Is this the best 65W CPU you can buy today?

I think that if today I had to build a new machine, I’d probably take this CPU for it, on a B650 mainboard. Twelve cores and twenty-four threads should be plenty for about everything, and since platform costs are high for the new AM5 series systems anyway, it doesn’t make too much sense to save on the CPU itself. I’d probably take a good after-market cooler still, even if the provided one is adequate already. Oh, and I’d only add a graphics card if that was my main use case, like rendering graphics or so – for all others, the built-in graphics should be fine, like they are with Intel as well. Add 32 or even 64GB of RAM in case you’ll plan to use big sample libraries for music or so, and that would be a wonderful machine.

As are ours, both Mitchie’s and my machines have the AMD 5700G “APU” which are 8-core/16-thread CPUs with built-in 8-core graphics, so the graphics are a bit better than in the newer ones, otherwise a new 6-core would beat ours. These are 65W processors as well.

Oh, and Zuleikha is mostly using Mitchie’s birthday present from 2019 now, so we’re all set… and notebooks are the ultimate in power saving 🙂

Like always, thanks for reading.

LibreArts – 2023 in preview

Free and open source software, short: FOSS has come a long way. For artists, 2022 has been very good in particular. Read the article 2023 in preview on LibreArts on what’s next for the coming year.

Also, the artwork for that article is about the nicest version of “2023” I’ve seen so far:

Like always, thanks for your interest.

Now come the real ones…

Finally, an AMD 7000 series CPU which I’d recommend over its 5000 series predecessor (which I have and with which I’m pretty happy). So if you’re looking for a new CPU for your next build, this could be the one. Or its 6 core version which should still easily beat my 8 core 5000 series one.

P.S.: just saw that Phoronix has some benchmarks of these processors under Linux. And like I thought, even the smaller one runs circles around mine, although they still took a bit more power than my 5700G.

Professional film makers use Linux

Andrew Cunningham writes about the Apple Mac Pro and compares it with the newer but not that expandable Mac Studio – but the most interesting part at least for me in that article was that professional film makers don’t actually use these that much. And the bigger the studios, the more people use Linux instead of a Mac for their artistic work (and smaller studios seem to prefer Windows). See the graphs here in case you don’t want to go and read the whole article:

60% market share for Linux, who would have thought?

I would have suspected to have Linux on about every render farm (and you need lots of rack servers to make a movie), and something like Windows and Macs on the artists’ desks, but this shows otherwise perhaps – interesting.

So as someone who makes music on a Linux system, am I ahead of my time? 😀

Like always, thanks for reading 🙂

Ardour 7.2 was released

About two hours ago, the Ardour team released their latest and greatest version 7.2. I have it already, and it works very nicely, just like it always does. Here are some screenshots:

Ardour 7.2.0 “Wrong Way Up”
Ardour 7.2 on Linux with a song I’ve had in 7.1 previously
Ardour 7.2 and its mixer view. My Sonarworks plugin is on the monitor bus.
Ardour 7.2 playing back the loaded song. Notice the threads on my CPU while playing back two tracks…

Very nice. I’ll start using it, keeping the 6.9 version because of older tracks, and the 6.5 one because it came with the OS. I also have the Windows version just in case Zuleikha would like to use my XLN Audio grand piano which came as a Windows VST plugin only (and yes, I know how to load these into Linux, but won’t do it).

Oh, and in case you want to hear the song I have in my DAW here (minus my tweaks to it), it’s this one. Please give Shi and Tom a thumbs up in case you like it.

In case that maybe you have no idea what Ardour is, it’s one of the best free and open source digital audio workstations available. Please have a look at its homepage in case that sounds interesting for you.

Like always, thanks for reading.

A model B for free

This is a nice gift for Santa, thanks to Dore Mark: a Steinway grand piano model B, sampled in 7 velocity layers, and using different microphones and microphone placements:

Kontakt Interface view of Dore Mark’s Steinway Model B grand piano

On Windows and Mac computers you can use it within Kontakt, the same with Linux in case you have something like yabridge. In case you don’t have that, or don’t plan to use Windows plugins in Linux, you can still use the provided SFX versions.

The Steinway model B is a 7 foot grand piano which is often found in the recording studios of this world, and in the homes of those who can afford such an instrument. The famous model D is too big for most places, and more at home in the concert halls. Dore Mark also has a Yamaha and a Fazioli grand piano if you prefer these.

Found via LinuxMusicians, and also linked within Wikiloops. Thanks Dore Mark!

This is interesting…

This

Could it be that not everyone sees it as an improvement if new CPUs run at 95°C and draw over 200 Watts out of your wall sockets? With ever shrinking dies and conducting paths, energy saving could have been the goal, not beating Intel in frames per second in computer games. Who wants to draw 500 or more Watts just for gaming? Don’t these CEOs learn and think? Just look at Apple, their M2 chips are the ones to beat, not Intel’s…

My 5700G is perfect, and idling at less than 20 Watts while I’m writing this… and AMD’s 7000 series could have been so much better than that, it’s a shame to see what they did instead.

Looking at / listening to Ardour 7.1 on Windows

Today I’ve been looking at & listening to the new Ardour 7.1 free and open source software DAW on Windows 11. Looks and sounds awesome:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52477508304/
Ardour 7.1 on Windows 11, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

The music you see within that program is from Dan and Chris, you can listen to that one on Wikiloops if you’d like to. The program seems to work fine, so next step is to also install it on Linux 🙂

And like always, thanks for viewing, listening, and reading.

Some phone shots from today – and some screenshots

At the moment, all three neighbours’ cats are here, and all are sleeping. Two (Wilma and Crunchy) on my bed, and one (Cookie) on the sofa. Earlier, I caught Wilma on my lap with the phone in my hands:

PXL_20221103_131652928.MP
Wilma on my lap, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

I had been trying different versions of LineageOS on an older Google Nexus 10 tablet device which we had laying around unused, and after trying some unofficial ones I decided to try the latest official build which you can get from Lineageosroms.com, which is LineageOS 13.0 – [ Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) ] as you can see here:

Screenshot

That is some years old already as well (the tablet is about 10, this image more than 4 years old), but it is still a nice compromise between speed, stability, and features. Being the equivalent of Android 6 under its hood, I could even install the Zapp app from the F-Droid store, and so now we can watch Live and/or streamed TV on it, like so:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52475045170/
News (via Zapp app, see F-Droid.org) on a 10 year old Nexus 10 device running LineageOS ‘Marshmallow’, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

I had to interrupt my activities to send Mitchie to work with the car, and when we came down to the garage I saw that some neighbour had parked a nice new Honda motorcycle right in front of their partly covered Fiat 500 and beside our car. After coming back, I took a quick pic of that as well:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wjlonien/52474579011/
A brand new motorcycle, Mörfelden-Walldorf 2022

Oh, and when looking into my blog software today I saw that I’ve got a new version of that as well:

Screenshot

So I’ll have to see what’s new, and whether any of the also new templates (2022 and 2023) are looking good…

So all photos in this article came from my Pixel 4a phone, and the screenshots from my computer. As always, thanks for reading and for viewing.