Ryzen, NVIDIA & Unity 8 Abandonment Topped H1'2017

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 3 July 2017 at 01:29 PM EDT. 3 Comments
PHORONIX
With the first half of the year in the books, here's a look back at our most popular articles on Phoronix for H1'2017. Written in the first six months of the year were 1,710 news items and 187 featured articles/reviews.

Nearly all but a handful of these 1,897 pieces of content were written by your's truly. It remains since early 2013 where there has been fresh content on Phoronix seven days per week, 365 days per year. If you would like to support the Linux hardware testing operations and news coverage I have done over the past 13 years, please consider showing your support by viewing this site without any ad-blocker or alternatively joining Phoronix Premium or making a PayPal tip. Thanks for your understanding and support.

Up first is the most popular open-source/Linux news for H1'17:

AMD's Ryzen Will Really Like A Newer Linux Kernel
AMD's Ryzen CPU is finally shipping in a few days! If you are planning to be an early adopter of AMD Ryzen processors, you will really want to be running a newer Linux kernel release for proper support and performance.

Kodi Is Getting A Proper Netflix Plugin
The Kodi HTPC software will soon have a "real" Netflix plugin/add-on for making a better show/movie watching experience.

Some Ryzen Linux Users Are Facing Issues With Heavy Compilation Loads
I haven't encountered this issue myself on any of my Ryzen Linux boxes, but it seems there are a number of Ryzen Linux users who are facing segmentation faults and sometimes crashes when running concurrent compilation loads on these Zen CPUs.

Ubuntu To Abandon Unity 8, Switch Back To GNOME
Canonical has announced via Mark Shuttleworth they are ending their development of the Unity 8 desktop environment and will be switching back to GNOME desktop by Ubuntu 18.04.

DRM Updates Submitted For Linux 4.11, Torvalds Explodes Over Code Quality
David Airlie submitted the main DRM driver updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel, but Linus Torvalds isn't happy about the code quality of a new addition and is considering not accepting the DRM changes for this next kernel release.

Ten Exciting Features Of The Linux 4.10 Kernel
The Linux 4.10 kernel didn't end up being released today, but was pushed back by an extra week. However, in looking forward to next weekend, here are ten of the features that excite us about Linux 4.10.

NVIDIA's "Open-Source Guy" Has Left The Company
One of the main public-facing figures to NVIDIA's open-source driver efforts has left the company to pursue a new opportunity.

Debian 9.0 "Stretch" Might Not Have UEFI Secure Boot Support
Debian 9.0 "Stretch" has seen UEFI Secure Boot support no longer being considered a release blocker but is now just a stretch goal for this upcoming release.

Valve Hires X11 Veteran Keith Packard To Work On The Linux Display Stack
Valve's latest high-profile hire is adding Keith Packard to their roster of Linux graphics driver developers.

NVIDIA Makes Huge Code Contribution To Qt, New Qt 3D Studio
The Qt Company today announced Qt 3D Studio, a new 3D UI authoring system, thanks to NVIDIA providing Qt with hundreds of thousands of lines of source code making up this application.

And then ten most popular featured articles:

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Linux Benchmarks
The day many of you have been waiting for is finally here: AMD Zen (Ryzen) processors are shipping! Thanks to AMD coming around at the last minute, I received a Ryzen 7 1800X yesterday evening and have been putting it through its paces. Here is my walkthrough of the Linux experience for the AMD Ryzen and new motherboard and a number of the initial Linux benchmarks for this high-end Zen CPU while much more coverage is coming in the hours and days ahead.

Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux Gaming Performance With NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060/1080
It's been a while since last testing Windows 10 vs. Linux on different, newer Linux game ports with a variety of GPUs, but that changed this week. As mentioned this weekend, I've been working on a large, fresh Windows vs. Linux gaming performance comparison. The results available today are for NVIDIA with testing a GeForce GTX 1060 and GTX 1080 on Windows 10 Pro x64 and Ubuntu 16.10 x86_64 with the latest drivers and using a variety of newer Direct3D 11/12 / OpenGL / Vulkan games.

AMD Ryzen 7 1700 Linux Benchmarks: Great Multi-Core Performance For $329
Yesterday we posted launch-day Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks that were particularly appealing for multi-core / heavily-threaded workloads like code compilation. Given all the code compilation done by Linux users in particular, if you were intrigued by the Ryzen 7 1800X performance but find the $499 USD price-tag to be too higher, today I have my initial benchmark figures on the Ryzen 7 1700. The Ryzen 7 1700 is still eight cores and sixteen threads but will only set you back $329 USD as the current low-end Ryzen processor for what's currently available.

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X vs. Intel Core i7 7700K Linux Gaming Performance
For those craving some Linux gaming benchmarks from the newly-released AMD Ryzen 7 1800X processor, here are some test results. In this initial comparison are benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 1800K to Core i7 7700K when running these processors at stock speeds while using a Radeon R9 Fury graphics card paired with AMDGPU+RadeonSI for the Linux graphics driver stack.

GCC 7.0 vs. LLVM Clang 4.0 Performance (January 2017)
LLVM Clang 4.0 is set to be released in February while GCC 7 will be released as stable in March~April. For those curious how both compilers are currently performing, here is our latest installment of GCC vs. LLVM Clang benchmarking on Linux x86_64.

Radeon Windows 10 vs. Linux RadeonSI/RADV Gaming Performance
On Monday I published a Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux gaming performance comparison with NVIDIA GeForce graphics while today the tables have turned and is a Windows vs. Linux gaming benchmark battle with AMD Radeon graphics.

AMD Ryzen CPU Core Scaling Performance
Curious how Ryzen scales across its CPU cores and SMT? Here are some Ubuntu Linux benchmarks testing a Ryzen 7 1700 with different core/thread counts.

Windows 10 Creators Update vs. Ubuntu 17.04 Linux Radeon Gaming Performance
Given Microsoft's Windows 10 Creators Update earlier this month and the never-ending advancements to the open-source Linux graphics driver stack along with the recent release of Ubuntu 17.04, here are some fresh benchmarks of Windows 10 vs. Ubuntu Linux when running a wide variety of cross-platform games with an AMD Radeon RX 580 and R9 Fury graphics cards.

Core i7 7700K vs. Ryzen 7 1800X With Ubuntu 17.04 + Linux 4.12
Given the recent BIOS improvements for Ryzen and the ever-advancing state of Linux and components like Mesa (although no recent Ryzen-specific work), here are some fresh tests of the current high-end Ryzen 7 1800X compared to an Intel Core i7 7700K on Ubuntu 17.04 with Linux 4.12 and Mesa 17.2-dev.

51 GPUs Tested, From The Radeon HD 2900XT To RX 580 & R9 Fury: Testing The 2017 Linux Driver Stack
It's that time of the year where we see how the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver stack is working on past and present hardware in a large GPU comparison with various OpenGL games and workloads. This year we go from the new Radeon RX 580 all the way back to the Radeon HD 2900XT, looking at how the mature Radeon DRM kernel driver and R600 Gallium3D driver is working for aging ATI/AMD graphics hardware. In total there were 51 graphics cards tested for this comparison of Radeon cards as well as NVIDIA GeForce hardware for reference.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week