Core i9 7900X vs. Threadripper 1950X On Ubuntu 17.10, Antergos, Clear Linux

[boxie]

Have you tried running an Intel CPU without AMD's 64-bit Linux contributions ? How's that working out for you ?

Also pretty sure that AMD is punching above its weight with regards to marketshare/revenue to OSS contribution ratio

[torsionbar28]

Also pretty sure that AMD is punching above its weight with regards to marketshare/revenue to OSS contribution ratio

^ for sure. Not to mention keeping intel honest when it comes to pricing. Without AMD, we'd be paying $1000 for a mediocre quad-core part from intel. Or if we want 64 bit, we'd be paying intel $7000 for an Itanium. Heck, the i9 being reviewed here wouldn't even exist. i9 came to market purely as a response to Threadripper.

[chithanh]

tiwake
It seems that Michael is not willing to do benchmarks on Gentoo.
About -march=native, that is not the whole story when it comes to performance. Gentoo's USE flags allow you to leave out all the cruft you don't need and which would otherwise clog your system.

franglais125
Likely the threshold won't change until there is considerable perfomance gain. In the meantime, the distro's focus appears to be on GCC function multi-versioning to achieve some of the benefits of more recent CPU instructions without giving up compatibility with older CPUs.

[DanL]

It would be nice if AMD at any point in the history of the company had made a contribution to open source that extended past getting its own hardware to run.

Dude, your 400+ posts boil down to, "I'm an Intel fanboy." How about you contribute something other than that to Phoronix?

[leipero]

chithanh In that case he doesn't really need to waste time on Gentoo, he can compile his custom kernel and other system critical things with those flags on any distribution, it would still take more time, but far less than doing Gentoo. That comes from the person who never even tried Gentoo, so my understanding of that OS is that everything needs to be compiled, correct me of I'm wrong.

[geearf]

Clear Linux runs on Atom as well, baseline is "Westmere" (2010 CPU, pre-AVX)

Do you guys have an idea of which packages matter the most in terms of compilation optimizations?
Maybe it's the whole OS, but I'm wondering if one could not recompile certain key packages to get about the same performance gain without having to go all source like gentoo.

[AndyChow]

DAMN these chips are getting big!!! I bet one day they will be the size of a Rubik's cube, since they are all becoming multi-silicon packages interposed and stacked.

[chithanh]

he can compile his custom kernel and other system critical things with those flags on any distribution, it would still take more time, but far less than doing Gentoo.

If you want to run the Linux kernel with CPU-specific optimizations, you need additional patches (cf. https://github.com/graysky2/kernel_gcc_patch, integrated into the Gentoo kernel package already - dunno about Clear Linux, maybe arjan_intel can comment).

While performance can be among the reasons why people run Gentoo, it is typically not the main reason. It is rather having more choice than a binary distro can give you, and having compiler optimized packages for your CPU is a free benefit from that.

Do you guys have an idea of which packages matter the most in terms of compilation optimizations?
Maybe it's the whole OS, but I'm wondering if one could not recompile certain key packages to get about the same performance gain without having to go all source like gentoo.

This is probably not what you want to hear, but: It squarely depends on your use case.

To answer the question which packages matter most, you need to analyze and profile the things which are performance critical to you. For example, if you do lots of media encoding, then ffmpeg would be a good candidate. Or imagemagick/graphicsmagick if you process a lot of pictures. Here is a report from a G'MIC user who saw huge performance gain from recompiling this particular application with optimized compiler flags.

Or if your code spends lots of time in libc (calling math functions) or in kernel space then look at optimizing those.

[geearf]

This is probably not what you want to hear, but: It squarely depends on your use case.

Well since I'm not hearing it, but reading it, it's fine

To answer the question which packages matter most, you need to analyze and profile the things which are performance critical to you. For example, if you do lots of media encoding, then ffmpeg would be a good candidate. Or imagemagick/graphicsmagick if you process a lot of pictures. Here is a report from a G'MIC user who saw huge performance gain from recompiling this particular application with optimized compiler flags.

Or if your code spends lots of time in libc (calling math functions) or in kernel space then look at optimizing those.

I do usually recompile ffmpeg, but to add support for fdk_aac; you make me wonder if I should change my flags for it.
I tried once with o3 but got many issues with the reencoded stuff and never tried again.

But yeah globally you make a good point.
I was more thinking of whatever app you use + whatever core stuff needs it. Like I don't think the kernel would change a lot based on grayski's benchmarks, but maybe glibc as you mentioned or something else...

[Azrael5]

Actually the test show that clearlinux is the best linux operating system.