Ryzen problems - AGAIN!

[MikeB]

Previously I had 100 Zen1(Ryzen) chips and they all had the segfault bug, took me more than 3 months to "reproduce" the bug, then 2 attempts before an RMA: the first attempt failed when I told them I had 100 of them, they kick me back and forth between the distributor and AMD customer service, the second time I told them confirm the faulty batch number first, issued an RMA ticket to the distributor and only after that I sent them my full stock.

At that time I thought that I'd never ever again buy any AMD stuff, but then I cannot resist the CP value of Zen2 released recently, so I bought another 50 of them, guess what?

They have this weird idle state bug that randomly freezes! Even better is that virtually every fix available are basically disabling C6 entirely(either disable it in BIOS or via BIOS update which essentially does the same), or stuff like zenstates, so there goes turbo boost and power savings.

Seriously do those guys do chips in "see if it works" mode? No wonder why there is no public cloud that runs on AMD today: the ones who did went bankrupt paying SLA penalties.

I've seen a few benchmark threads about their performance, they are good for as long as they last, you've been warned.

You own 150 computers, do I understand you correctly? I hope it's not all for chess?

[shrapnel]

Previously I had 100 Zen1(Ryzen) chips and they all had the segfault bug, took me more than 3 months to "reproduce" the bug, then 2 attempts before an RMA: the first attempt failed when I told them I had 100 of them, they kick me back and forth between the distributor and AMD customer service

Looks like you forgot the Golden Words that people have been saying for YEARS....."AMD SUX ! "

[mbabigian]

Many of these complaints are self-inflicted. The problems the OP complains of are old as computers themselves. Some people learn from history some don't but the computer industry is perfectly consistent.

Back when I ran PCDOS I noticed that when a new version came out, early adopters got burned every time. I vowed never to upgrade my OS back then until the new OS was out for a year. That philosophy saved me massive headaches _every_ release. Upgrading a single app the second it comes out and getting burned means one app has a problem, but upgrading something that runs everything you have that way is a recipe for disaster. I then applied that same idea to processor upgrades and saved myself from many an expensive disaster like Intel's Pentium floating point bug etc. This philosophy goes triple for people managing 100s of PCs for work.

Burning yourself once is a learning experience, twice is a failure to learn from one's mistakes. These issues happen to every brand ARM, AMD, Intel and every OS.

I too plan to buy a Threadripper 32 or 64 core HEDT soon. Watching the technical forums and places like this help me decide when it is _relatively_ safe to spend $10k and not regret it. Patience will go a long way these days

My 2 cents.

[Damir]

Well the problem is already well-known:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=196683

Basically what it takes to be safe is to either use a crippled kernel or a crippled BIOS, which disables C-STATES and turbo boost.

What really frustrates me is that for stuff like CPUs I would assume them to be stable, just like for drinking water, I'd assume it is not toxic.

Now it seems for them it is launch first, then everyone else(OSes, motherboards, users) have to fix their mess and it is not like those are some corner cases that only happen once out of a million.

Even though it is well known, it is still a good idea to raise a stink about it. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Your statements put some fear in my heart about buying the 64 core threadripper.

Noob is only saying this cause is experimenting with extreme BIOS settings and expect them to work…. probably if he did not touch any of his extreme settings his PC would work just fine... but he wants much better performance for the money, and is not happy with anything else…..

[noobpwnftw]

Noob is only saying this cause is experimenting with extreme BIOS settings and expect them to work…

Exactly the opposite, I have no interest in trying anything other than defaults, and that is precisely my complaint is about.

[Dann Corbit]

I notice that the bug is 2 years old.
And the comments all seem to be kludge ideas.
Twiddling with voltages, and things like that.

[smatovic]

Many of these complaints are self-inflicted. The problems the OP complains of are old as computers themselves. Some people learn from history some don't but the computer industry is perfectly consistent.

Back when I ran PCDOS I noticed that when a new version came out, early adopters got burned every time. I vowed never to upgrade my OS back then until the new OS was out for a year. That philosophy saved me massive headaches _every_ release. Upgrading a single app the second it comes out and getting burned means one app has a problem, but upgrading something that runs everything you have that way is a recipe for disaster. I then applied that same idea to processor upgrades and saved myself from many an expensive disaster like Intel's Pentium floating point bug etc. This philosophy goes triple for people managing 100s of PCs for work.

Burning yourself once is a learning experience, twice is a failure to learn from one's mistakes. These issues happen to every brand ARM, AMD, Intel and every OS.

I too plan to buy a Threadripper 32 or 64 core HEDT soon. Watching the technical forums and places like this help me decide when it is _relatively_ safe to spend $10k and not regret it. Patience will go a long way these days

My 2 cents.

+1

It is safer to buy the second stepping of a CPU, and to wait for the first service pack of Windows.

--
Srdja