Likely Linux Requirements

[Brophen]

To be honest, I do have use for several of these and I waited a long time for them. I hope that the information is right that they also support ECC.
Although benchmarks are interesting I will buy them anyway. Just look at the technical data and you will realize that the IGP will beat the sh*t out of current Intel IGPs. And this IGP even uses the same memory like the CPU... No matter whether you run games or even professional applications with FP32/FP16-computation you will experience a performance you never have seen before with an IGP.

Same, I was also thinking a NAS, I think all of Ryzen is supposed to support ECC but it's left up to the motherboard maker whether to implement ECC or not

[wizard69]

Micheal;

One thing worth testing is the ability of the various distros to install cleanly on Ryzen APU based machines. Right now on my mobile based machine ive yet to find a stabile distro that installs and runs. Linux in a VM is fine but most native installs seem to crash.

Now part of this is needing the latest Kernels but you also need binaries and other package updates. Obviously this is all about being on the bleedding edge but i suspect many readers will want to know when the hardware is cleanly supported.

These APUs are really impressive. I can see myself building at least a couple of desktop based machines. It is really nice to see AMD offering better than Intel solutions.

[duby229]

There was ordering on Amazon even month ago... and some got it early already

OK, that guy is super annoying. Wishy washy as all hell.

[szymon_g]

will upcoming Openuse 15 support it? i.e. will I get everything working out-of-the-box without need to recompile kernel and install other stuff (from outside the repo)?
feature wise, how far is Linux (on the free and on closed drivers) compared to Windows- in terms of performance and features supported by the drivers?

[Michael]

will upcoming Openuse 15 support it? i.e. will I get everything working out-of-the-box without need to recompile kernel and install other stuff (from outside the repo)?
feature wise, how far is Linux (on the free and on closed drivers) compared to Windows- in terms of performance and features supported by the drivers?

I think openSUSE 15 final will be shipping 4.14 LTS... So unless SUSE ends up backporting AMDGPU DC to 4.14, no, you would need to upgrade at least your kernel.

[starshipeleven]

Same, I was also thinking a NAS, I think all of Ryzen is supposed to support ECC but it's left up to the motherboard maker whether to implement ECC or not

Most Asrock motherboards support ECC with Ryzen already, and all AMD Ryzen mobos from any manufacturer have received a BIOS update to support newer processors.

[duby229]

will upcoming Openuse 15 support it? i.e. will I get everything working out-of-the-box without need to recompile kernel and install other stuff (from outside the repo)?
feature wise, how far is Linux (on the free and on closed drivers) compared to Windows- in terms of performance and features supported by the drivers?

On the open source side of things there's the kernel driver (amdgpu), the xorg DDX driver (modesetting), the mesa OpenGL driver (radeonsi), the mesa Vulkan driver (radv), and the AMD Vulkan driver (amdvlk), the OpenCL driver (ROCm)

The kernel driver amdgpu is basically feature complete. The xorg DDX driver is so much better than any other display driver AMD has ever made. The OpenGL driver radeonsi is outperforming AMD's proprietary OpenGL driver by as much as 20- 50 percent and that while achieving much lower CPU usage, it's -the- best OpenGL driver AMD has ever had. The mesa Vulkan driver radv is so good it's already nearly feature complete but it still needs some performance tuning to get it on par with radeonsi. Even still it's outperforming AMD's other Vulkan driver amdvlk, which itself is a harder story to tell. I'm biased against it so you may not want to hear my rant about that driver. And then there is ROCm, which I think has some serious low level fundamental human resources problems. (What I mean by that is, they basically throw code over the wall and call it open source, but it has no repository management at all, git is worthless to it, and it is not really possible to make a community around it.)

[artivision]

Strong 12nm APUs like those Intel Kabylake-G uses, could save the situation versus miners. So i propose to AMD to save 12nm only for strong APUs.

[gukin]

It's a bummer AMD didn't send you a kit, Michael, there seems to be a lot of excitement behind this new processor. When there are several sites doing a "Watch us unbox our new Raven Ridge processor". I know I've been waiting for something like it since I bought my Kaveri 7850K and I hope it doesn't disappoint.

I also believe that there is going to be some shortages initially. I started shopping for cases and motherboards for my build and lo and behold many have sold out, at least at Newegg. It's also too bad that there are no LTS kernels with AMDGPU DC support but then again, it's pretty early in the game for Raven Ridge.

I'm looking forward to your reviews Michael.

[OneBitUser]

Most Asrock motherboards support ECC with Ryzen already, and all AMD Ryzen mobos from any manufacturer have received a BIOS update to support newer processors.

What. The actual. Hell.
My AsRock mobo does indeed support ECC... I don't recall if it had support when it was launched, but still, it is surprising and nice to have a workstation feature like that on an inexpensive board like the AB350M Pro4.

A few years down the line this might provide a cheap upgrade path for people that want a 64GB RAM machine for a hobby or work, seeing as ECC DIMMs usually sell for "pennies" on ebay.