AMD Wowed Linux Users In 2020 With Their Fantastic Zen 3 CPUs, Timely New Open-Source GPU Support

[oiaohm]

I am wowed by the paper launches.

I would like amd nics and would like amd to figure out how to catch up to intel sata controllers.

AMD if you are buying stuff straight from different places in china were not paper launches but low volume launches. A paper launch suggests no product at all. Low volume launch there was product just no where near enough to go around.

What's to catch up to? SATA is on the way out as a legacy bus interface. AMD is ahead of Intel on PCI-E implementations which NVME drives directly interface with. Both of them have some catching up to do with the bombshell Apple dropped in November. But between the two, Intel is the one that's going to be suffering more as they've been behind the curve on core system components for years.

I don't even have an SATA drive outside of the optical drive in my desktop - for legacy purposes. It's all NVME. The legacy SATA drives I have I put in USB drive docks as needed.

I want to ask the same thing but I use a lot of SATA HDD for archive drives so on way out I would not 100 percent say that. Tape has been on the way out for ages

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/computing/hardware/tape-is-back-and-better-than-ever

Yet it still going strong with tape.

There are always going to be sections of storage where cable length is going to be more important than speed sata 1m of wire without any booster or any fancy shielding does make doing 4U enclosures stuffed full of drives simpler. Lot of the archive usage faster than sata/SAS speeds is not required. So I see Sata/SAS staying around for some time. But this is not a reason for AMD to need to make SATA controllers so coming another vendor in large number of ports game.

My sata controllers are mostly Marvell. Tones of PCIe means I can connect tones of these. Its not like Intel sata controllers perform any better than Marvell ones. Its also not that AMD chipset include sata controller is horrible bad as well.

It would be nice to see more AMD nuc class boards with a marvell SAS/SATA controller intergrated for particular usages.

There is such thing as reinventing the wheel when there is really no need to-do so I really do think with SATA and AMD this would be the case. Marvell and other vendors make very decent and well support sata controllers that are highly competitive against Intel offerings.

[ThoreauHD]

While the hatdware has been great, it would be nice to know what the voltages are on their hardware. It's a small thing, I know, but generally helpful if you are concerned about power and heat.

[hubick]

Dear AMD, I'm typing this on a monitor attached to a Radeon Pro VII plugged into a Threadripper 3960X box running on Fedora 33. Great out of the box GPU support on Linux and a fantastic CPU architecture w PCIe 4.0 and a fast chipset link is why you got all my money. Keep it up.

[AdrianBc]

Dear AMD, I'm typing this on a monitor attached to a Radeon Pro VII plugged into a Threadripper 3960X box running on Fedora 33. Great out of the box GPU support on Linux and a fantastic CPU architecture w PCIe 4.0 and a fast chipset link is why you got all my money. Keep it up.

Where did you buy the Radeon Pro VII from?

[hubick]

Where did you buy the Radeon Pro VII from?

I bought it from B&H and they shipped it to Canada.

[EvilHowl]

Wow us more by finally adopting USB4 and making your own WiFi and Bluetooth chips. As it stands, you either need to buy pricey AMD notebooks that have Intel wireless or you get Realtek crap.

Why would AMD, which is not a networking company, make networking products?

[Schugy]

Wow us more by finally adopting USB4 and making your own WiFi and Bluetooth chips. As it stands, you either need to buy pricey AMD notebooks that have Intel wireless or you get Realtek crap.

My new 292€-Notebook is equipped with rtl8821CE - BT and WiFi works (245Mbit@5GHz). Not super fast but much better than the old rtl8723be. I hope rtw88 kernel module will work in Leap15.3. Almost forgot all the good news because of this Linux 5.11 Drops AMD Zen Voltage/Current Reporting Over Lack Of Documentation article.

[AdrianBc]

AMD if you are buying stuff straight from different places in china were not paper launches but low volume launches. A paper launch suggests no product at all. Low volume launch there was product just no where near enough to go around.



I want to ask the same thing but I use a lot of SATA HDD for archive drives so on way out I would not 100 percent say that. Tape has been on the way out for ages

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/computing/hardware/tape-is-back-and-better-than-ever

Yet it still going strong with tape.

There are always going to be sections of storage where cable length is going to be more important than speed sata 1m of wire without any booster or any fancy shielding does make doing 4U enclosures stuffed full of drives simpler. Lot of the archive usage faster than sata/SAS speeds is not required. So I see Sata/SAS staying around for some time. But this is not a reason for AMD to need to make SATA controllers so coming another vendor in large number of ports game.

My sata controllers are mostly Marvell. Tones of PCIe means I can connect tones of these. Its not like Intel sata controllers perform any better than Marvell ones. Its also not that AMD chipset include sata controller is horrible bad as well.

It would be nice to see more AMD nuc class boards with a marvell SAS/SATA controller intergrated for particular usages.

There is such thing as reinventing the wheel when there is really no need to-do so I really do think with SATA and AMD this would be the case. Marvell and other vendors make very decent and well support sata controllers that are highly competitive against Intel offerings.

Tape cannot enter its way out before any alternative for it will appear.

Right now, there are no commercially-available memory devices that can be used for long-term (more than a couple of years) archival storage, except magnetic tapes.


On the other hand magnetic disks can be replaced by SSD's in any applications, except for very large capacities, when only their lower price per TB can make them the preferable choice. Now such large capacities are needed only in servers, and there, as you said, external controllers are better anyway, so having more PCIe lanes is more valuable than good integrated SATA controllers.


So HDD's are indeed on their way out (for example I have not used HDD's in more than a decade), while tapes will continue to be used for an unpredictable but certainly long time (yes, I store all my archival and backup data on magnetic tapes, as SSD's are much worse than even HDD's for that purpose).

[AdrianBc]

I bought it from B&H and they shipped it to Canada.

Thanks.
Those are hard to find.

[AdrianBc]

I am wowed by the paper launches.

I would like amd nics and would like amd to figure out how to catch up to intel sata controllers.

After seeing how quickly the AMD products disappeared immediately after launch, I was inclined to believe, like you, that they were paper launches.

Nevertheless, now I am sure that at least the availability of AMD products is much better than that of the top Intel models (slow Intel CPUs are of course easily available everywhere).

I do not know about the new AMD GPUs, as I have not attempted to buy one, but I have just easily substituted an older AMD CPU with a Ryzen 9 5900X.

Seeing the empty stocks of a few weeks ago, I was expecting that I might upgrade to a Zen 3 some time in 2021.

However, on Christmas Eve, while searching for something unrelated, I noticed that there were plenty of Ryzen 9 5950X and Ryzen 9 5900X in stock in several local shops around me (in Europe), so, on impulse, I bought a 5900X from the shop with the lowest price.

After an easy upgrade, I am happy with my decision, because it is indeed as fast as claimed.

For example, it is significantly faster in single-thread than the Apple M1, whose launch was accompanied by ridiculous claims that it is much faster than any Intel/AMD CPU, including desktops, when in fact it was much faster only in comparison with the older Apple computers, which were much slower than competing products.

In multiple-thread, obviously, a low-power CPU, like Apple M1, is not even close to a desktop.

Before buying the new Zen 3, I was curious which will be the actual clock frequencies.

This of course may vary depending on your luck, but at least on my sample of Ryzen 9 5900X the frequencies are:

All 24 threads active for a long time (e.g. compilation with make -j24 of large software project or AVX-256 floating-point FMA on all threads): 4.4 GHz on all cores, compared to the 3.7 GHz nominal base frequency.

The same conditions, but during the initial time, before the cores heat until the steady-state temperature and the power consumption is lowered: 4.6 GHz on all cores.

Single-thread clock frequency depends on the core temperature, but it is normally between 4.95 GHz and 4.85 GHz, compared to the nominal 4.8 GHz value.

There are a few cores, at least 2, with the highest single-thread clock frequencies, while the slowest cores have frequencies between 4.75 GHz and 4.85 GHz.

So for the maximum speed of a single-thread program it is useful to pin the process to a fast core.

I do not know if there is any Linux scheduler that is clever enough to do such pinning automatically when a single thread is active. The default scheduler migrates the process randomly, so user intervention with taskset (e.g. included in a start-up script) is needed for pinning to one of the fastest cores.