With systems that have standby modes, does boot time even matter anymore? Is there ever a reason to turn a system completely off other than to fix kernel panics or faulty hardware?
The peace of mind from knowing you have a "freshly" booted Windows instead of one riddled with crud from weeks' uptime?
I know this is less of an issue on Windows 10, but I've long had the habit of restarting every Windows machine every few days to reset the state and regain the normal performance. Then again, this might only affect me due to the number of stuff (with drivers of various quality) I have connected.
It's another matter that "shutdown" doesn't always mean what it used to mean; unless you've disabled fast boot, Windows will only close applications, but will save the system state and resume from that when you start the next time - a sort of "hiberation lite" if you will. (You can prevent this on a case-by-case basis by holding Shift while you press Shutdown.)
I've personally never had problems with NT-kernel windows being up for months at a time. Heck, at work I had a daily use win2k workstation up for 450+ days, and that was with being forced to use the legendary IE6 every day.
Unfortunately, that probably isn't the safest thing to do with critical security packages being issued every month or so, but it didn't perform any worse with 450+ days versus a couple of hours. And that was with a mere 256MB of ram.
My home gaming box doesn't go more than a few weeks without reboot, because of video driver updates. You can technically install nvidia drivers nowadays and not be forced to reboot, but occasionally i've noticed some odd behavior after installing the new drivers without rebooting afterwards.
Since Win2k I've rarely had to reboot Windows more than monthly after patch tuesday. Since Win7 blue screens have become so rare that even that scenario rarely happens. Memory does not work like you seem to think, 'crud' is a Win9x era thing.
It still happens. The Xfinity wifi router gets confused. My wifi card would lock up, then lock up the whole machine. Power off/on of the router was the only thing that fixed it. Still happens.
At work, I sometimes get a confused bluecoat proxy or maybe it's Windows. I don't know. I use smart cards to login at work. One for regular user, one for admin account. The admin account gets no internet browser love. It doesn't launch (GPO settings blocking it) and if for some reason it does launch, the proxy blocks it's outside access.
Sometimes when I logon with my admin account, logoff later, it somehow caches that info. Even though I logon to my non-admin account, it somehow thinks I'm on my admin account and my browser usage gets blocked. Everything works perfectly fine, aside from the browser issue. The only quick fix is to restart. Maybe if I wait long enough, whatever connection, credential, whatever issue resets, but I never bother testing to see how long that lasts.
Other times for a restart, software install/uninstalls.
linux do. with correct shim and stuff, its down to 0.7 seconds example of 7 steps to booth 1.1 ARM in ~5 sec https://elinux.org/images/b/b3/Elce11_koen.pdf do it on current top ryzen or i7 and you will be in sub sec.
The TRX80 in particular was just straight out unbelievable. It would have almost every EPYC feature at half the price. 8 Channel memory is the big differentiator between Epyc and ThreadRipper. There is no way at all AMD is going to put out an 8 Channel TR as it would eat marketshare on a higher margin product. I couldn't believe people bought into that rumor.
Arguably, the main differentiator between Epyc and Threadripper is dual-socket support. The one-socket P-variant Epycs aren't that much more expensive than the corresponding Threadrippers.
But that's exactly the point, no one would buy Eypc single core if TR had 8 channel memory. The differential might not be huge but Eypc-P does cost more TR. To create this TRX80 platform they'd destroy the entire point of the Eypc P models. And they aren't going to do that because the OEM's would abandon those products even if they did keep them.
EPYC is also available in low-core count SKUs. Sometimes you need a lot of PCIe lanes and RAM but don't need a lot of CPU power. An 8-, 12-, 16-core EPYC fits; Threadripper doesn't (depending on the generation, there are 12-core TR, but there's no 8-core).
We're putting our third 8-core EPYC server into production later this month or early Feb (Gigabyte EPYC mobos are backordered due to chipset shortages, according to Gigabyte).
I kind of assumed that these unsubstantiated rumors were examples of misinformation intentionally leaked to a person/partner/vendor/etc to determine if they were in turn leaking the information to the press.
AMD are quite well known for putting out false info, more for gpus as GPUs launch much closer to release of information from them as they aren't a platform, just a plug in device. CPU stuff has to be talked about so far in advance to partners that it's mostly pointless. However the general trick is to change shader amounts, or move bandwidth by 10%, have a different product name to try and find a leaker. Faking an entire new platform people might end up disappointed not to see (even if 8 channel would be worthless for 99% of threadripper buyers) is generally a bad move. You want to leak essentially meaningless differences or things you can't really tell are good or bad. A new gpu has 5% more bandwidth, you don't really know how much bandwidth it needs, if it's called a 5700XT or a 5600 ultra, outside of catching leakers that just doesn't matter.
So most of these types of leaks as in the article are more either fanboys whipping themselves into a frenzy and making stuff up or misreading something, misquoting it and doing it enough that people repeat it and people read the rumour again from others now and they convince themselves it must be real. These ones are just nonsense, companies won't leak fake platforms.
Because: 1 ) Having learned its lesson a decade+ ago with LGA775, Intel wants no part of the "the CPU mechanically fits in the socket, but there is no BIOS support so it won't work" garbagefire that results from mobo OEMs not spending extra for a BIOS chip that can hold more than 2 generations worth of microcode again.
2) Most of not all of the extra pins are for increased quantity/stability of power delivery; so while they could have continued with another 115x socket it would have been at the expense of lower maximum clock rates. If any pins are for something else; they're presumably for a feature that can be safely disabled for testing (ex an extra PCIe x4 off the CPU or an x8 DMI).
Didn't they run into a problem recently where updating motherboards to support the newest processors removed support for the oldest processors because manufacturers are still using EEPROMs that were reasonably sized in 1997?
I have a PC with a 1700x and a Gigabyte x370 chipset with the latest bios release (Nov 2019). So far that PC doesn't seem to have any issues. It doesn't have a RAID setup though.
Nope, it started happening on AM4 boards a year and a half ago. Then last year, some boards resorted to removing features (eg raid) to cram more versions of microcode in.
This is why I love Anandtech - they really do their research. I usually don't believe most tech news unless it's written about here. Thank you Anandtech and Dr. Ian Cutress for cutting through the fake news time and time again!
Apparently they didn't do their research. It's listed on the USB-IF standards committee. Seems like Anandtech is taking a swipe at Gamers Nexus, which was the original source. GN has a super high accuracy rate, has its own sources, and has the backing of USB-IF listings...a standards committee. So. Odd that they would criticize them like this, but not have the cojones to call out GN directly. This is like a subtweet article lol.
With Ryzen desktop CPUs pushing 16 cores, and desktop APUs coming soon (possibly with 8 cores?), it would be nice to see support for quad-channel memory. Especially in the APUs.
Was actually surprised the mobile APUs still only have dual-channel memory. Will be interesting to see some benchmarks of Ryzen Mobile 4000 systems in single-channel and dual-channel setups to see how performance changes; and to extrapolate from there to see how (if?) it would improve with the extra two channels.
The APUs are only 8 cores max, and most of the bandwidth is needed for the tiny iGPU anyway. Extra memory channels come at a cost, especially in terms of power, which means less watts for your CPU/GPU cores. Further if your memory isn't all soldered down (which I abhor) then it also means more slots and sticks to actually utilize. That makes it unpalatable, especially for the mobile space.
With that said, Ryzen Mobile 4000 supports LPDDR4X up to 4266, which offers a TON more bandwidth. If manufacturers take advantage of it AND utilize a proper dual-channel configuration, they'll see a massive boost without the power consumption of an exotic-for-this-segment quad channel configuration.
On the desktop, dual channel is still fine for the vast majority of cases. If you can afford their 16 core chip, you can afford high-end RAM. You've got a lot of options too for low latencies at 1:1 IF or much higher clocks but higher latencies at 2:1. If that's not good enough for your workload, they already HAVE a quad-channel HEDT platform. Anyway for regular consumers, dual channel DDR4 is good enough until DDR5 platforms arrive.
Additional memory channel require a lot more CPU pins and a lot of extra complexity in routing the memory from the socket to the DIMM modules.
As unfortunate as it is, I doubt mainstream will move to quad-channel. DDR5 will almost double the bandwidth, so that'll probably hold us over for a while again.
This all seems odd, as those chipsets were, and still are, listed on the USB-IF standards committee. Perhaps the author missed that bit. Companies don't submit things to standards bodies for...nothing.
As usual rumors are things yiu should take with huge grain of salt, they can be wrong, things change during development, someone can get something wrong too,... So never plan based on rumors and so on.
But of course a lot of sources will deny it. Not everyone is ready to leak things. Or to confirm anything. Those are things that will cost them their job, if it ever gets out who leaked it. And sometimes people are given tiny bit different info to make source more likely to locate. Not to mention that not everyone gets all information. There are cases I know where you could count quite few people as primary source and thry knew nothing, because ony few people in company actually knew about something till last possible moment.
But on the end, I simply take rumors as interesting and I find it even more interesting to see what comes out and if anything was actually rumored right. Because sometimes names change, but general idea like two sockets still could be correct.
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CajunArson - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
Screw the TRX-80!I want my TRS-80! [Betcha can't beat the sub-second boot time]
FreckledTrout - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
LOL Miss those days.Dolda2000 - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
With systems that have standby modes, does boot time even matter anymore? Is there ever a reason to turn a system completely off other than to fix kernel panics or faulty hardware?Hul8 - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
The peace of mind from knowing you have a "freshly" booted Windows instead of one riddled with crud from weeks' uptime?I know this is less of an issue on Windows 10, but I've long had the habit of restarting every Windows machine every few days to reset the state and regain the normal performance. Then again, this might only affect me due to the number of stuff (with drivers of various quality) I have connected.
It's another matter that "shutdown" doesn't always mean what it used to mean; unless you've disabled fast boot, Windows will only close applications, but will save the system state and resume from that when you start the next time - a sort of "hiberation lite" if you will. (You can prevent this on a case-by-case basis by holding Shift while you press Shutdown.)
blppt - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
I've personally never had problems with NT-kernel windows being up for months at a time. Heck, at work I had a daily use win2k workstation up for 450+ days, and that was with being forced to use the legendary IE6 every day.Unfortunately, that probably isn't the safest thing to do with critical security packages being issued every month or so, but it didn't perform any worse with 450+ days versus a couple of hours. And that was with a mere 256MB of ram.
My home gaming box doesn't go more than a few weeks without reboot, because of video driver updates. You can technically install nvidia drivers nowadays and not be forced to reboot, but occasionally i've noticed some odd behavior after installing the new drivers without rebooting afterwards.
Reflex - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
Since Win2k I've rarely had to reboot Windows more than monthly after patch tuesday. Since Win7 blue screens have become so rare that even that scenario rarely happens. Memory does not work like you seem to think, 'crud' is a Win9x era thing.0ldman79 - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
There are still the occasional memory leak in a driver.Windows 10 randomly refuses to display text on the start menu for me regardless of video drivers, which is the recommended fix.
7 was more stable and faster.
GreenReaper - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
Try turning off translucency effects? They knocked my X1400 Mobile system out of usability a year ago and still haven't been fixed.FunBunny2 - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
"fix kernel panics or faulty hardware"It still happens. The Xfinity wifi router gets confused. My wifi card would lock up, then lock up the whole machine. Power off/on of the router was the only thing that fixed it. Still happens.
khanikun - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
At work, I sometimes get a confused bluecoat proxy or maybe it's Windows. I don't know. I use smart cards to login at work. One for regular user, one for admin account. The admin account gets no internet browser love. It doesn't launch (GPO settings blocking it) and if for some reason it does launch, the proxy blocks it's outside access.Sometimes when I logon with my admin account, logoff later, it somehow caches that info. Even though I logon to my non-admin account, it somehow thinks I'm on my admin account and my browser usage gets blocked. Everything works perfectly fine, aside from the browser issue. The only quick fix is to restart. Maybe if I wait long enough, whatever connection, credential, whatever issue resets, but I never bother testing to see how long that lasts.
Other times for a restart, software install/uninstalls.
FunBunny2 - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
"I want my TRS-80"affectionately pronounced 'Trash-80', and true it was.
deil - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
linux do. with correct shim and stuff, its down to 0.7 secondsexample of 7 steps to booth 1.1 ARM in ~5 sec
https://elinux.org/images/b/b3/Elce11_koen.pdf
do it on current top ryzen or i7 and you will be in sub sec.
close - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
QNX Neutrino boots up in about 250ms.croc - Sunday, August 23, 2020 - link
PDP 11-70. Instantaneous boot.FreckledTrout - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
I never did believe any of those rumors they all seemed a bit far fetched to me.rahvin - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
The TRX80 in particular was just straight out unbelievable. It would have almost every EPYC feature at half the price. 8 Channel memory is the big differentiator between Epyc and ThreadRipper. There is no way at all AMD is going to put out an 8 Channel TR as it would eat marketshare on a higher margin product. I couldn't believe people bought into that rumor.Dolda2000 - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
Arguably, the main differentiator between Epyc and Threadripper is dual-socket support. The one-socket P-variant Epycs aren't that much more expensive than the corresponding Threadrippers.rahvin - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
But that's exactly the point, no one would buy Eypc single core if TR had 8 channel memory. The differential might not be huge but Eypc-P does cost more TR. To create this TRX80 platform they'd destroy the entire point of the Eypc P models. And they aren't going to do that because the OEM's would abandon those products even if they did keep them.phoenix_rizzen - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
EPYC is also available in low-core count SKUs. Sometimes you need a lot of PCIe lanes and RAM but don't need a lot of CPU power. An 8-, 12-, 16-core EPYC fits; Threadripper doesn't (depending on the generation, there are 12-core TR, but there's no 8-core).We're putting our third 8-core EPYC server into production later this month or early Feb (Gigabyte EPYC mobos are backordered due to chipset shortages, according to Gigabyte).
rahvin - Wednesday, January 15, 2020 - link
If you aren't gigabyte only the supermicro eypc boards are pretty nice if you are ok with all the supermicro idiosyncrasies that is.MrCommunistGen - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
I kind of assumed that these unsubstantiated rumors were examples of misinformation intentionally leaked to a person/partner/vendor/etc to determine if they were in turn leaking the information to the press.drunkenmaster - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
AMD are quite well known for putting out false info, more for gpus as GPUs launch much closer to release of information from them as they aren't a platform, just a plug in device. CPU stuff has to be talked about so far in advance to partners that it's mostly pointless. However the general trick is to change shader amounts, or move bandwidth by 10%, have a different product name to try and find a leaker. Faking an entire new platform people might end up disappointed not to see (even if 8 channel would be worthless for 99% of threadripper buyers) is generally a bad move. You want to leak essentially meaningless differences or things you can't really tell are good or bad. A new gpu has 5% more bandwidth, you don't really know how much bandwidth it needs, if it's called a 5700XT or a 5600 ultra, outside of catching leakers that just doesn't matter.So most of these types of leaks as in the article are more either fanboys whipping themselves into a frenzy and making stuff up or misreading something, misquoting it and doing it enough that people repeat it and people read the rumour again from others now and they convince themselves it must be real. These ones are just nonsense, companies won't leak fake platforms.
close - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
"there's next to no difference between Coffee Lake Refresh and Comet Lake silicon"So what's the requirement behind a new socket?
FSWKU - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
To make sure you buy a new motherboard.DanNeely - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
Because:1 ) Having learned its lesson a decade+ ago with LGA775, Intel wants no part of the "the CPU mechanically fits in the socket, but there is no BIOS support so it won't work" garbagefire that results from mobo OEMs not spending extra for a BIOS chip that can hold more than 2 generations worth of microcode again.
2) Most of not all of the extra pins are for increased quantity/stability of power delivery; so while they could have continued with another 115x socket it would have been at the expense of lower maximum clock rates. If any pins are for something else; they're presumably for a feature that can be safely disabled for testing (ex an extra PCIe x4 off the CPU or an x8 DMI).
Retycint - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
Somehow AMD managed to make it work with AM4 though, supporting 3 (soon to be 4) gens of RyzensLord of the Bored - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
Didn't they run into a problem recently where updating motherboards to support the newest processors removed support for the oldest processors because manufacturers are still using EEPROMs that were reasonably sized in 1997?sarafino - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
I have a PC with a 1700x and a Gigabyte x370 chipset with the latest bios release (Nov 2019). So far that PC doesn't seem to have any issues. It doesn't have a RAID setup though.lmcd - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
That's very subjective considering multiple motherboard manufacturers recommend only taking the latest updates if you're running newer silicon.DanNeely - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
Nope, it started happening on AM4 boards a year and a half ago. Then last year, some boards resorted to removing features (eg raid) to cram more versions of microcode in.https://www.anandtech.com/show/12971/amd-bios-limi...
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/psa-be-carefu...
Drkrieger01 - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
This is why I love Anandtech - they really do their research. I usually don't believe most tech news unless it's written about here. Thank you Anandtech and Dr. Ian Cutress for cutting through the fake news time and time again!HeyYou,It'sMe - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
Apparently they didn't do their research. It's listed on the USB-IF standards committee. Seems like Anandtech is taking a swipe at Gamers Nexus, which was the original source. GN has a super high accuracy rate, has its own sources, and has the backing of USB-IF listings...a standards committee. So. Odd that they would criticize them like this, but not have the cojones to call out GN directly. This is like a subtweet article lol.Korguz - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
maybe posting a link to this would help ?DigitalFreak - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
That's what you get when you read WCCFTechphoenix_rizzen - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
With Ryzen desktop CPUs pushing 16 cores, and desktop APUs coming soon (possibly with 8 cores?), it would be nice to see support for quad-channel memory. Especially in the APUs.Was actually surprised the mobile APUs still only have dual-channel memory. Will be interesting to see some benchmarks of Ryzen Mobile 4000 systems in single-channel and dual-channel setups to see how performance changes; and to extrapolate from there to see how (if?) it would improve with the extra two channels.
Alexvrb - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
The APUs are only 8 cores max, and most of the bandwidth is needed for the tiny iGPU anyway. Extra memory channels come at a cost, especially in terms of power, which means less watts for your CPU/GPU cores. Further if your memory isn't all soldered down (which I abhor) then it also means more slots and sticks to actually utilize. That makes it unpalatable, especially for the mobile space.With that said, Ryzen Mobile 4000 supports LPDDR4X up to 4266, which offers a TON more bandwidth. If manufacturers take advantage of it AND utilize a proper dual-channel configuration, they'll see a massive boost without the power consumption of an exotic-for-this-segment quad channel configuration.
On the desktop, dual channel is still fine for the vast majority of cases. If you can afford their 16 core chip, you can afford high-end RAM. You've got a lot of options too for low latencies at 1:1 IF or much higher clocks but higher latencies at 2:1. If that's not good enough for your workload, they already HAVE a quad-channel HEDT platform. Anyway for regular consumers, dual channel DDR4 is good enough until DDR5 platforms arrive.
nevcairiel - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
Additional memory channel require a lot more CPU pins and a lot of extra complexity in routing the memory from the socket to the DIMM modules.As unfortunate as it is, I doubt mainstream will move to quad-channel. DDR5 will almost double the bandwidth, so that'll probably hold us over for a while again.
HeyYou,It'sMe - Monday, January 13, 2020 - link
This all seems odd, as those chipsets were, and still are, listed on the USB-IF standards committee. Perhaps the author missed that bit. Companies don't submit things to standards bodies for...nothing.hammer256 - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
Is there a link? I can't seem to find anything on USB-IF's product search page.Devo2007 - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
"If the second source is trusted, for example a fellow media peer in the industry that has a history of accuraccy and one that we trust...."Spelling mistakes happen, but it's a bit ironic that the error was with the word "accuracy" :)
phoenix_rizzen - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
Just finished watching Zombieland and had to make sure to get the double-tap acc/acc in there?SethNW - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
As usual rumors are things yiu should take with huge grain of salt, they can be wrong, things change during development, someone can get something wrong too,... So never plan based on rumors and so on.But of course a lot of sources will deny it. Not everyone is ready to leak things. Or to confirm anything. Those are things that will cost them their job, if it ever gets out who leaked it. And sometimes people are given tiny bit different info to make source more likely to locate. Not to mention that not everyone gets all information. There are cases I know where you could count quite few people as primary source and thry knew nothing, because ony few people in company actually knew about something till last possible moment.
But on the end, I simply take rumors as interesting and I find it even more interesting to see what comes out and if anything was actually rumored right. Because sometimes names change, but general idea like two sockets still could be correct.
CrystalCowboy - Tuesday, January 14, 2020 - link
Supply and demand. There was a lot of justified interest in the buildup to Ryzen 3000, and someone stepped in to fill the demand.urbanman2004 - Saturday, January 25, 2020 - link
3700X FTW 😅