AMD Ryzen

[folderol]

Has anyone been able to get hold of one of these yet? If so how well does it appear to perform?

I understand you need Linux kernel 4.10, and I'm wondering if there are suitable drivers for the recent motherboard chipsets as I think it's a new socket type too.

If a few things come together this Autumn and feed the 'toys' budget I'd quite like to get one. My current DAW is getting quite long in the tooth now.

[asbak]

Haven't got one but word on the street seems to be that:

- Generally speaking, X370 motherboards are a better (and more expensive) option than B350
- There are some CPU bugs which can lead to segfaults and crashes which are being investigated and may require workarounds

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... v-Response

https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/p ... ct-epyc-tr

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... Stress-Run

https://community.amd.com/thread/216084

https://community.amd.com/thread/215773

https://hardforum.com/threads/some-ryze ... s.1936605/

https://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonf ... 557fd9ac20

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... Workaround

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n ... v-Response


The gist of it is that under heavy compilation workloads, Ryzen crashing / segfaulting can be made to occur and that it's a hardware bug. Supposedly Threadripper & EPYC don't suffer from the same problems but who really knows.

Ryzen looks like a decent platform but there are some teething issues which affect users under certain conditions. It may be worth waiting until these issues are addressed before investing.

[folderol]

Thanks for all of those links. That was looking quite bad until I read the last link.
So it seems it's a known problem.
It only affects very heavy parallel workloads - one example being compilers compiling themselves!
AMD are aware of it.
It doesn't affect the new processors - possibly not the newest Ryzens too?

[asbak]

Supposedly it doesn't affect the Threadripper & EPYC (Server) CPU's. Problem is they may be affected by other as yet unknown issues. That's always the problem with new tech that hasn't been subjected to exhaustive testing.

For general purpose usage Ryzen & Threadripper are probably just fine. Personally I'd rather wait a bit longer until some of these issues are resolved before throwing readies (my $$) at it. Threadripper has only just been released and there are bound to be niggles.