Intel Reveals Few More Details Regarding 11th Gen "Rocket Lake" Processors

[Guest]

"Please please please don't pay any attention to the new chips coming from one of out competitors* next month which leaks** indicate stomp a mudhole in our best offerings*** for far less money**** pretty please. Wait until another six months for our new chips*****. They'll be better, we promise******. Pinky swear."

* Of course this is AMD, but Intel will probably desperately avoid naming them.
** That at least appear semi-credible.
*** Well, actually, we've been mostly losing in the server space since Epyc arrived, and only AVX-512 has really allowed us to maintain any hope of competition here.
**** Bulk discounts, chip rebrands from Platinum to Gold, etc. don't count.
***** But not a new process - in fact an old one! 14 is twice as good as 7, dontchaknow?
****** Terms and conditions apply.

The above is satire.

I'm seriously considering Cometlake/Rocketlake, because I know that they have great Linux support and shit will just work.

Whereas with AMD and the AM4 motherboards, I don't know what works and what doesn't. Driver support and reliability is a huge unknown.

Plenty of AMD fanboys claim "Everything is just fine" and then when you press them, they say "Yeha I can't see temperature and power stats but who needs that? Yeah sound doesn't work properly but who needs that? Yeah you need to use out of tree drivers for some Realtek hardware but that's not an issue. Yeah, USB doesn't work properly but who needs that? Yeah, suspend and hibernate doesn't work properly due to motherboard issues but who needs that? Yeah, RdRand is still broken but who needs that? (because motherboard vendor still didn't issue the update) (also proceeds to claim it's a systemd bug) Yeah you can't disable or configure SecureBoot but who needs that?"

[Jumbotron]

"Please please please don't pay any attention to the new chips coming from one of out competitors* next month which leaks** indicate stomp a mudhole in our best offerings*** for far less money**** pretty please. Wait until another six months for our new chips*****. They'll be better, we promise******. Pinky swear."

* Of course this is AMD, but Intel will probably desperately avoid naming them.
** That at least appear semi-credible.
*** Well, actually, we've been mostly losing in the server space since Epyc arrived, and only AVX-512 has really allowed us to maintain any hope of competition here.
**** Bulk discounts, chip rebrands from Platinum to Gold, etc. don't count.
***** But not a new process - in fact an old one! 14 is twice as good as 7, dontchaknow?
****** Terms and conditions apply.

The above is satire.

You know what makes good satire.....it contains a lot of truth. This is good satire. I particularly enjoyed ****** Terms and conditions apply. LOL!

[Jumbotron]

I'm seriously considering Cometlake/Rocketlake, because I know that they have great Linux support and shit will just work.

Whereas with AMD and the AM4 motherboards, I don't know what works and what doesn't. Driver support and reliability is a huge unknown.

Plenty of AMD fanboys claim "Everything is just fine" and then when you press them, they say "Yeha I can't see temperature and power stats but who needs that? Yeah sound doesn't work properly but who needs that? Yeah you need to use out of tree drivers for some Realtek hardware but that's not an issue. Yeah, USB doesn't work properly but who needs that? Yeah, suspend and hibernate doesn't work properly due to motherboard issues but who needs that? Yeah, RdRand is still broken but who needs that? (because motherboard vendor still didn't issue the update) (also proceeds to claim it's a systemd bug) Yeah you can't disable or configure SecureBoot but who needs that?"

** cough, cough ** meltdown/heartbleed/spectre ** cough, cough**

[Paradigm Shifter]

Plenty of AMD fanboys claim "Everything is just fine" and then when you press them, they say "Yeha I can't see temperature and power stats but who needs that? Yeah sound doesn't work properly but who needs that? Yeah you need to use out of tree drivers for some Realtek hardware but that's not an issue. Yeah, USB doesn't work properly but who needs that? Yeah, suspend and hibernate doesn't work properly due to motherboard issues but who needs that? Yeah, RdRand is still broken but who needs that? (because motherboard vendor still didn't issue the update) (also proceeds to claim it's a systemd bug) Yeah you can't disable or configure SecureBoot but who needs that?"

I'll agree with the temperature monitoring taking so long to be integrated into the kernel.

I've never had an issue with sound on an Asrock X370, MSI B450, or Asus X470 or Gigabyte X399. Looking online it seems this was an issue with specific Realtek audio chipsets?

You can't really blame AMD for problems with Realtek hardware - I had an X58 board which had dual Realtek NICs, both of which were a PITA, and another X58 board with one of the "Killer" gaming NICs (which flat out never worked in Linux until long after I abandoned that motherboard).

Only time I've had USB not work properly is when I plugged a USB HDD into a front-case port and it pulled too much power. Drive worked... but would randomly disconnect and reconnect.

I've got Intel systems (laptops, admittedly) where suspend and hibernate don't work correctly in Linux (but are OK in Windows), so again it's not an AMD exclusive issue.

I'll agree with rdrand as well, although I would equally apportion blame between AMD (for having it broken in the first place) and motherboard manufacturers (for being too lazy to issue updates).

I've not had issues disabling or configuring SecureBoot except on the MSI X399 board where it was fixed with a BIOS update.

In my opinion, the one insanely annoying, total fail that AMD have on Linux is one you haven't mentioned: drivers and support for their motherboard (SATA) RAID implementation. It sucks. It may have improved, but when I was trying to get it working (about a year ago) Linux drivers had been removed from the AMD website apparently due to an argument with the 3rd party developer, you had to "get lucky" finding them on a file sharing site via a forum, they were an absolute mission to get to install, required all sorts of fun and games every time there was a kernel update and generally were about as usable and useful as a wet fart in a hurricane. I'm not going to put myself through the torture of trying it out again to see if they've made any progress in the last year, so for me, AMD and RAID on Linux will forever now be followed by "need dedicated RAID card or go Intel". As I needed the PCI-E slots stuffed full of GPUs, for that box I went Intel. And that opened up a whole new can of worms.

...

Y'see, I'd consider Rocket Lake for AVX-512. That's about it. Some of the software I use has recently added an AVX-512 codepath (the other option being CUDA) and I would really, really like to lessen my dependence on nVidia. But I'm not going to sink $$$$$ into an AVX-512 dual-socket workstation without doing some serious testing first; and that for me means physical hands-on time, not messing about with short-term remote access for testing purposes; thus, a lower powered desktop, something I can do some real work on, but won't break the bank.

[Guest]

I'll agree with the temperature monitoring taking so long to be integrated into the kernel.

I've never had an issue with sound on an Asrock X370, MSI B450, or Asus X470 or Gigabyte X399. Looking online it seems this was an issue with specific Realtek audio chipsets?

You can't really blame AMD for problems with Realtek hardware - I had an X58 board which had dual Realtek NICs, both of which were a PITA, and another X58 board with one of the "Killer" gaming NICs (which flat out never worked in Linux until long after I abandoned that motherboard).

Only time I've had USB not work properly is when I plugged a USB HDD into a front-case port and it pulled too much power. Drive worked... but would randomly disconnect and reconnect.

I've got Intel systems (laptops, admittedly) where suspend and hibernate don't work correctly in Linux (but are OK in Windows), so again it's not an AMD exclusive issue.

I'll agree with rdrand as well, although I would equally apportion blame between AMD (for having it broken in the first place) and motherboard manufacturers (for being too lazy to issue updates).

I've not had issues disabling or configuring SecureBoot except on the MSI X399 board where it was fixed with a BIOS update.

In my opinion, the one insanely annoying, total fail that AMD have on Linux is one you haven't mentioned: drivers and support for their motherboard (SATA) RAID implementation. It sucks. It may have improved, but when I was trying to get it working (about a year ago) Linux drivers had been removed from the AMD website apparently due to an argument with the 3rd party developer, you had to "get lucky" finding them on a file sharing site via a forum, they were an absolute mission to get to install, required all sorts of fun and games every time there was a kernel update and generally were about as usable and useful as a wet fart in a hurricane. I'm not going to put myself through the torture of trying it out again to see if they've made any progress in the last year, so for me, AMD and RAID on Linux will forever now be followed by "need dedicated RAID card or go Intel". As I needed the PCI-E slots stuffed full of GPUs, for that box I went Intel. And that opened up a whole new can of worms.

...

Y'see, I'd consider Rocket Lake for AVX-512. That's about it. Some of the software I use has recently added an AVX-512 codepath (the other option being CUDA) and I would really, really like to lessen my dependence on nVidia. But I'm not going to sink $$$$$ into an AVX-512 dual-socket workstation without doing some serious testing first; and that for me means physical hands-on time, not messing about with short-term remote access for testing purposes; thus, a lower powered desktop, something I can do some real work on, but won't break the bank.

I wasn't blaming AMD for Realtek driver issues, just pointing out that there are important practical problems with using non-Intel systems. It's easy to say "everything is working fine" when in fact, many things are not.

In terms of why non-Intel USB could be a problem, my own motherboard has Intel USB 3.0 ports and two Asmedia USB 3.1 ports. The Asmedia USB drivers had USB auto-suspend bugs, so they would fail sometimes. I'd plugged in stuff there which kept failing and thought it was the device. Then I looked at dmesg and figured out it was the Asmedia USB ports that caused the problem. The Intel USB ports worked perfectly fine with zero driver problems.

The gap in driver quality for Intel vs non-Intel is big, and affects many things that people use in their everyday life. Claiming that such systems just work fine, is dishonest.
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