Raven Ridge, Vulkan & Another Valve Linux Developer Excited Folks This Month
February 2018 continued with more Spectre and Meltdown testing, AMD Raven Ridge on the desktop launched this month but unfortunately the Linux support is still a bit rough with all the hardware I've touched so far, and there continues to be plenty of Linux distribution excitement. Looking forward to March, there's a lot more benchmarks on the way and some exciting and potentially game-changing news to announce in the next few days... But for now, a look back at the most popular content on Phoronix this month written by your's truly. As always, if you enjoy our daily original content, please do not view this site with any ad-blocker or please join Phoronix Premium to get ad-free access, multi-page articles on a single page, and other benefits. Or some have also given via PayPal in seeking forgiveness for their ad-blocking sins. Below is a look at the ten most popular news articles and featured reviews for February 2018.
Valve Has Hired Another Open-Source Linux GPU Driver Developer
Valve has onboarded another open-source Linux graphics driver developer.
The Community Has Brought The Unity 8 Desktop To Ubuntu 18.04
Besides bringing Ubuntu Touch to new mobile devices, the UBports team has also managed to continue their community-driven work on advancing the Unity 8 convergence desktop after Canonical abandoned work on it last year. They now have Unity 8 working on top of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
VLC 3.0 Released
As expected, the VLC 3.0 media player is now available!
GNOME Shell vs. KDE Plasma Graphics Tests On Wayland vs. X.Org Server
A premium member this week had requested some benchmarks of openSUSE Tumbleweed when looking at the performance of KDE Plasma vs. GNOME Shell in some open-source graphics/gaming tests while also looking at the Wayland vs. X.Org Server performance.
GNOME 3.28 Beta Released With Many Improvements
Following a slight delay, the beta release of GNOME 3.28 is now available ahead of next month's official release.
Core i9 7980XE vs. Threadripper 1950X On Linux 4.15 With Ubuntu 18.04
With more than one hundred different benchmarks, here are some fresh tests of the Core i9 7980XE and Ryzen Threadripper 1950X boxes when running on the Linux 4.15.2 stable kernel atop a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
Intel Open-Sources LLVM Graphics Compiler, Compute Runtime With OpenCL 2.1+
Now it's clear why Intel hasn't been working on the Beignet code-base in months as they have been quietly working on a new and better OpenCL stack and run-time! On open-source Intel OpenCL you can now have OpenCL 2.1 while OpenCL 2.2 support is on the way.
Wine-Staging Will No Longer Be Putting Out New Releases
Wine-Staging as many of you have known it for the past four years is unfortunately no more. We'll see if other reliable folks step up to maintain this experimental version of Wine but the original developers have sadly stepped away.
AMD May Have Accidentally Outed Vulkan 1.1
AMD on Wednesday released the Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Edition 18.Q1 for Linux driver. It really isn't noticeable for its official changes, but does claim to advertise Vulkan 1.1 support.
Wine "PBA" Shows Potential For Improving Direct3D-Over-OpenGL Performance
University student Andrew Comminos wasn't too familiar with Direct3D or Wine development, but out of a desire for better World of Warcraft performance on Linux, he figured out the code-base and a means of enhancing the WineD3D code.
And the featured articles:
Ryzen 5 2400G Radeon Vega Linux OpenGL/Vulkan Gaming Benchmarks
Here are our initial performance figures for the Vega graphics found on the newly-released Ryzen 5 2400G "Raven Ridge" APU under Linux and testing both OpenGL and Vulkan graphics benchmarks. CPU tests as well as benchmarks of the Ryzen 3 2200G under Linux are forthcoming on Phoronix.
Windows 10 WSL vs. Linux Performance For Early 2018
Back in December was our most recent round of Windows Subsystem for Linux benchmarking with Windows 10 while since then both Linux and Windows have received new stable updates, most notably for mitigating the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities. For your viewing pleasure today are some fresh benchmarks looking at the Windows 10 WSL performance against Linux using the latest updates as of this week while also running some comparison tests too against Docker on Windows and Oracle VM VirtualBox.
Intel Atom C3950 + Tyan Tempest S3227
The past few weeks I've had the pleasure of testing the Tyan Tempest S32272NR-C950 motherboard with Atom C3950 "Denverton" processor. Yes, it's been a real pleasure as it's been a few years since last touching an Atom system and this current combination allows for a mighty competent configuration with the C3950 server processor featuring 16 physical cores (no HT) running at a 1.7GHz base frequency and 2.2GHz turbo frequency all while having a 24 Watt TDP.
The Cost Of Home Directory Encryption & LUKS Full Disk Encryption On Ubuntu 18.04
With many of you likely upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS upon release and the recommendation to use disk encryption as important as ever on any important system especially laptops/ultrabooks, here are some fresh benchmarks using a development snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" and looking at the current performance overhead of using the current "home directory encryption" and "full disk encryption" options available to Ubuntu Linux users.
Mesa 12.0 To Mesa 18.0 Benchmarks Show The OpenGL/Vulkan Radeon Evolution
Last week I provided some benchmarks showing how the RADV and RadeonSI performance changed with Mesa 18.0 while in this comparison is a look at how the Mesa 18.0 performance has evolved since Mesa 12.0 for Radeon open-source Linux graphics driver performance.
Radeon Linux OpenGL Driver Continues Giving Its Best Against Windows 10
With having around a Windows 10 installation this week for the latest Windows 10 WSL vs. Linux benchmarking, I also carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Radeon gaming performance between Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux using the very latest drivers on each platform. This time around a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 were used for this benchmarking.
AMD Ryzen 3 2200G + Ryzen 5 2400G Linux CPU Performance, 21-Way Intel/AMD Comparison
Yesterday I posted some initial Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 5 2400G Raven Ridge APU when looking at the Vega 11 graphics, but for those curious about the CPU performance potential of the Ryzen 5 2400G and its ~$100 Ryzen 3 2200G sibling, here are our first CPU benchmarks of these long-awaited AMD APUs. These two current Raven Ridge desktop APUs are compared to a total of 21 different Intel and AMD processors dating back to older Kaveri APUs and FX CPUs and Ivy Bridge on the Intel side.
AMD Raven Ridge Graphics On Linux vs. Lower-End NVIDIA / AMD GPUs
This week we have delivered the first Linux benchmarks of the OpenGL/Vulkan graphics capabilities of AMD's new Raven Ridge desktop APUs with the Vega 8 on the Ryzen 3 2200G an the Vega 11 on Ryzen 5 2400G. Those tests have included comparisons to the integrated graphics capabilities of Intel processors as well as older AMD Kaveri APUs. For those interested in seeing how the Raven Ridge Vega graphics compare to lower-end Radeon and GeForce discrete graphics cards, here are those first Linux benchmarks.
36-Way Comparison Of Amazon EC2 / Google Compute Engine / Microsoft Azure Cloud Instances vs. Intel/AMD CPUs
Earlier this week I delivered a number of benchmarks comparing Amazon EC2 instances to bare metal Intel/AMD systems. Due to interest from that, here is a larger selection of cloud instance types from the leading public clouds of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine.
AMD Vega 8 Graphics Performance On Linux With The Ryzen 3 2200G
Yesterday I posted the initial Ryzen 5 2400G Vega 11 Linux graphics benchmarks while for your viewing please today -- as well as this morning's 21-way Intel/AMD CPU Linux comparison that featured these new Raven Ridge APUs -- the results now completed are initial OpenGL and Vulkan performance figures for the Vega 8 graphics found on the Ryzen 3 2200G.
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