I am thinking about assembling a desktop with AMD Ryzen 9 3950X. The RAM will be 128 GB.
Has anyone tried it with Fedora 31? What is it like? I heard people say that AMD processors don’t work well with Linux OS. If its reliability is inferior to Intel processors, I will stick with Intel I9 9900K.
AMD had a serious problem with the random number generator (rdrand) in the Ryzen 3000 series that prevented modern Linux distributions from booting:
In the meantime all mainboard manufacturers should have released BIOS firmware with a new CPU microcode and the problem should be fixed. To be sure, I would check with mainboard manufacturer before buying such CPU.
I think i will stay away from amd processors for now. That being said, i really appreciate amd for forcing Intel to cut prices
You should not have issues with AMD and linux. In general, the latest AMD processors, particularly those with high core counts, perform better on linux than on Windows.
The booting issue with Ryzen 3000 was resolved long ago, fairly soon after launch, by a workaround to systemd and also BIOS updates. The Ryzen 3000 Boot Problem With Newer Linux Distros Might Be Due To RdRand Issue - Phoronix
What is more disturbing is that the root RDRAND issue is/was a long-standing issue from many CPU generations ago: 1150286 – rdrand instruction fails after resume on AMD CPU
The rougher experience on linux was with AMD APUs, which seems to have settled down, though I’m not sure if they’re fully resolved. The non-APUs have been much less troublesome.
I would not hesitate to get AMD, and I’ve been running a 2700X with Fedora since launch with no problems. However, which CPU you get should depend more on your workloads.
For example, Intel has the advantage of better AVX and library optimizations (Zen 2 finally has a real AVX 256 implementation) which gives an edge for certain numerical computation applications. Plus, Intel is much better when it comes to the software and optimization side.
AMD is better now in just about everything else. Overall performance in many/most applications, PCI-E lanes, ECC memory support, price/value, and excitement/novelty factor, plus not being vulnerable to as many of the hardware bugs which keep getting found and thus not suffering performance penalties due to their mitigation.
If you’re worried about hardware bugs… Intel should be the last option on your list 
In the end, your CPU choice should ideally be guided by your use-case, but in general AMD + linux works just fine.
Thanks for your detailed explanation. My main tasks are related to scientific computing, which can benefit a lot from intel mkl. Amd seems to have better performance per dollar. I will give it a try in the future.
Yes, scientific computing is an area where there’s a case to be made to still go with Intel. Though, it is a closer race now with Ryzen 3000 compared to previous generations which had gimped AVX implementations, something I did not know before making my purchase.
Puget Systems has great articles benchmarking hardware for specific workloads, and you can see the 9900K is a good choice for engineering simulations, while AMD’s high core counts are better for rendering. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/SOLIDWORKS-2020-SP1-CPU-Performance-1681/
I use Fedora with AMD Radeon 10 (APU). It works Fine, even better than Windows. And never had any heating issues.
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