Where can I buy a Ryzen box?

[Gerald Henriksen]

On Mon, 10 Sep 2018 22:00:13 -0400, you wrote:

>On Monday, 10 September 2018 11.39.56 EDT Matthew Dillon wrote:
>> If you want to use the GPU for computation you may have to run Linux.  In
>> fact, you probably would have to.
>
>Could I do it with the CUDA compiler in Julia (which of course requires 
>getting Julia to work on DragonFly)? Or could I do it with OpenCL?

CUDA is an Nvidia only technology and is only supported on Linux,
Windows and macOS.  For unknown reasons they apparently don't enable
CUDA in the FreeBSD binary drivers so porting those won't help.

OpenCL would depend on if that has been ported to Dragonfly or not,
but it at least in theory can work with the AMD open source drivers,
Intel drivers, and on the CPU.

>Michael Neumann told me off-list that DFly doesn't support the built-in GPU of 
>the Ryzen. Does that mean than I have to get a separate GPU even if I can't 
>program it?

The Ryzen with APU (Raven Ridge codename) is likely just too new
having only been released in February and even as late as May there
were still a lot of stability issues on Linux (when using the APU). So
without Dragonfly support for the APU you would need a separate,
supported video card in order to get anything other than perhaps text.

Given the lack of Raven Ridge support you may want to consider pricing
out getting a plain Ryzen CPU + separate GPU, may either save you
money or allow to get a better GPU for the same money unless you
specifically want the ability to drop back to the APU in the future if
the drivers get ported to Dragonfly.