Linux Takes Another Shot At Fixing Visual Glitches & GPU Hangs For Intel Sandy Bridge

[skeevy420]

I think you're mistaking something being good enough for your needs with saying there was no progress in the meantime. Did you feel your computer was too slow back then? Or you just noticed it could have been faster. Two very different things. When somebody finds their needs are met then their needs are met. It doesn't mean it couldn't be better, but better means discarding hardware, spending money, migrating, or whatever reason why someone may prefer sticking to what works for them.

In my case my needs were met, my system went out, I tried repairing it twice, and, fortunately, I got a $600 stimulus check for COVID that I put towards building my current PC. It wasn't until I upgraded that I saw what I was missing out on.

The irony here is that I'm currently getting over COVID, dealing with long COVID, and could now use the stimulus money they sent me a couple years ago when I wasn't sick during the pandemic and was able to make ends meet. It sucks walking across the house and feeling like I've been working out. My congestion is just awful.

To comment on your sister -- she could probably buy something used from 2016-2020 for $50-$100 that'll last the next decade or so. That's what I did for my mom. Spent $200 on monitor ($75) and a Skylake desktop ($125). AVX, doesn't suck power, SSD, and more than adequate for her needs of paying bills and shopping on Amazon. Only thing it doesn't have is TPM2 for Win11. MS announced that maybe a month or so after we bought that so I didn't know it was something I needed to look for.

[andyprough]

Intel Sandy Bridge processors launched 12 years ago this month and if you still are relying on these 32nm CPUs, it's really time to consider an upgrade for not only the performance but also security and power efficiency reasons.

This is my favorite site for promoting security theater. In this case, once again, there are zero known exploits of any Sandy Bridge hardware simply for being Sandy Bridge hardware.

And, if some nation-state black hat spy has direct physical access to your powered-on and logged-in system, you're probably fscked no matter which chippery you chose to run it with.

[stormcrow]

Seems my post was not well written - what I ment is I am a bit tired of michael recommending hw upgrades every post which is dedicated to some old hardware - because most users doing so have a good reason (either it still fits their need, or they can not upgrade for another good reason.)
I also agree, as a linux user I am accustomed to receiving driver updates long after the manufacturer has abandoned the product which is actually a great thing. I run a ivy bridge media station myself and don't see any need to upgrade it.

And there's really no huge power efficiency gains to be had between say Sandy or Ivy Bridge and say Zen 2, probably even less so between that and Intel Gen 12 once you take everything into consideration, not just the emotional issues related to conservation especially if your system is idle or near idle most of the time like many users are.

The only time I point out people shouldn't be using old hardware is the case where really old hardware lacked the ability to save energy when idle. They never powered down. But Sand Bridge and later all have that capability and they're all idling within a few Watts of each other. The energy and time savings for a single person may not make financial sense. That is, buying a capable enough new system may outweigh the cost of electricity saved. The real question is more one of saving time. If you save neither time nor electricity, there's definitely no compelling reason to upgrade beyond hardware failures.

It's possible to make the case that moving from a Sandy Bridge to an M class system would be desirable both with power and time efficiency, but only if you're willing to move to MacOS and that's because M1, M2 etc idle and perform at far less Wattage than Intel/AMD (edit to add: but even then they may not save you a lot of time. If your work doesn't entail a lot of automation. For example, for a ham radio workstation, there's no real difference in time efficiency using Sandy Bridge versus Zen versus M1 because either you're logging a contact or controlling a station, neither of which would have time benefit savings nor even if you're into digimode operations. At least you'd be doing it with less electricity on the M class system, but that wouldn't be the case between Sandy Bridge and Zen 2).

[cjcox]

Remembering back when we didn't have to run latest and greatest for Linux to work. Good times.

[stormcrow]

Remembering back when we didn't have to run latest and greatest for Linux to work. Good times.

Um... Sandy Bridge is over 10 years old and its iGPU has never really worked right. So I'm not sure what you're referring to. I've got plenty of older systems (other than Sandy Bridge) that work just fine. Just that Intel iGPUs have historically been awful with bad drivers, and incomplete hardware support for widely used functions. They weren't even great for Windows even in the o(O)ffice use case.

[brucethemoose]

While Sandy Bridge is still a good general purpose CPU, and there is frequently no reason to upgrade, I think many users should consider what they may "invisibly" miss running old hardware.

For instance, if YouTube is a common workload, you wont get the benefits of a newer system with a VP9 or AV1 decode block, and the quality difference would never be apparent until you switch systems. Other examples I can think of are compositor/browser rendering features that are silently disabled on old GPUs, sites that render a different way on certain hardware, features in media software tied to AVX2 and/or GPU acceleration (which are getting more common now that generative AI is starting to proliferate) and so on.



I dont buy the power consumption rationale though. Zen2+ idles hotter than sandy bridge, and while modern Intel doesn't have that MCM issue yet, they clock much more aggressively doing pretty much anything.

[middy]

While Sandy Bridge is still a good general purpose CPU, and there is frequently no reason to upgrade, I think many users should consider what they may "invisibly" miss running old hardware.

For instance, if YouTube is a common workload, you wont get the benefits of a newer system with a VP9 or AV1 decode block, and the quality difference would never be apparent until you switch systems. Other examples I can think of are compositor/browser rendering features that are silently disabled on old GPUs, sites that render a different way on certain hardware, features in media software tied to AVX2 and/or GPU acceleration (which are getting more common now that generative AI is starting to proliferate) and so on.



I dont buy the power consumption rationale though. Zen2+ idles hotter than sandy bridge, and while modern Intel doesn't have that MCM issue yet, they clock much more aggressively doing pretty much anything.

k10temp-pci-00c3
Adapter: PCI adapter
Tctl: +28.4°C
Tccd1: +28.8°C
Tccd2: +27.8°C

this is my 5900x idling with just firefox, steam running in the background, and a terminal window open. cooled with a simple $30 cooler master 212. how is 20c range hot? i understand zen4 runs hot due to its heatspreader but no issues cooling a zen3 5900x at least for me.

I went from 8c16t Westmere (48GB DDR3 1333) to 6c12t Zen 2 (32GB DDR4 3600) and it was a night and day difference. I used to say the same things you said and then I woke up to a dead PC that forced me to upgrade and realized the difference between what I thought was good enough and newer hardware.

I need a new power supply and more ram now since the PS5 and its NVMe is really upping the ram requirements for games. Instead of implementing DirectStorage and whatnot they're doing what I did before I had an SSD when I had 48GB of ram -- copy the game to ram and run it from there.

Michael isn't wrong in suggesting that. The cheapest modern Intel or AMD processors will run circles around anything from that era.

Personally, I'd upgrade to Zen 2 or Zen 3 if I was trying to save a buck. It's a bit more mature and better supported as well as AM4 & DDR4 prices are coming down. I say that because I can get 2K to 4K 60FPS High/Ultra with a 4650G paired with a 6700 XT. Things are getting so powerful that you don't have to look at the best hardware for great gaming performance.

It's funny, with FSR I can't tell the difference between 2K and 4K in a lot of games outside of GPU fan noise.

that's funny because that's why i "upgraded" from dual rank (2x DR) 16gb 32gb of 3200mhz to dual rank (4x DR 16gb for quad rank) 64gb 3200mhz. just to mess storing stuff in tmpfs. with systemD defaulting /tmp to tmpfs its super easy to store stuff in memory. i have AUR build from there, hell even set my download's folder to /tmp as well. anything i want to keep long term i just move out. i've tried a few games and its pretty amazing how quickly stuff loads lol. and decompressing archives is A LOT faster too. both my hynix p41 2tb nvme (gen4) and p31 2tb (gen3) are pretty fast but nothing compares to the raw performance of system memory yet.

[brucethemoose]

this is my 5900x idling with a cooler master 212. how is 20c range hot?

https://hattedsquirrel.net/2020/12/p...0-series-cpus/

https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/9651/amd-ryzen-9-5900x-zen-3-cpu/index.html#Power-Thermals-and-Final-Thoughts

9651_46_amd-ryzen-9-5900x-zen-3-cpu-review.png

Maybe its staying cool, but I would be surprised if its drawing fewer watts than an older Intel system.

My understanding is this is a fundamental limitation of the multi chip design (hence laptop Ryzen is monolithic).

[NateHubbard]

12 years ago was just 2010.

I know it's only January, but you might want to check that calendar.

[Mark Rose]

I'm still using an Ivy Bridge laptop. It'll turn 10 years old in a few months. I haven't needed to upgrade it.