Comment on spychip-free AMD chips from 2013
grue@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Yeah, that page renders with a single column of lists for me, and is also written in a bit of a confusing way. The author is definitely infinitely better at English than I am at German, but it’s clear it isn’t their native language.
Anyway, I have an Asus KGPE-D16 with a couple of Opteron 6272 (Bulldozer) CPUs in it, but I think that was because Libreboot had problems with the 63XX (Piledriver) at the time (since resolved), apparently, not because Piledriver was off-limits due to the inclusion of a PSP.
My goal was to get the fastest fully-trustworthy computer ever made [or reasonably close to it: IIRC, 6272s were much cheaper than similar chips with a few hundred more MHz], and that’s basically it. The absolute fastest would be a KGPE-D16 paired with Opteron 6386 SEs, I think.
That said, you asked about a laptop or mini PC. Brute-forcing performance with 32 cores of server hardware is one thing, but I’m not sure a 2/3/4-core desktop or mobile Bulldozer-family chip is going to have acceptable performance in 2026.
I think for people who don’t use highly multi-threaded tasks, the lower core count Piledriver CPU’s would be a better choice, as the 6272 is likely going to use a lot more power at idle, and each core is clocked significantly slower than a lower core count chip, exacerbating the already low single thread performance of those chips.
The desktop chips also overclocked quite well, I recall pushing my FX-6300 to 4.5ghz without much issue, and the same for the 8-core FX-8320. Though I’m unsure if Libreboot supports overclocking (if not, than having higher default clocks would be even more important, IMO).
grue@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You accidentally pasted my quote again where you meant to put the link URL. What video were you trying to cite?
Ah sorry, I meant to link this video: m.youtube.com/watch?v=6M53LdJcvOo
In the meantime I also found this video by Phil’s computer lab where he tests your CPU, and at the end concludes that, at least for gaming, the desktop CPU’s are better (but also assumes over clocking is an option, and I have since learned it’s not terribly viable to do on coreboot).