AMD Zen 2 + Radeon RX 5700 Series For Linux Expectations

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD Zen 2 + Radeon RX 5700 Series For Linux Expectations

This weekend I was out the AMD E3 event learning more about their third-generation Ryzen processors as well as their equally exciting AMD Radeon RX 5700 series Navi hardware. Being at the event, one could reasonably deduce the Linux support will be great and it does appear to be that way building upon their improvements of earlier GPUs and Zen processors. It does appear to be that way while obviously we will begin testing soon of these new processors and graphics cards. At least for the Zen 2 processors, I am confident in their Linux support while on the Navi side we are awaiting Linux driver support but I am optimistic it will work out nicely. Now that the initial embargo has expired, here are more details on these new AMD products launching 7 July and my Linux information at this time.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=27968

[tildearrow]

GameCache...? I am wondering how do these processors achieve such massive caches at a low cost (as you may know these caches have to be insanely fast (e.g. SRAM) and hence are more expensive)...

Also, minor rambling: Can you stop being all about "gaming"? I want to work, compile, and sometimes leave my computer on overnight! Whenever I see "gaming" I always think "oh, this thing is not 100%-reliable and at some point it will fail when not used for something that is gaming (where people just sit in a computer and play a game for like a few hours then turn it off and do something else but sadly it is not what I do all the time (yes I do play games at times but not like aaaallllllll-the-time...))" That MEG "creation" Threadripper motherboard says it's for creators but if you actually break the acronym down, you see MSI Enthusiast Gaming so it is not a true workstation motherboard... so basically are you saying that a "creator" is different from a workstation user? Both do some sort of work, but you can't be giving the creator a less reliable thing.... some of them really demand the whole environment to be stable and therefore need a workstation machine... They are creators, they don't want this "creator" thing, so they need workstations, AKA real machines where the work can be done.

Radeon RX 5700 only competing with the RTX 2060? That's kinda sad unless the card is going to cost less. Does AMD have any plan for a pretty high-end model that can outperform my current FE (12TFLOPS or something like that)? Also, please tell me where are the raytracing or tensor cores. yeah I know raytracing is pretty much a fad but still would be good to see from AMD's side. Also, 4K90 encode seems really exciting but let's really really really hope that this new Radeon Media Engine is going to do 2 things I really crave: proper documentation (seriously, the Wikipedia entry for VCE 4.0 is so lacking it looks like AMD just bumped a number and nothing else) and 4:4:4 encoding (let me tell you. 4:4:4 is a zillion times superior for screen capture as every pixel is perfectly mapped to a luma and chroma sample unlike consumer-grade 4:2:0 which maps 4 luma samples to 1 chroma sample that is shared between the 4 pixels in a 2x2 grid. Yeah I know people don't mind much because the human brain is better at distinguishing from luminance variations than chroma ones but the thing is, that only works for pictures. This is screen capture, and in screen capture you usually see more sharp borders which means some text will look blurred or at lower saturation (especially on non-HiDPI) and this disturbs me. I remember a time back in 2015 when I was doing some screen recordings with this capture card and trust me, red/magenta text was baaarely readable to the point the 'm' was almost impossible to perceive, and when it captured OpenMPT at times the VU meter was monochrome! Yes, my capture card was this bad. Now with 4K I don't have that much of a problem with 4:2:0 but still would love to see 4:4:4 on AMD's side because NVIDIA has done so (and hey, on plain consumer hardware!) and my CPU isn't powerful enough to encode 4K@60fps in 4:4:4... it sorta works when you encode something like your desktop but then I open Xonotic and my CPU is overtaxed)) Oh! and I forgot about 1 more thing but I hope I vBulletin doesn't consume my edit in whole since I have edited this post like 3 times but I can't stop uttering words at the moment because my brain is so active: high-quality low-bitrate encoding. It has been proven lots'a times that AMD has the worst hardware encoder block when compared to Intel, NVIDIA and x264. While I don't worry that much about this one because I use the CQP mode anyway and I'm not streaming, it would still be cool to see.

Final Edit: size

[tildearrow]

Also typo the Ryyzen 5 3400G and Ryzen 3 3200G

[xorbe]

> Pricing on the Ryzen 9 3950X isn't yet available

$749 per the presentation

[pal666]

GameCache...? I am wondering how do these processors achieve such massive caches at a low cost

at low cost they have low amounts of cache

[pal666]

H.264 4K150/8K30 decode / 4K90 encode, and H264 4K60 decode / 4K90 encode.

presumably second 264 is 265

[DanL]

(inordinately small text)

"Bullshit! I can't hear you! Sound off like you got a pair!"

[chithanh]

When it comes to the Zen 2 Linux support, while I haven't yet begun testing these new processors or X570 motherboards (but will be in time for the 7 July launch), I am quite confident that it should be in good standing.

I hope that it will be at least better than Zen 1.
With Zen1 we had the segfault bug.
We still have the idle freeze bug in C6, which is unsolved as of now.
We had virtualization broken in various ways, and in some ways it is still (admittedly this is not a Linux-specific issue).
And AMD was unsuccessful preventing their OEM partners from shipping broken UEFI/BIOS.

So I hope for Zen 2 generation at least the following improvements are there:

• Someone at the OEM boots Linux and exercises the important functions before shipping hardware/firmware
• The idle freeze bug is addressed in some way
• PCIe ACS support for the X570 chipset

RDNA brings the new Radeon Display Engine that supports "DCC everywhere" for delta color compression in order to drive increasing resolution displays at higher refresh rates, such as 4K at 144Hz.

Also (finally) support for DisplayPort DSC, which is required for 4K@144 Hz without subsampling.

[tildearrow]

at low cost they have low amounts of cache

Exactly, but then please explain, how can a $500 processor have 70MB of cache (which would belong to a jewel-priced processor) as seen in the slide?

[tildearrow]

"Bullshit! I can't hear you! Sound off like you got a pair!"

Done. Most of it is unimportant which is why I put it in small letters.