Linus Torvalds swaps Intel for AMD Threadripper, very happy with the results

Linus Torvalds made a big reveal during his Linux Kernel 5.7 RC7 release. He revealed that he was moving on from Intel CPUs. He joked by saying he wasn’t going towards ARM CPUs but revealed to have been relying on an AMD Threadripper CPU.

Linus is very happy with the jump!

By his comments, it is obvious he is more than happy with the end-result he got by switching from Intel. He has been putting this system through its paces for building and testing kernels. As a result, his ‘allmodconfig’ test builds are now three times faster than they used to be.

He said:

In fact, the biggest excitement this week for me was just that I upgraded my main machine, and for the first time in about 15 years, my desktop isn’t Intel-based. No, I didn’t switch to ARM yet, but I’m now rocking an AMD Threadripper 3970x. My ‘allmodconfig’ test builds are now three times faster than they used to be, which doesn’t matter so much right now during the calming down period, but I will most definitely notice the upgrade during the next merge window.

About the Threadripper 3970X

The AMD Ryzen AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X Processor has 32 cores/ 64 threads with 128MB L3 Cache. The CPU has a base/ boost clock speed of 3.7 GHz/ 4.5 GHz. Therefore this CPU is great for kernel developers since to its massive single and multi-threaded performance. Linus didn’t say which Intel CPU was using, but saying that the upgrade Threadripper is 3x the performance he’s getting says a lot.

This is good for both AMD and the Linux community. Linus builds Linux kernels would encourage many other developers to grab Threadripper for respective workloads. Intel has a lot of catching up to do even in the mainstream CPU business. While it may have seen Intel slowly crawling its way with the Comet Lake-S series, AMD has been gearing to launch the Matisse Refresh SKUs.

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