Linux retrospect


OK, I use and like Linux having been force moved to use it by MS's cancelling my old legal Windows licenses (done by linking the license to the individual machine's hardware and cancelling the license whenever the hardware gets changed or a driver crash kills the machine) and then  by MS simply getting greedy all the time and always finding brand new ways to invalidate my existing good Windows licenses.

This is no joke -- I got pissed and contacted the MS complaint line and worked backwards working with the supervisor of that department and she, using tools that are not available to her worker bees, she found 4 valid MS Windows licenses that all referenced my wife's laptop as home base.   None of them were bad per se, but over the years MS had declared them "invalid" and insisted I buy a new license to get the machine rolling again.

The complaint lady then reactivated the best Windows version of the lot and apologized for my inconvenience in the matter.

All this told me was that MS had one honest employee who was working to help people, just one good person in a SEA of shameless thieves.


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I liked the original Gnome Ubuntu, but I moved over to Mint to get the pre-installed codecs and to get a new level of ease of use that was both real and is still very much appreciated.

Pure Ubuntu is still #2 in the general distro ranking, this is mainly due to all of the many Ubuntu derivatives that are out there in specialty land that remove their numbers from the mothership count when it gets split into distros.   I'll use PoP OS as a talking example -- it was built from Ubuntu to be a builder installed "starter OS" which saves the builder the cost of a Windows license.   Specialty distro, oh my yes ..... but still part of the Ubuntu family group.   It still gets a large numerical count as it comes pre-installed on a lot of Linux based machines.

#1 in the detailed Linux distro ranking is Linux Mint Cinnamon, which is the default Linux Mint that gets shown first in the download list on the Mint website.

Linux Mint Mate came out as a lighter, faster version of Mint that did not use the porkier, slower, slightly more buggy home cooked Cinnamon interface.   Instead it used Gnome, trimmed up and trued up to simply work better.

If you want to get closer to  the look and feel of Win XP (and I mean right down to the XP keyboard shortcuts that all still work) then use Linux Mint Mate.

Realize that when you talk in general about Ubuntu vs Fedora vs Suse then all the Ubuntu variants tend to get clumped together in the Ubuntu family group.   But when talking pure user popularity at the distro level, Linux Mint is still the most popular distro out there.


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HOWEVER, please do always remember that Joe and Rita Sixpack will still ALWAYS use what comes installed on their new machine, and face it folks ---- there are predominately more machines built with Windows preinstalled out there than any other OS (or all of rest of them added together, if you to make the point a little more bluntly).

Rita and Joe think that Windows is great and they don't mind getting skinned every 2 years for a new Windoze this and that .....  and they obey all the little prompts to get signed up for every support package that MS can invent for them to buy.



Then Rita and Joe also simply use the browser that MS gives them pre-installed, warts and all.   Why it takes a super powerful state of the art machine to run a browser, I will never know.  They bought it because they got a pop up saying they needed to buy a "x" generation Intel processor to fix their driver issues that made their old "w" generation Intel processor run so poorly ......

Somebody keeps telling Joe that he can fix ANY of his old "dead" machines simply by sticking in a Linux Mint Mate DVD and getting a fully functioning backup machine for free --- but is isn't Winders Certified and Rita won't hear about it.

This is a reminder of what ARM promised was going to happen this upcoming year, and yes it looks like they have already beat that promise by six months on the early side as Apple is here right now, jest a doing it.



This graph intersection prediction and the colored line inversions have already come to pass at Cortex-A77 processors early this past spring ...... and this should be a reminder why ARM and Apple are going to be AMD's real competition going forward since they start out beating Intel Core i5s at the ARM Cortex-A78 levels and get strongly better each year thereafter after each lithography drop.

Intel isn't really in the race for much any more, really, and that leaves AMD to hold up the x86 end of things pretty much by itself.



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https://venturebeat.com/2020/06/10/heres-how-apples-mac-and-mobile-arm-chip-r...

Apple is reportedly working on 5-nanometer Mac chips featuring up to 12 CPU cores, with near future plans to offer chips with more than 12 cores. This suggests to me that there could be two lines of Mac-specific ARM processors, one destined for laptops and laptop-class Macs, and the other for super high performance desktop Macs akin to the iMac Pro and Mac Pro. Whether Apple goes with X-series, Z-series, or some other type of branding for these Mac ARM processors remains to be seen.

In each case, Apple will be targeting a platform-optimized balance of performance and power. The smaller the device’s battery and the greater Apple’s ambition to shrink or thin that form factor, the less raw horsepower the chip will deliver. Conversely, where battery life and chip size aren’t major considerations — in desktop Macs, for instance — the chips can go off to the races, eating as much energy as necessary to accomplish their tasks, constrained only by cooling and desktop form factors. Due to Apple’s aggressive performance-per-watt energy optimization designs, neither of those issues is likely to limit the company’s ARM chips to the degree it felt shackled by Intel’s desktop and laptop CPUs.

With the caveat that everything is subject to change due to engineering issues and pandemic considerations, here’s what I broadly expect to see Apple do with chips over the next five years.

2020: A 5-nanometer A14 for iPhones an S6 for Apple Watches, and possibly a 5-nanometer A14X for iPads (more likely 2021). Unless it plans to use the A14X for Macs, Apple will preview a separate entry-level Mac laptop chip to developers ahead of a 2021 commercial release.

2021: A 5-nanometer A15 for iPhones an S7 for Apple Watches, most likely A14X/A15X for iPads, and almost certainly the commercial release of Mac laptop (say, “X1”) and desktop (“Z1?”) chips.

2022: A 3-nanometer A16 for iPhones an S8 for Apple Watches, possibly an A16X for iPads, second-gen Mac laptop and desktop chips, and possibly a 5- or 3-nanometer Apple-developed smart glasses chip.

2023: A 3-nanometer A17 for iPhones an S9 for Apple Watches, possibly an A17X for iPads, third-gen Mac laptop and desktop chips, and either a 5- or 3-nanometer Apple smart glasses chip.

2024/2025: A 2-nanometer A18 for iPhones an S10 for Apple Watches, either an A17X/A18X for iPads, fourth-gen Mac laptop and desktop chips, and likely a second-gen, 3-nanometer Apple smart glasses chip.

It’s impossible to know the specific year-to-year performance increases for each of these chips — most of them are far from finalized — but Apple’s past track record provides some general expectations. In addition to small annual or biannual battery life improvements based on big drops in nanometer manufacturing scale and subsequent refinements of the same nanometer’s process.  It is fair to assume annual single-core performance gains of 15% to 30% for some tasks, with multi-core jumps ranging from 40% to 200%, depending on Apple’s overall product priorities for a given year.

Two key areas currently stand out as likely to impact multiple Apple chips at various points over the next five years. First, Apple plans to integrate self-designed 5G modems into some of its chips, which led it to purchase Intel’s smartphone modem division for $1 billion last year. And beyond trying to stay comfortably ahead of Intel in the CPU department, it will also compete with Qualcomm, which makes laptop, smartphone, smartwatch, and XR headset chips of its own.

You will note I am taking my progress notes from the guys who are ACTUALLY MAKING THE PROGRESS, not from Intel or AMD who are spending all their efforts watching each other do very very little, and that very very slowly.    

Both will get lapped and left behind by ARM chipsets within this same period of time  .......

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15910/amd-announces-ryzen-threadripper-pro-wor...

What is new .......

AMD is only selling these newest TR PRO chipsets directly to major vendors --- there is no advertising budget and there are no samples being sent out for press testing.    Cost is being minimized as AMD is so thoroughly trashing Intel right now that literally nothing needs to be said at this point in time beyond tech reviews like this one.

The various technical publications and press will do all that is needed to roll the sales over to the new AMD offerings, that and the much lower price to purchase AMD and the much lower AMD associated costs for power and cooling.



Competition
AMD’s main competition here is going to be Intel’s own workstation line of processors. If you haven’t been following what Intel is doing, not to worry – it’s somewhat of an older confusing mess. Let us take it in stages:

Before Intel launched Xeon Scalable, it offered variants of its E5-2600 processor line as ‘workstation’ models, such as the E5-2687W v2/v3/v4. These were socket compatible with Intel’s high-end desktop processors without ECC, or could be used in server-grade motherboards with ECC validation.

After this, Intel launched the Xeon W-2100 family, built upon Skylake, and offering up to 18 cores with quad-channel memory. These were on the LGA2066 high-end desktop socket, but required special motherboards that used server-only chipsets. These were updated with Xeon W-2200 variants, built on Cascade Lake.

Alongside this, Intel had Xeon W-3100 and Xeon W-3200 workstation processors, for the LGA3647 socket, enabling six-channel memory and offering up to 28 cores. Intel even offered a special W-3175X model that was overclockable.

Now this year, Intel added the Xeon W-1200 family to its workstation lineup, using the consumer LGA1200 socket, but again with motherboards that have a server-only chipset installed. These W-1200 actually replace the E-2300 processors, and the Xeon E family has been mothballed into Xeon W.  On top of all this, Intel has Xeon Scalable Cascade Lake which have also been used extensively in workstations.


AMD’s argument here is that TR Pro will compete well against all of Intel’s Xeon W offerings.  Whereas Intel has 80+ older options across a variety of sockets, AMD will have only four TR PRO units that will cover all of the market, and AMD will continue to use the existing consumer Ryzen Pro line for the low-end pro and the upper level consumer stuff.

Yes, AMD unleashes just four TR Pro workstation units and those four TR Pro units will beat up on all 80 of Intel's existing workstation offerings, yes all 80 of them ---- for both data crunching throughput,  AMP draw powerwise and finally (and most tellingly) purchase price-wise.

   It works out like this,  if you simply buy at your intended spend price point you can pocket all the extra power and performance that AMD provides to you.  Or else you can pick your units carefully and buy the equivalent (to slightly better) performance at a much lower cost and pocket all the dollar savings.   It is your choice on how you take your AMD savings.

Many users will just opt to buy the very most powerful AMD units on sale at an even more reduced price point and get all that juicy much cheaper mainframe power that comes to them along with the many extra channels of faster data transfer built into the AMD mainframe chiplet technology.  

When overbuying can be done so cheaply, it becomes easy to justify as "future proofing" or "extending service life" or "lower operational (energy) costs'.

Intel will likely respond with some new black bag benchmark tricks to try to keep what they have now so that it can can be perceived by the uninformed as "operationally equivalent" for as long as possible  --- Intel will try to "lie and cheat, not compete" in other words.

Intel as of this point is simply outclassed on all fronts, and this outclassing of Intel will simply get deeper and stronger next year and deeper and stronger again in the years following ......



Here is the current performance summary across Intel's and AMD's top end offerings ...... it looks pretty bad for the "Intel Inside" boys doesn't it?   Remember, it takes 2 each of the full sized mainframe Intel chipsets (at over $1,200 list price each of Intel Inside) to even get up on this chart to get your butt whupped by AMD's single socket product.

Note that AMD lists the results for all of the tests you can run, not just selectively cherry picking the ones they could win most strongly as Intel so liked to do in years past.   All tests are shown "as shipped" --- Intel also likes to cheat by optimizing their test units for the individual tests that you are running so you can expect to see that trick being played again by Intel in 2020-2021 as well.

https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-and-intel-core-cpu-market-share-report/



It looks like Germany isn't the only market where AMD is doing well as reports from major Asian based retailers show the same trend for Ryzen processors which are now gaining more popularity than Intel's Core processors lineup.

AMD Ryzen Market Share Now Higher Than Intel Core CPU In Major Asian Markets
According to Danawa Research, a firm run by Danawa which is one of the biggest retailers in South Korea, the volume of AMD Ryzen CPUs sold exceeded that of Intel Core processors just a few days after the new Ryzen 3000 chips became available on store shelves. Starting Monday (8th of July), as soon as the market opened, AMD CPU sales witnessed a huge jump of 48.72% versus 28.24% just a day earlier. This trend continued and the volume of AMD CPUs sold exceeded Intel's just two days later at 53.36% versus Intel's 46.64%. Not only that but the research firm also shared the statistical figures which show the number of clicks on their retail outlet for each processor brand. The same results were reported with more users now searching and looking into AMD's processor lineup. In comparison, the AMD CPU drew the attention of up to 76.95% users while only 23.05% users were interested in Intel's lineup.





The other breaking news comes from BCN Ranking, who collects more generalized round up data from major retail outlets in Japan, who reports similar results that the AMD Ryzen CPUs have managed to overtake Intel's share and now stand at 50.5% versus Intel's 49.5%. This is a continuing trend with Intel's market share showing a downward trend as it was 72.1% back in October 2018 and has now seen a major fall.







Lastly, here is another shot of the same Mindshare.de data from Germany showing about the same gap percentage as the rest do.   Since we now have confirmation from China and Japan and India that AMD takes over the majority market share, I will no longer report it as a "early predictor" graph, but instead this stuff is simply factual actual now-a-days.








Americans should be angry that Intel is allowed to act "in restraint of trade" by illegally preventing the publishing of numbers such as this in the American computing press.

Ditto for other countries data, Intel does NOT want you to see be able to see where they really sit in the marketplace in relation to AMD.

Having to get our comparison data pulled from foreign BANKS and foreign Financial Periodicals (because Intel has such a lock on USA computer press reporting) simply sucks diseased camel wang, IMHO.



THIS ALSO SPEAKS VERY POORLY ABOUT JOE SIX PACK'S  "COMPUTER LITERACY"  THAT INTEL CAN ACTUALLY GET AWAY WITH LYING LIKE THIS FOR SUCH A VERY VERY VERY LONG TIME and not get called out over it  .......   are we really that slow and jest plain dumbass ignorant?



Intel's main dirty trick here is to require all "approved" US computer press reporting to include all the data for all processors ever sold that are still considered by Intel to still be active (yep, all the units ever sold going way back in time) which counts all the old moldy stuff that was already put in the dump years ago (or needs to be put in the dump now).  

It is very hard for the current dog to wag that big of a dinosaur tail ......  but he is working on it.



My favorite, Linux Mint is actually a small factor in this part of the game since old moldy Intel hardware still works just fine with Linux Mint Mate that was installed to replace the MS OS originally supplied with the machine.   A lot of the old out of date Intel machines ARE really still going today ...... they are running smooth and quick on Mint or some other form of Linux.

I have several 10 year old Dell workstation boxes that are working for me just fine on Mint ......   and when MS craps a machine up intentionally my Linux Mint Mate DVD can be counted on to instantly bring them back from the dead just dandy .......
 

 I wonder if AMD is trying to cash in on an amount of the pre-holiday, quarantine buyers group.

 A ton of people I know still think AMD is inferior by far for gaming, and the only efficient solution I know of is putting out product since very few bother to read up on it.  They watch YouTube and buy what their favorite streamer uses.

 

the switch for me was the math chip fiasco.

https://liliputing.com/2020/07/intels-transition-to-7nm-chips-delayed.html

Intel had a notoriously hard time moving from 14nm to 10nm chips. In fact, even after multiple delays, only some of the company’s current processors are manufactured on a 10nm node.

Now the company is looking ahead to 7nm… and seeing more delays.

During the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Intel officials explained that its pushing back its timeline for 7nm chips by about six months. Tom’s Hardware explains that means we probably won’t see those chips until the late 2022 or early 2023 at the soonest.

Note line by line the large amount of MISLEADING BS put out here instead of any real discernible facts .....


The company says it’s still on track to release its 10nm “Tiger Lake” laptop chips with Intel Xe graphics during the third quarter of 2020. 10nm “Ice Lake” chips for servers are also currently in production.

We’ll have to wait until the second half of 2021 to see the first 10nm “desktop” chips from Intel though. Those will be code-named “Alder Lake.”

But Intel CEO Bob Swan says the 7nm delays are due to a defect that the company identified in its manufacturing process. The company is moving to a contingency plan which involves using third-party foundries to manufacturer their chipsets.

Intel's new 10nm processes don't perform as promised ---- if Intel wants anything competitive they will have to pay TSMC or Samsung to make it for them.   Otherwise, Intel has no valid future pathway forward at this point in time .....

This delay pushes any Intel 7nm progress (shaky as that is, BTW) out into the 5nm fully developed volume production zone for ARM processors and for AMD chiplet production.  

Shaky low yielding domestic 7nm Intel in-house production vs high yielding robust 14 layer deep direct burn 5nm TSMC lithography is simply not a winning place for Intel to be.

5nm ARM processors and 5nm AMD chiplet production  .......  Intel cannot compete against either of these product groups.



By late 2021 some 3nm early pre-production test runs will have been made by Apple and others, btw ......    that will be another 3-4 layers of burning hot asphalt (all of 5nm and 3nm) rolled out over the rounded lump where Intel was originally.

"whenever Eegore buys his first AMD based unit for his own business uses."

 I've had AMD for about 9 years, just not on Dell branded units.