pgerassi (pgerassi2012.delete@this.wi.rr.com) on August 13, 2018 3:16 pm wrote:
>
> Essentially it seems that Linux distros don't have a scaling problem
> to 32/64 cores/threads. Windows 10 Pro is the problem.

Maybe.

I certainly don't expect any kernel scaling problems with just 64 threads on Linux, considering that people have been running real loads with way more than that.

But the Windows comparison was fairly random, and the Linux benchmarks that Phoronix did run are potentially quite a bit more scalable than the ones that Anandtech did.

For example, the kernel build process has been tuned for parallelism quite a bit - in ways that I'm not convinced that the Chromium build has. So the kernel build really does scale pretty well. So it might be less about what the platform that you are building on is, and more about what project you are building.

That said, ridiculously scalable or not, those Phoronix numbers do look good on Linux. It's been a long time since I used an AMD system for my personal work (way back in the good old Opteron/K10 days - I despised all the nasty split-cpu AMD Bulldozer+ cores), but I'm seriously considering upgrading to an AMD system, and the new threadrippers would really fit my load.

During the merge window (like now), I spend a fair amount of time double-checking my merges by doing builds before pushing out, and my old i7-6700K is showing its age, with the kernel having grown, and meltdown slowing things down.

My main worry is noise. I'm not sure I want to deal with the blower required for a 180W+ CPU.

Linus