AMD’s lineup of powerful, high-core monsters earned a huge proponent this week. As part of Linux 5.7-rc7’s announcement, Linux creator Linus Torvalds revealed that he had upgraded to a new machine with a Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, ending his long-time relationship with Intel. The move isn’t all too surprising, being that Torvalds has been pretty public about his grievances with blue team lately.
Launched in November 2019, AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3970X is a 32-core, 64-thread processor with an official boost clock of 4.5 GHz. There’s actually an even more powerful SKU – the 64C/128T 3990X – but Torvalds said that the middle sibling has already allowed him to run test builds three times faster.
“…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,” said Torvalds. “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.”