Gadget geeks aghast at guru's geriatric GPU As work picks up on the forthcoming Linux 6.17, many joystick-wigglers are shocked by its millionaire dev's positively ancient AMD graphics card. As we reported a few days ago, version 6.16 of the Linux kernel is out with new and improved Rust module support. But that means that work is now picking up on the next version, …
Linus also had something to say about my aging AMD FX-8350 processor (from 2012) after I reported that objtool didn't support its instruction set which caused the 6.16 build to crash with multiple errors and warnings:
And yeah, I think it's bulldozer-specific, which explains why nobody sees it (because bulldozer was one of the not-very-great AMD uarchs before they got it right with Zen).
It was all to do with the new kernel configuration option "X86_NATIVE_CPU"
Optimize for the current CPU used to compile the kernel.
Use this option if you intend to build the kernel for your
local machine.
which uses those gcc options to optimise your build
I run a Radeon HD 7850 (launched 2012) on my desktop Debian box. It does what I want: Mate desktop and can happily view MP3s, etc. I do not play games so I do not know if that would be a problem.
What is the point of running something that you do not need? It would take him time to update to something newer as well as create more digital waste.
You VIEW MP3s? Do you see sounds, or have your headphones simply slipped onto the front of your head?
Joking aside, rich people don't get rich by spending money unnecessarily. If everything works for him, then there isn't really a problem.
(Typed on a 2015 Dell Optiplex, with onboard graphics and a very large pension fund, thank you very much)
Warren Buffet is famous for still living in the house he bought in 1958 for $32K.
# nvidia-detect
Detected NVIDIA GPUs:
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 6GB] [10de:1c03] (rev a1)
That's from 2016, which is older than Linus' card.
Linux Devuan Daedalus on a Sun Ultra 24 box with 8Gb RAM and a Q9550 + three monitors:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G96CGL [Quadro FX 580] (rev a1)
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G96CGL [Quadro FX 580] (rev a1)
Assholes at Nvidia screwed everyone with the drivers and I manage well enough with Nouveau, which get better as time goes by.
But I will never ever spend money on anything Nvidia again.
Same thing Matrox did eons ago and they also lost me as a client back then.
.
> You VIEW MP3s?
You never heard of sound visualisations ? Like oscilloscope, frequency bars, even Pink Floyd used it on an album cover...
https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=sound+visualization (unclickable so you can see it is a "clean" google image search link)
Or better stiill, FreeBSD. Still quite lightweight with xfce and has all the packages needed here. As for graphics, most here have amd V3900, probably pre 2010, low power and more than adequate for desktop and dev work. Cheap as chips as well.
"It would take him time to update to something newer as well as create more digital waste."
As if that would matter to His Linusness, praise be upon him.
The current Linux kernel is nudging 40M lines of code. It's already generating more than enough digital waste.
Come to think of it, so does systemd. Though someone else is to blame for that almighty heap of toxic sewage.
It can't be long now until these monuments to bloatware assimilate each other and create a singularity that forms the universe's newest software black hole.
Most of that is hardware support.
Ok, arguably all of it is hardware support because that's what a kernel does, but you know what I mean.
Which hardware should be deleted to reduce the line count?
Is it not better to leave it in unless it becomes a direct problem, and then ask if anyone is actually using it before removal?
Or are running a CPU with no built in graphics.
Sandy Bridge Xeon here, with a trusty GT1030 making the pretty pictures. No serious gaming, so it just needs to handle browsing, office stuff, video playback etc. A better GPU would be zero advantage to me. I suspect Linus is in the same situation, grunty CPU that get his work done, and a GPU that displays what he needs to see. A RX580 wont be lacking on resolution or multi-screen support. Upgrading the GPU would bring exactly zero actual benefit.
Yeah, but that ONLY does DVDs. Want HD streaming / local media playback / web browsing and a bit of light gaming, PLUS the ability to play those Blu-rays?
On the homework desk at the moment is a nice slimline office machine I got for free (costs $20 to take e-waste to the transfer station here). 8th gen i7, 16 gb of RAM, SSD etc. I've added a cheap low profile RX550 GPU. Running it up with Linux now, and it's sweet little media / light gaming PC. Has DVD player and multi-card reader installed. It's still a perfectly usable PC now.
> 8th gen i7
[...]
> little media / light gaming PC
I think I have at least 2 generation 5 core i7 machines in production use as general-purpose workstations, driving a couple of screens, multiple lardy Electron apps at once and so on.
I strongly suspect I'd still be quite happy with a Core 2 Duo for most things, TBPH, if I chose some lighter-weight apps. Ghostwriter instead of Panwriter and so on.
Core 2 machines will still "work", but they are sluggish, enough to notice. Especially with multiple apps / browser windows open. If I HAD to use one, it would work. A 2nd gen i5 would work a lot better, especially if you throw a SSD and some more RAM in there.
It's not that machines that old can't still run Linux and modern software, but they are "sluggish". Wait a second here, wait a second here, and you notice it. Modern Linux, like Windows, benefits from having more CPU cores, because there are so many background tasks running. Swapping between them on one or 2 cores slows things down even more than the lower processing power of the old CPU would suggest. Hence an old
The point is that adding a top end graphics card to many people's machines gives NO actual benefit, for the work they are doing.
> A 2nd gen i5 would work a lot better
Totally agree, the Sandy Bridge CPUs were the last where the performance gain was really really big compared to the previous generation. Pushed AMD Phenom into the corner big time. And very overclock friendly. My i7-2500k ran, air cooled, and 4.8 GHz straight, which resulted hyperthreading making video encoding nearly 100% faster compared to 35% to 50% speed difference at normal clock speed. I still have a used dual Sandybridge 8-core server around here for stuff that needs 196 GB RAM. But I rarely turn it on since x265 and SVT-AV1/RAV1E need less RAM than x264 at insane video resolutions.
Core 2 machines will still "work", but they are sluggish, enough to notice. Especially with multiple apps / browser windows open.
Many years ago, we bought a bunch of C2D desktops (the HP DC7800 & 7900) as refurbs to do an upgrade from WinXP to something supported enmasse. At a later point I started buying new Win10 boxes to replace them with.
The new Win10 boxes i'd specced came with duel screens, which led to lamentations and demands for parity from the workforce, along with a desire for a quick fix, which was that the DC7900's got an upgrade package of a second hand Quadro card, 8GB of RAM and an SSD.
These PC's remained perfectly task adequate up until they were all retired just before the Win7 EOL in Jan 2020.
In March 2020, we had a sudden unexpected requirement for a large amount of home working, along with a pile of PC's that were task adequate with a quick reimage. These PC's were then gifted to staff. Many of them are still in use in a personal capacity, but certainly do well enough for office work web browsing and watching youtube etc.
There is certainly many good use cases for GPUs, even outside gaming and crypto. CAD / video editing / heavy math work using CUDA systems etc. And putting a basic modern GPU into an older machine to help with video decoding is another valid one. Adding one to your old system gave some tangible benefit, you can watch hi-res video more reliably. But you don't go out and drop $1500 on a GPU just to do that. You find a used GTX 1650 or similar, which does the job and doesn't need a new PSU and 3 more cooling fans installed.
It depends how you define 'serious'. For VR you probably want something a little newer, ideally, although 2017 era cards will work for some VR games and applications.
For some quite recent games such as Alan Wake 2 and the excellent Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, they require hardware raytracing support and a fair amount of VRAM to run at an acceptable rate, even in low resolutions, so it's not just about wanting to run ridiculous resolutions or refresh rates.
A chap who buys a decent refurbished Xeon equipped workstation who was extremely puzzled why there wasn't any video from the ports on the rear. :)
Always assumed that integrated graphics was another support chip on the motherboard and not part of the silicon real estate of the CPU.
Quite embarrassing :) but some Xeon servers (DELL?) had Matrox graphics on the motherboard.
Used an old but top line NVidia card for a while but various driver problems made it easier to replace it with a Radeon card (for even less demanding use than Linus'.)
Always assumed that integrated graphics was another support chip on the motherboard and not part of the silicon real estate of the CPU.
Used to be, back in the 810/845/915 chipset days (early Pentium 4).
Originally, the Intel graphics were just something to fill up otherwise wasted space on the chipset die (“we can fit 50,000 gates in the empty space, what graphics output can we do within that budget?”)
Then they moved onto the CPU and got gradually more and more complex, as “decent performance” became more important than “don’t increase the die size”.
And if I recall correctly, the difference between Xeon parts and their equivalent desktop cousins has generally (with a few exceptions) been that the former had ECC support whereas the latter had integrated graphics.
The fact that we HAVE to have graphics even when the machine is only configured for text console is irritating. I've just set up a new server which has a GT710 graphics card as the processor does not have a graphics port. The AMD Ryzen5 5600 was sitting on the shelf simple because I had not twigged that it would not provide graphics on the motherboard that was bought with it, but at least the listings do now flag things better. One gets used to things like 'graphics' built into the motherboard ;) Having to manage graphics settings from the command line to get the text screen to display has been fun. But since it's normally only used in an emergency it's not a problem ... ssh into the servers is the normal access port and does not need some high power graphics card on the desktop machine?
Annoyingly, AMD's desktop CPUs that have a built in GPU, don't support ECC memory. Even though their non-graphics-equipped equivalents do support ECC. Presumably this is to force us cheapskates to buy a proper server chip for a home server.
Still, better than Intel though, who don't support ECC on any of their desktop chips.
If you're sticking to Linux, or at a push FreeBSD, it's possible to run proprietary Nvidia drivers and run the very latest hardware - useful if you need to run up to the minute games.
Otherwise, stick to older stuff. After a number of years Nvidia begrudgingly release information to allow Nouveau to support cards properly, and AMD drivers are open source from day one. It then takes a little time for those drivers to reach OpenBSD and NetBSD which simply do not support any proprietary drivers.
If you're using an AMD card you're also better running an older card as their (Windows) driver quality is consistently sub par. I still have a Vega 56, also a 2017 card, in my main system. Bought at the beginning of 2020 it took *two years* before I'd call it fully stable, just as the following generation were released and experienced driver issues, and then the same thing happened for the generation after that. Also note if you want PCI-e passthrough AMD cards continue to be sub par; for over a decade Nvidia has been far less hassle to do passthrough, AMD simply do not care about fixing their issues.
For my couch gaming system I needed something VR capable, so went with an Nvidia 4070 Super. This has been hassle free under Windows, and supported under Linux.
I'd also look at buying an Intel Arc card simply to get some competition in the market, but it needs resizable BAR support, and its support outside Windows and Linux is currently lacking as is its VR support and various older game compatibility.
Me, reading the article: "ooh! I have the same GPU as Linus! That is even more of a claim to fame than my having met Gyles Brandreth back in 1991!"
...and then I reached the line
...At least one Reg commenter this year, "David 132," runs the same thing...
Don't know whether to feel flattered that I've been namechecked, or deeply embarrassed that I still haven't upgraded. ¿Porque no los dos?
In my defence, all my spare cash these days goes on duck feed. And no, that's not a euphemism.
> Don't know whether to feel flattered that I've been namechecked, or deeply embarrassed that I still haven't upgraded.
Well, I'd go with the former myself. ;-)
Look, if it's any consolation, I write this nonsense on machines with considerably older and lower-end GPUs than either of these, and I still have 1 or 2 Core 2 Duo boxes in active rotation.
My desktop iMac has a 2GB AMD somethingorother from 2015 and being an iMac it'd be hard to upgrade. Being an iMac I don't have to worry.
My two nVidia-equipped machines run circa 2010-2011 integrated GPUs and are Thinkpads: they can't be upgraded at all.
Don't worry, be happy.
Me too! I have an HP Z620 workstation. 2011 vintage, 8 core Xeon, 64Gb RAM. A beast in its day! Very happy running my DAW, Factorio, BeamNG and that's about it.
I was informed that in its current spec it would have cost around £10k new. Picked it up during locky-d for £200!
I am writing on an >10 year old Fujitsu E746, i5-6300U, Intel "HD Graphics 520", 4k60Hz on the same ridiculous oversized "Smart TV as computer screen" as my gaming/CPU-power computer with 4k120Hz.
If I would not insist on 4k60Hz much less would be enough by far, going back 15 years would be no issue at all. Going back 20 years is a different thing, you might have bad Windows Vista/7 AERO performance and would have to switch to Non-aero desktop style like Windows XP/Server 2003 use.
I made do with the same tower setup with the exact same i7/16gb/2TB system for about 11 years before I upgraded it. Every 6 months hoover it out, replace the O/S and carry on!
We Gen-X are well known for our frugal lifestyles. We were raised as kids in the god awful 1970s where our parents lectured us about being careful with money. I lost count the number of times my dad would say, "Son, money don't grow on trees!". We make do, we repair, we look to justify our purchases. I make a bloody good living as a techie but I still do my own DIY and I car repairs simply to save money, why would I pay a mechanic £120/hr to replace brakes pads I can do myself in an hour on a Saturday morning.
People wonder how so many of we Gen-X can even think about retiring early, we're a bunch of tight-arsed misers and proud of it!
RTX4070Ti here because I like my Steam gaming and to play with LLMs. But as far as a system without those requirements goes, if you can do text ttys to edit code and run commands, what more do you need?
Anything on the market with a 2k 1440x3440 FireWire output would do my programming just fine.
Still running a RTX3060 here in my gaming setup, it runs games at 1440p comfortably enough although I may consider an upgrade next year.
The "test rig" next to it was built from parts left over from previous upgrades to try out gaming on a few various Linux distros, and doesn't have an iGPU.As a result its running a GTX1050Ti I got off eBay for £50. That shows its age quite a bit on newer titles but is still more than fine for older stuff.
That said I'm typing this on a Samsung NC10 netbook which for light web browsing and basic office stuff is still just as adequate as it was back in 2009. Just a shame its Atom CPU is locked down to 32-bit only as there is a slow decline in the amount of available software and OS's that it'll run.
Games or crypto-mining or LLM/Generative AI.
I used to play PC games. I do have Steam on Linux, but it I wanted gaming I'd maybe get a PS5 or Xbox or Nintendo Switch or Steam Deck, or all of those.
crypto-mining or LLM/Generative AI.
You couldn't pay me enough.
I considered a PCIe GPU upgrade for my Dell 7050 mini-workstation, but bought another backup drive instead, also swapped a hot 4T HDD for a cooler 6T HHD (boot and OS is on an SSD).
Nonono, don't let the GFX card do the scaling. You simply select a lower resolution in the game, and the monitor does the scaling.
The newfangled AI-pattern-recognition-scaling is reserved to newer cards, starting with the Touring generation from nvidia, then AMD came soon after... Every card before that, like the on Linus uses: You let the monitor do the scaling.
> Dual boot is broken anyway since (U-)EFI came along.
It's not that bad. I am typing on a triple-boot UEFI machine right now: Win11, Ubuntu 24.04, MX Linux. It's rock solid and none of the 3 have ever trampled on any of the others.
* Keep the firmware rigorously current;
* Have one shared ESP, and make sure it's big enough; do not try to resize it with Gparted;
* Disable all disk encryption and Secure Boot;
* Use the same bootloader for all distros; don't try to mix-and-match GRUB and systemd-boot or anything;
* Use GPT with UEFI and MBR with BIOS, and stick to it. Don't mix-and-match.
Saying that, I agree, it's an ugly flawed design. I think it was the compensation Intel demanded for losing the 64-bit x86 ISA battle to AMD64.
We'd be better off with OpenFirmware or something like that.
> We'd be better off with OpenFirmware or something like that.
Amen.
UEFI is a designed-by-committee boondoggle with too much Microsoft influence (or outright control).
Legacy BIOS was a klunky old thing, but at least we'd gotten used to it.
Lest the embedded/ARM folks feel left out, not a huge fan of U-Boot either. :-)
It's been all downhill since OFW (and Sun et al who used it) went by the wayside. Oh for a firmware which natively speaks serial console again, rather than afterthought. (admittedly marking my age, here)
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I have an eight year old machine with built in Intel graphics (that appears to be in the same chip as the processor cores) and while it's not exactly nippy, it handles Netflix through a browser, random cat videos, and the regular screen stuff just fine. If it can do that and get me six or seven hours from battery then I'm happy. I don't need anything more fancy and energy consuming.
And, as I'm sure many of you know, you don't need a cutting edge GPU for writing code...
It's main purpose is to run benchmarks.
Joking aside, it's a fairly recent RTX in a ZBook I was required to order as part of a HW refresh, I benchmarked it out of sheer curiosity when I got it and to the best of my knowledge that's the most work it's ever done.
I simply don't need the power of the i9 CPU, the 4tb SSD, the GPU or the 128Gb of RAM but it really does upset the little boys who worship shiny pebbles
Hardware spec outpaced what 99.9% of computer users will ever need at the turn of the century. Just how much compute power do you need to run e-mail, a web-browser, a word-processor and spreadsheet? Okay, so you miss out on being able to spin the Compiz cylinder at 1200 RPM, but other than that, as far as just producing work-product goes, minimal boxes more than mow the grass.
If push came to shove, I could get by with a Pi 3B+ just fine (build times would suffer, but that's just extra coffee).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against building beast like boxes. I raised 3 kids and have a bone-pile of about 3 of every other year's gotta have Nvidia cards. (yes the 390 and 470 drivers are now a pain to patch with each new kernel version -- but hey, it looks like we will get a free pass with 6.16, no patches seen yet!) And yes, the kids needed the power and graphics power to game with all graphics options turned on. For me, meh, I've got no need. Now that the kids are all grown and out of the house, the bone-pile has quit growing, but looking at the old RTX2070 supers and GTX980s, there is still enough pixel pumping power for anything I'll ever need.
I'd a lot rather make use of older kit, adding a new SSD to replace spinning rust, and take the I/O benefit as that provides a bulk of what the latest and greatest promises as far as responsiveness. With RAM cheap, most old boxes now have 32G (and 64G if their chipsets support it). That's plenty enough to put even large builds on a tmpfs in RAM (e.g. PHP or MongoDB, etc..) which then complete quite quickly, and -- I avoid having to upgrade to a new 750-1000W modular PSU just to support the latest graphics cards.
I guess in sum, this is a testament to the advances made in computing capability over the past 40 years. From the 8080 with a few K of RAM and dual 8" floppy drives that wouldn't hold a single picture taken on your phone today, to Terabyte M.2 drives, processors with more cores than sense, RAM approaching the Terabyte scale and GPUs with more compute power than the system they are attached to. My Tumbleweed laptop powered by an ancient Gen 2 i7 sporting 8G still boots from off to full desktop in just under 12 seconds. Runs all Mozilla apps and libreoffice just fine (as does vscodium, etc..) and will finish most of the large builds I kick off within 30 minutes or so.
For decades I would spec-out the motherboard and chipset wanted, the socket and processor, buy the RAM and graphics card and PSU and put it all in one of Antec's solid cases (and most of those still run!). But today, if I need a box to jut prepare work product, I usually grab an off the shelf refurb HP that meets my needs and costs about $300 US. (many of those are still running too). The custom boxes and the kids custom gaming machines always cost more, but for shuffling documents and occasional builds, literally, just about anything made this century will do. Seems the King Penguin thinks somewhere along those lines too. Good for him. Taking a stand against wasted Watts contributing to global warming and using old kit as long as it meets the need to help prevent us all from drowning in e-waste (most of which is still operational...) That I can respect.
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