Another shitty `technology' company

Oh FFS.

I have my previous workstation for work sitting idle so I thought i'd drop in an xubuntu install and try building openjdk & openjfx on it. It's got a 6x core I7-980 and plenty of RAM so it should be ok right?

Well all went well until I tried to build webkit, just for completeness. Result - consistent ICE inside g++. Blast. Well I thought it was consistent until I tried it with a fresh build of gcc 7.3, this also crashed but in a different place and when I went back to the system gcc I noticed the crash whilst repeatable wasn't in a consistent place. Actually it started crashing everywhere, even inside various jvm based tasks.

This is typically a symptom of system problems, specifically RAM. I looked in the BIOS incase it's been overclocked but it is so ancient there's no settings for RAM, I ran a few memory testers, I tried various numbers of threads for the build.

Then I remembered Intel and their notorious bugs this year causing system stability problems in some cases. I tried to find the options to turn off the bug mitigations but (in part due to isp maintenance at just that moment) I gave up and just booted with the 4.10.x kernel.

Oh look, works fine now (well, it compiles cleanly, webkit tests still fail!)

Perhaps this is a failure of Canonical, or the Linux developers? No, ultimately it's because Intel cut too many corners and have shit hardware. Then again any company that could design something as poor as HPET in this day and age is obviously fucking incompetent.

On a related note i've been eyeing off a Ryzen system every few months. I price one up and think about it but ultimately leave it for the time being. I'm just not doing enough computing beyond 'read internet' to justify it. Another thing I can't decide on is between some 'low-end' APU system or a beastly 2700X machine. The RAM is still so $$$ here and you need good ram for either. At least the last time I specced one up I noticed from some benchmarks than a 2700X would pretty much cream that old I7-980 at 1/4 of the price (or less, not that I paid for it).