So I recently bought an 8700k. I was wondering if I should rather return it and get AMD instead? Not sure how much the recent bugs will impact me performance wise.
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20180102222354.qikjmf7...
Of course, this depends on workload — gaming will see different results than computationally heavy tasks.
It is likely that games using Vulkan, DX12 or OoenGL's AZDO functions will see much lower performance impact (because they usually only do a handful of syscalls per frame) than games using older APIs, or even OpenGLs immediate mode (which does one syscall per emitted vertex, in worst case)
If you absolutely need the best single core performance you can, Intel is the way forward.
If multicore performance is important (lots of multitasking, lots of heavy processes running) then one of the 8 core Ryzen 7's will be better, for cheaper.
Perhaps with drivers written in the 90s for hardware from the 90s. Any OpenGL implementation worth its salt will buffer those requests on the client side until they need to be observed. Indeed this was a big feature in the heyday of DirectX 9 where D3D programmers had to count the drawcalls whereas with OpenGL you have way more leeway with calls since the driver tends to be smarter and caches that stuff.
In theory with a modern driver using OpenGL's immediate mode API shouldn't need any more syscalls than building the vertex buffers in your program, setting up the necessary state and issuing a buffer draw command.
The only time where you'd need a syscall per emitted vertex would be if the GPU had OpenGL-like commands and your OpenGL implementation was a thin wrapper over that. I think one of ATI's very early GPUs worked like that (although the commands were per primitive, not per vertex).
Nowadays, thanks to vulkan and AZDO with glMultiDrawElementsIndirect, you're right, of course — you might even use a single syscall per frame.
That's why I said, in absolute worst case.
Remember, a lot of the Zen arch was developed by Jim Keller, who is the brains behind the Athlon 64.
Although AMD’s response in the forum was that these were isolated issues, phoronix was able to
reproduce crashes by running a stress test that consists of compiling a number of open source
programs. They report they were able to get 53 segfaults with one hour of attempted compilation.AMD has committed to the AM4 socket they're using until at least 2020, so if you buy a Ryzen processor and motherboard today, you should be able to use that motherboard with Ryzen class processors until 2020.
Good to know AMD is doing that! Getting new motherboards is annoying.
Intel switched to the AMD model starting with the i3/i5/i7 series, now moving to an integrated MMU themselves.