# What's up with kernel 4.8 ?

## Tony0945

It's almost the release of the week. I tried reading the commit logs but I don't understand them. I read things on the net like skylake power control is not working right. i.e. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Skylake-Concerns-MJG

Are all these changes mostly about skylake?  Why the rapid development pace?

Anyone know?

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## asturm

Intel Linux support has been on a downward spiral for a long time. It does seem though that their Windows driver support now is equally crappy.

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## The_Great_Sephiroth

Why has Intel support been decreasing? I have never had issues with Intel products and Linux, but I do not run Linux on bleeding-edge hardware either. I use that hardware for gaming rigs, which means Windows.

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## Ant P.

In a word, mismanagement. This has been going on for several years, the symptoms are only beginning to surface now. I'd expect them to get steadily worse.

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## Tony0945

 *Ant P. wrote:*   

> In a word, mismanagement. 

 ???? Whose mismanagement are you referring to? Intel's? Or kernel.org?

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## asturm

Intel...

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## The Doctor

Shame, but I suppose it should have been obvious something was up with all these very different generation of processors still being called the i3, i5, and i7.

In all seriousness I hope they put their house in order. Their stuff is still better value than AMD, and cooler (in the literal sense).

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## asturm

I doubt you could interpret anything out of their choice of (likely established) CPU model numbers. It mostly is their software departments showing signs of disintegration, developers leaving, no userspace driver release in years, distributions abandoning it for modesetting, ...

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## Tony0945

Too bad. I was thinking of building a Skylake system because AMD seems to be having a lot of problems launching Zen and the pre-release benchmarks are not looking as good as Skylake. Plus, I have a 3.2Ghz Phenom II CPU now and don't like the idea of slowing down to 2.8. I had hoped Zen would run at 4.0

I won't touch the FX- series because of monstrous power consumption (220 watts!). I used to have a total electric home in Virginia. The heating elements were 250 watts. I don't want to heat a room or cook supper with my PC!

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## asturm

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> Plus, I have a 3.2Ghz Phenom II CPU now and don't like the idea of slowing down to 2.8. I had hoped Zen would run at 4.0

 

Zen is considerably improving IPC, I thought by now we had it established that pure frequency does not tell you that much about real power. Just remember that NetBurst gave us 3.5 GHz already 11 years ago, yet no one would still run one of those parts if they had a choice these days.

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## Tony0945

asturm, I only see comparisons to Bulldozer and everyone says Bulldozer is a dog. I have seen lots of recommendations to stick with Phenom II X6 rather than Bulldozer. Also. my X6 is six real cores and FX- is really three cores with code swapped in and out which Linux does anyway, but Windoze is too brain dead to do. I saw glowing benchmarks for my A8-7800 showing it as fast as my Phenom II X6, but it really is on a par with my Athlon II X3. I'm not that disappointed because it's a lot better than the Newcastle it replaced, still I like to see say kernel compilation benchmarks instead of Windows benchmarks.  And then came the announcement that Zen would only be supported on Windows 10, followed a day or two later by the clarification that Microsoft would only support it on Windows 10, but there would be Linux support. Plus the lead developer, whom I had great respect for,  the last of the DEC Alpha team, "left to pursue other opportunities". I wish AMD was still in the hands of the original management. I don't think the present management understands there products or markets. They should probably be running Sears.  A product that was supposed to be launched 2nd Q 2016, totally skipping the Christmas season? Doesn't that sound like development problems? 

My last Intel chip was my first, a 486DX-100. I fell in love with AMD with the k6-II, but all good things must end. I see the end of Gentoo also with systemd and the arrogance of the devs.

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## Zucca

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> I won't touch the FX- series because of monstrous power consumption (220 watts!). I used to have a total electric home in Virginia. The heating elements were 250 watts. I don't want to heat a room or cook supper with my PC!

 I have octa-core FX-8350 4GHz. TDP is 125W and it cosumes about 130-140W of power at max load. It's been air cooled and is pretty silent.

Not as powerful (in terms of processing power) as 4GHz 4-core intel i7 with hyper threading, but at least I didn't pay very much.

So no. They are not 220W TDP all. It's only the FX-9xxx series that are "factory overclocked" and generate enough heat to run steam train.

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## asturm

 *Tony0945 wrote:*   

> asturm, I only see comparisons to Bulldozer and everyone says Bulldozer is a dog.

 

Well, Zen is not Bulldozer. The rest of your post, where to begin with? It's not news that new architectures arrive late, it's not news that new hardware is unsupported by old proprietary software, it's not news that people switch jobs sometimes. All I care about is best open source support for Linux, at this point, I've been through enough to give it priority over maximum performance. Bristol Ridge has its justification in the segment it is competing with Intel chips, and I'm sure Zen will have too. In fact, my biggest gripe with AMD lately has been the horrendously outdated platform around the CPU; with AM4 there come new chips and I/O capabilities at last, so I feel comfortable putting together a box with it again.

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## Tony0945

 *Quote:*   

> It's only the FX-9xxx series that are "factory overclocked" and generate enough heat to run steam train.

 

LOL!

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