Well Known Linux Kernel Developer Recommends Against Buying Skylake Systems

[Delgarde]

I don't know why it wouldn't be as easy as ordering one online but yes, it's certainly not cheap.

Ordering online and delivery works great if you're in the US or thereabouts. But shipping internationally isn't always offered - especially by smaller companies - and the cost of safely delivering expensive (and heavy) workstations across the world is likely to exceed the purchase cost.

[willmore]

Michael, careful quoting a very biased source with an axe to grind.

[c117152]

Michael, careful quoting a very biased source with an axe to grind.

Tell that to the Bay Trail users. From BayFail, to SkyFall, Intel been consistently neglecting their linux mobile* SoCs.

Two years ago Intel would have received the benefit of the doubt, but now? If a kernel dev, regardless of his "axe", says they're neglecting their new mobile SoC, there's no reason to give Intel the benefit of the doubt.

*At the top of the article, it says: "this issue is restricted to the mobile SKUs. Desktop parts have very different power management behaviour".

[jacob]

Ordering online and delivery works great if you're in the US or thereabouts. But shipping internationally isn't always offered - especially by smaller companies - and the cost of safely delivering expensive (and heavy) workstations across the world is likely to exceed the purchase cost.

I believe you can order just the chip and motherboard. Shipping that shouldn't be difficult or expensive. It's ATX compatible so you can get all the rest from your local computer parts shop. You still end up with a $3000+ PC, but it's as open as it gets. Plus, it has 12 cores with 8 threads per core.

[linuxforall]

Anyone here using Arch? Can they tell me whats their average frequency at idle with their Skylake CPUs. The reason I ask is the 300MHz tick keeps the Haswell refresh idle freq high at near turbo with occasional 2.4GHz drop, its a bug with that tick setting so am just wondering if Intel has managed to fix it.

[Guest]

I just disable P-State and everything works well. I've always observed abnormal/wrong behaviour from P-State, both on Core i5-6600k as well as Core i7-4700MQ, where the processor is run at the maximum turbo frequency, overheats and then thermal protection kicks in and it runs at ridiculously low frequency (apparently 130 MHz for the 4700MQ, not sure if the reported reading was correct)

[dibal]

Intel's own documentation suggests all low-power idle states be enabled for long-term reliability

Does this mean that this CPUs have a shorter life if there are not being idle most of the time

[milkylainen]

This is just the thing I have been lamenting. Modern Intel and Linux have become a mess of powermanagement etc. It is just a tossup if the machine is going to work properly with CPU scaling, powermanagement etc. My Broadwell was borked to shit with regard to suspend/resume and Intel GFX. My Skylake is still broken with regard to suspend/resume sometimes but with power management beeing somewhat off with regard to fan control and cpu scaling (but still functional). Both are Dell machines. The Intel GFX was disabled and I am now running a Nvidia with proprietary drivers. It is still the only GFX driver that gives me a halv-decent user experience.

[Krejzi]

I'm not sure how to interpret these. Can the blog author verify if this laptop is affected?

[Ardje]

I'm not sure how to interpret these. Can the blog author verify if this laptop is affected?

It looks your laptop is not being affected. But probably because your laptop is more desktop like than his.
There is a big range in what's put in a laptop, and if you have than can perform at least a little, it usually already has more hardware aking to a desktop.
Very low power intel cpus are slow.
Intels linux support varries with the target group. I've got some an intel cpu with the latest kernel being supported is 2.6.28, a CE5315.