News Linus Torvalds still uses an AMD RX 580 from 2017 — also ditches Apple Silicon for an Intel laptop

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Admin said:
His deliberate use of modest, open-friendly hardware subtly pushes back against AI hype and proprietary bloat.
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So subtly that it's homeopathic.
ezst036 said:
Open source support lasting for such a long time is so wonderful as opposed to the planned obsolescence machine.
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It depends very much on the details, if the "planned obsolescence" is needed to push things forward then it's much better than having open source being held back in the name of support.
Imagine if we were still on pong machines to keep support with older tech...
 
Dr3ams said:
I thought the RX 570 and 580 came out in 2018. Anyway, I still have a RX 570 8 GB I bought back in 2019. I used it for a few years until I upgraded to the RX 6700 XT 12 GB (my current GPU). The 570 is still a good GPU. I could play The Division 2 with it set on high without any issues.
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2017, I mean technically 2016, they're just the RX 470 and 480 with a new die revision so they can hit higher clocks. You can flash many RX 470's and 480's to RX 570's and 580's as its mainly a clock speed and slight power increase, and most of those could tolerate the increased clock and power settings.

Some OEMS actually didnt change a thing on power and clocks and just changed the name. So a Dell OEM RX 480 and RX 580 are exactly the same card, just with a different name. This was a thing because AMD never release a reference RX 580, they just told the other OEM's to have fun. So some RX 580's have exactly the same clocks as the RX 480 (1266 boost), and others shoot up to 1430 boost. We also have the RX 590, the RX 480's 12nm final form, up to 1580 boost clocks.

I think Polaris is AMD's best GPU architecture, it was never the fastest, but it was good enough, and it was there when the company desperately needed it. Its interesting to see it still around, and somewhat relevant for low end gaming, almost a decade after its release.

RX 480
https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/184327/amd-rx480-8192-160603

Dell RX 580
https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/194686/dell-rx580-8192-170301
 
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If you need a dGPU for plain old desktop graphics, like for a machine which lacks an iGPU, I think the humble RX 550 is possibly the GOAT. It's still fast enough at 3D to run Google Earth smoothly, supports new enough display standards to do 4k @ 60 Hz, and yet uses less power than newer cards like the RX 6400.

Unlike Nvidia, these Polaris cards work perfectly with the open source drivers. That means, you don't have to do anything extra, aside from installing the OS.

The best part is that we can expect at least another decade of software support, considering the open source driver for AMD cards even a decade older are still getting updates and bug fixes.

The main thing you won't get is hardware encoding or decoding for anything newer than H.265. For that stuff, either the Intel A380 or a mid-range RDNA2 card is the way to go.
 
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artk2219 said:
2017, I mean technically 2016, they're just the RX 470 and 480 with a new die revision so they can hit higher clocks. You can flash many RX 470's and 480's to RX 570's and 580's as its mainly a clock speed and slight power increase, and most of those could tolerate the increased clock and power settings.

Some OEMS actually didnt change a thing on power and clocks and just changed the name. So a Dell OEM RX 480 and RX 580 are exactly the same card, just with a different name. This was a thing because AMD never release a reference RX 580, they just told the other OEM's to have fun. So some RX 580's have exactly the same clocks as the RX 480 (1266 boost), and others shoot up to 1430 boost. We also have the RX 590, the RX 480's 12nm final form, up to 1580 boost clocks.

I think Polaris is AMD's best GPU architecture, it was never the fastest, but it was good enough, and it was there when the company desperately needed it. Its interesting to see it still around, and somewhat relevant for low end gaming, almost a decade after its release.

RX 480
https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/184327/amd-rx480-8192-160603

Dell RX 580
https://www.techpowerup.com/vgabios/194686/dell-rx580-8192-170301
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It's amazing how everyone seems to forget the 470/480 were a thing. I remember them being hard to get at the time as they were performant enough and offered a huge jump in efficiency going from 28nm to 14nm. I grabbed the 8GB one at MSRP ($239) a few weeks after launch. One of my favorite cards.
 
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Thunder64 said:
I remember them being hard to get at the time as they were performant enough and offered a huge jump in efficiency going from 28nm to 14nm.
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The reason they got scarce was due to crypto (Ethereum) boom from that time (2017-2018).

I overpaid for my RX 550, and I didn't even buy at the peak of the market, but waited until prices lowered and inventories recovered a bit. IIRC, I paid like $120 (edit: no, actually just $90) for an allegedly $80 card. It was the 4 GB version, at least, and I did remember thinking it was an opportunity I should probably pounce on.
 
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ezst036 said:
AMD RX 580 are still fully supported, only on the Linux side though.

So, why not keep using it if its capable for the job. Open source support lasting for such a long time is so wonderful as opposed to the planned obsolescence machine.
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Lol I guess if you're going to only going to do the things that Linux is capable of doing You really don't need much of a processor at all.
 
I still use RX580 8GB on my main system: SuperMicro MB, Xeon 1275, 32GB DDR4 RAM. But then: I only play Solitaire and Majong. As it's Win10: will have to move to a new box (win11) this year: SuperMicro MB, 11900K, 4070, 128GB DDR4 RAM.
 
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I'm guessing Linus Torvalds has a build that is working well for him, and doesn't want to risk encountering the weird driver issues with whichever linux distro he is running where you effectively need to do a ton of google searches and hope one of the random forum posts has the solution where the commands suggested will still work on your distro.
 
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bit_user said:
The reason they got scarce was due to crypto (Ethereum) boom from that time (2017-2018).

I overpaid for my RX 550, and I didn't even buy at the peak of the market, but waited until prices lowered and inventories recovered a bit. IIRC, I paid like $120 (edit: no, actually just $90) for an allegedly $80 card. It was the 4 GB version, at least, and I did remember thinking it was an opportunity I should probably pounce on.
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For the 580 sure that's true. The 480 was basically a 290 using almost 100W less. 8GB was the icing on the cake. Since mining wasn't an issue, just high demand, I was able to get one at MSRP like I said. I just had to wait a month or so after launch. If only that were true today.
 
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razor512 said:
I'm guessing Linus Torvalds has a build that is working well for him,
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Clearly. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it", as the saying goes.

razor512 said:
and doesn't want to risk encountering the weird driver issues with whichever linux distro he is running where you effectively need to do a ton of google searches and hope one of the random forum posts has the solution where the commands suggested will still work on your distro.
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LOL, wut? No, it's not like that. AMD GPUs have been well-supported on Linux for probably about a decade. Just plug it in and go. That's for the graphics stuff, anyhow.

Where people have encountered a lot of problems and frustration is with the ROCm compute stuff, since distros only started compiling it in somewhat recently.
 
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TerryLaze said:
So subtly that it's homeopathic.

It depends very much on the details, if the "planned obsolescence" is needed to push things forward then it's much better than having open source being held back in the name of support.
Imagine if we were still on pong machines to keep support with older tech...
Click to expand...

What is so seductive about a company is going to boss you around?
 
HardwiredWireless said:
Lol I guess if you're going to only going to do the things that Linux is capable of doing You really don't need much of a processor at all.
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Let us not forget that Linux is capable of taking a Windows based gaming handheld and then without any hardware changes at all you get more frame rates and better battery life with that very same handheld just because you ditched Windows 11 Advertising Edition.
 
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bit_user said:
No, that's not accurate. The 290 used 2nd gen GCN silicon, made on a 28 nm node. The 480 used 4th gen GCN silicon, made on 14 nm.

Here's the Anandtech preview. They compare it to the 380, which was based on a 3rd gen GCN chip also made on the older 28 nm node:
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Let me correct that, its performance was like a 290/390 at far less power. I know it wasn't just a die shrink. I was going to link to Anandtech but that site is slow as hell at times. Right now it is working a bit better.

I know it was GCN 4 and probably the best of the bunch. The followup Vega seemed poor. Vega 64 was a power hog, Vega 56 was OK, but I wonder how "Big Polaris" would've done. Thankfully for AMD Vega did well with low CU counts on iGPU's.
 
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femboyswamp69 said:
Who?
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Linus Torvalds is the creator and lead maintainer of the Linux operating system.

Unlike most tech celebrities, he's still doing more or less the same technical work he did since the early days. By contrast, consider how Jensen Huang and Lisa Su started their careers as engineers, but haven't done any engineering in decades. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg started out as programmers, but very quickly changed their focus to management and business strategy. Even Jim Keller has long been out of the day-to-day work of CPU design and wasn't technically even the architect of Zen (that was Mike Clark).

If you read some of the stuff he's written, Linus is very smart and knowledgeable, but I don't think he's like a super genius. Just a smart, hard-working guy who happened to be doing the right stuff at the right time and stuck to his principles basically ever since.
 
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That's technically true but imho completely wrong...

"While Nvidia has since opened up a bit—publishing portions of its driver source"

Look at the patches, all the blob functionality went into mgmt CPU's embedded in the GPU and it just calls them now instead of going to the blob.
I'm not sure this should count as "opened up a bit" in any form...
 
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Ah, Polaris. I had a mining rig with 4 RX 570s and an RX 580. The 570 was actually preferred to mine ETH at the time because it was able to hit much lower power levels at the same hashrate. I want to say mine hashed around 32 MH/s at only 72 watts. I kept mine extremely cool and clean and sold them after the move to PoS (I was clear that I mined them to the buyers). Amazing, underrated cards.
 
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