Gaming Discussions

[prodigit]

First of all, let me give my feedback on the horrible registration procedure!
It took me a good 25 tries, or 10 minutes, to register via numbers or the written letters captcha; they're inhumanely difficult!

I felt like beating someone to a pulp, for setting up something so out of this world stupid!
Please, make the registration procedure more simple, so that normal humans (and not computers) may be able to register! 
Thank you!

Second,
I'm into distributed computing. Folding, Boinc.

I am currently running the blue team's Xeon processor, but am in the market for an upgrade.

The Epyc CPUs look very tasty, but have low support in the distributed computing fields, since they're ARM based.

I would like to ask if we're going to see more AMD official involvement in this market?
This is the reason, Nvidia has so many followers in GPU intensive tasks, not only because they're superior there (sorry AMD), but also because they offer great driver and software support, to make sure their GPUs are running on distributed computing applications.

From a random Folding poll, an average estimated >90% of GPUs are Nvidia (and <10% AMD). That's a market of over 3000 GPUs, just for folding.

I'm not looking for GPUs from AMD, but AMD does make great CPUs!

And many projects (like Boinc), still need CPUs for their crunching tasks.
Threadripper and Epyc are 2 CPUs I would love to see more official AMD support for, in the distributed computing fields.
Thread ripper is 100% x86 compatible, so that one is good. Epyc isn't.
But Epyc would make a far better AI/folding/crunching CPU than Threadripper...

I want to support AMD, and switch over, because they could potentially offer me a superior product of twice the performance my current Xeon CPU does; but without sufficient support, I won't jump the fence just yet.

So, are we going to see AMD backup these projects?

[indinv35]

You do realise that it's the developers of those projects that need to support the available hardware (especially cpus) and not the other way around, right? I assume you made the same request to them? Also 3000 gpus is nothing relative to the rest of the market but yeah I would also like to see the distributed computing developers to dedicate more resources to support all vendors 

[prodigit]

It's quite often that those developers are scientists themselves, and no real programmers.

The reason why folding at home works with Nvidia cards, is because Nvidia made it easier for developers to use opencl as well as provides up to date drivers for Windows and popular Linux distributions, like redhat (rpm) and Debian (Deb), which means support would work for most derivatives of those operating systems (Like all Ubuntu variants, mint, centos, Fedora, and a bunch more).

In fact they have supported those projects up until Ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04.

Being several years later, and their support now gone, these projects are running in danger due to no compatibility with operating systems past 18.10 (due to the discontinuation of python 2 support, the platform they are built on).

Anyway, thread ripper would probably work, just like Ryzen, Xeon, or core-I processors, but for Epyc there's need for AMD to meet up. These ARM based CPUs don't have support, but can be far superior for distributed computing than most desktop or even server CPUs (save for GPUs, which have even more cores)...

Especially around the time when they will be appearing on the second hand market for an affordable price.

[indinv35]

What are you talking about? AMD linux drivers are just fine.

About the developers, well they programmed for nvidia opencl support so they can do the same with AMD, I don't see why not. Unless you have some evidence that they asked for help or clarifications from AMD and they did not reply.

[colesdav]

RE: AMD linux drivers are just fine.
No they are not "just fine".
They need lots of work on Linux, just to provide a basic GUI to control cards.
Complete loss of display and installation issues are frequent.
I run both Nvidia and AMD GPUs on Linux and the Nvidia experience is much better.

[prodigit]

Like said before, support for Epyc and other ARM based server CPUs is lacking.