5+ months later, the Beast is finally alive

[Makaveli]

I just managed to grab a 5800X for $650 CAD this morning so i'm also jumping on the Zen 3 bandwagon.

 

[RMerlin]

I just managed to grab a 5800X for $650 CAD this morning so i'm also jumping on the Zen 3 bandwagon.

That`s a fairly reasonable price considering the situation, congratulations! The 5800X is also a very solid processor, I was debating between the 5800X and 5900X personally since I knew firmware building could benefit from the extra cores. But pretty much nothing else that I do will. It came down to having the budget for it, so I went for it.

 

[Makaveli]

That`s a fairly reasonable price considering the situation, congratulations! The 5800X is also a very solid processor, I was debating between the 5800X and 5900X personally since I knew firmware building could benefit from the extra cores. But pretty much nothing else that I do will. It came down to having the budget for it, so I went for it.

Based on your workflow totally understand.

I was tempted to go with the 5900X because the difference in MSRP isn't huge but most of my work won't benefit from the extra cores. Plus finding a 5900X in stock right now is difficult. I'm see alot more 5600X and 5800X in stock that quickly leave.

The same place I got the CPU was charging $800 CAD for it a week prior so I was watching their stock and pricing like a hawk the last couple days. It also helps the store is literally 5 mins walk from my place so no online ordering for me.

 

[maurer]

congrats are in order first !
jumping the curiosity bandwagon here - what OS do you run on the "beast" @RMerlin ?

 

[tommyv2]

Based on your workflow totally understand.

I was tempted to go with the 5900X because the difference in MSRP isn't huge but most of my work won't benefit from the extra cores. Plus finding a 5900X in stock right now is difficult. I'm see alot more 5600X and 5800X in stock that quickly leave.

The same place I got the CPU was charging $800 CAD for it a week prior so I was watching their stock and pricing like a hawk the last couple days. It also helps the store is literally 5 mins walk from my place so no online ordering for me.

I have a 5900X ordered since November 24th. Still nothing. Strangely enough it took me only 4 days to get an RTX 3080 in that same week. The market is a mess right now.

 

[RMerlin]

congrats are in order first !
jumping the curiosity bandwagon here - what OS do you run on the "beast" @RMerlin ?

Windows 10 Pro for the host, and I use an Ubuntu 20.04 VM for firmware development.

 

[anotherengineer]

Nice system, congrats, hope it works out well and lasts a long time!!

Prices and shortages are pretty crazy compared to what it was like before covid, and mining and scalping. I'm trying to build a small desktop for my daughter, and an AMD 3400G came in stock for $210 so I grabbed it. With the basic schooling she will use it for and roblox/minecraft it will be more than enough. Would have preferred a 3600 and RX570 but none in stock or price is out to lunch.

 

[Makaveli]

I have a 5900X ordered since November 24th. Still nothing. Strangely enough it took me only 4 days to get an RTX 3080 in that same week. The market is a mess right now.

I've seen people selling 5900X Kijiji for $1000-$1200 no thanks!

Canada computer has it listed at $779 you just need to wait for stock.

 

[intr0]

the human malware

Great phrase. And congrats on your custom box. Nice specs!

 

[Authority]

This will save me a LOT of time.

Out of curiosity had you consider Google or Amazon cloud to compile?

 

[RMerlin]

Out of curiosity had you consider Google or Amazon cloud to compile?

There's no way I could get anything faster than even my former i7 without spending thousands of dollars per month.

 

[Authority]

There's no way I could get anything faster than even my former i7 without spending thousands of dollars per month.

I don’t mean leasing a machine I mean buying cloud time.

 

[maurer]

There's no way I could get anything faster than even my former i7 without spending thousands of dollars per month.

you can get 24cores cloud servers for as low as 32$/m - of course on some less known providers like https://datasoft.ws/ctcloud24core.php

 

[sbsnb]

I don’t mean leasing a machine I mean buying cloud time.

Signing up for server time. Back to the future.

 

[RMerlin]

I don’t mean leasing a machine I mean buying cloud time.

Need multiple high IPC cores for the build process to be faster.

you can get 24cores cloud servers for as low as 32$/m - of course on some less known providers like https://datasoft.ws/ctcloud24core.php

Dedicated vs shared. 24 shared cores especially at a cheap reseller generally means highly overallocated resources.

 

[sfx2000]

A good part of those results is from upgrading from 6 threads to 20 threads in my build VM. But the single thread performance also has a significant impact as seen by the RT-AC68U build time which dropped by roughly 25%.

Cool thread - yes, Zen3 is that good

Even on a VM - wonder how it would be on metal, probably even faster

Couple of q's...

1) have you looked at ccache? I using this for both host cc and the cross-build, and this does help in my environment
2) I'm doing multi-thread builds - I'm based on openwrt these days for a side-project on MIPS... and this keeps things running while threads are doing more time intense things like C++ and cmake, which take forever relative to c code...

ionice -c 3 nice -n19 make -j5 V=s

I haven't built AsusWRT in quite some time...

 

[RMerlin]

Even on a VM - wonder how it would be on metal, probably even faster

The gap between virtualization and bare metal is growing increasingly thin these days. It's downright impressive (unless you are dealing with more intensive applications such as a graphical desktop).

have you looked at ccache? I using this for both host cc and the cross-build, and this does help in my environment

I've used ccache in the past back when I was building my own Android images for my Motorola Xoom. That's not really realistic to do with the very complicated and messy build system used by Asuswrt.

I'm doing multi-thread builds - I'm based on openwrt these days for a side-project on MIPS... and this keeps things running while threads are doing more time intense things like C++ and cmake, which take forever relative to c code...

I've made a number of tweaks to the build system so at least the components that cleanly build in multi-thread (like the kernel and its modules) now do so.

platform.mak:export PARALLEL_BUILD := -j$(shell grep -c '^processor' /proc/cpuinfo)

Some components however don't build cleanly that way so it's implemented on a case-by-case basis so for these I append $PARALLEL_BUILD to the build recipe.

Building multiple components in parallel would require scrapping and redesigning the whole build system from the ground up, so that's not possible. Broadcom's own build system is fairly complicated, and Asus had to use digital duct tape to make it fit with their own build system as used by Asuswrt, so the resulting system is a bit shaky, and can go down as deep as 8 makefile levels at times. That can't be parallized.

I was able to gain like 15-20% performance gain a few months ago just by fixing a few glaring issues that caused some components to be recompiled up to five times during a single build run. The RT-AX86U for example went from about 44 minutes down to 30-32 minutes after I increased multithreaded compilation and removed some of the recursive build recipes that were being repeated multiple times. The Zen 3 upgrade pushed that same firmware build down to 25 minutes now.

 

[elorimer]

That can't be parallized

Very punny.

 

[Rassal]

I know your pain RMerlin, i did the same, bought my RAM back in Sept. and needed 64gb for an AMD build, got 3200 also... but then the saga about getting motherboard and CPU... i was able to grab the MB during Christmas time, got myself a Zen3 ready board (Dark Hero) and then, all i needed was CPU, which was a real pain... and i decided that either a 5600x or 5900x would be fine, and whichever would come 1st would be good, since i'v been prepared for it since Sept. A 5600x came along, which i got a MSRP (got lucky at MemExpress i guess). Now my upgrade is done, real change from my old trusty i7 3930k, but was showing it's age... now if only i could grab a new Video card... this is another ball game, it's even worst than the CPU to grab... and i refuse to buy from a scalper! So i guess another couple of month waiting...

 

[sbsnb]

and i refuse to buy from a scalper! So i guess another couple of month waiting...

I hope the situation in silicon isn't like the one faced by anyone trying to buy ammunition (law enforcement, competitive target shooters, etc.). Remember toilet paper last April? That's been the ammunition market for 9 months now. Hopefully silicon won't be that scarce for the next year.