A sign of the times, Linus Torvalds says he has upgraded his main PC to an AMD based system. Linus said in his Sunday update that the most excitement he had that week was upgrading his PC to an AMD Threadripper 3970x processor. Most of the update was of course work related as they are hard at work on Linux Kernel 5.7-rc7.
In fact, the biggest excitement this week for me was just that I
–Linus
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.
He didn’t mention what he was using prior to his upgrade but having his workload being completed 3x faster is a pretty nice upgrade. As it should be, the 3970x is a monster CPU with its 32 cores, 64 threads and 144MB of combined cache. He also might be enjoying much of the 88 PCIe lanes that the 3970x provides. Having all those extra lanes is an upgrade in itself for a work station PC.
I wonder how he is keeping his new work horse cooled as I have heard him talk in interviews of how he prefers his PC’s to be very quiet and that he would sacrifice some horse power in favor of having a PC he can’t hear.
I also wonder if this is related to his right hand man, Greg Kroah-Hartman receiving a similar setup from Wendell and his team over at Level One Techs. The same day Linus posted his update Wendell released a video where in it he builds Greg Kroah-Hartman an AMD Threadripper 3970x based system. I could just see Wendell now if he discovered that Linus himself was the one actually using the system. He would lose his mind with excitement.
Interestingly, it would seem that Linus has a long term goal of leaving both AMD and Intel behind in favor of an Arm based system. I look forward to reading about that day when it eventually comes.
