1st of June

Farm status
Intel GPUs
Running Einstein O2AS20 work overnight

Nvidia GPUs
Two running Seti work

Raspberry Pis
Running Einstein BRP4 work


BIOS updates
The motherboard manufacturers will update the CPU firmware via a BIOS update. There are other ways of patching them as well such as using the intel-microcode package under Debian.

The Intel CPUs have another security issue referred to as MDS or more commonly known as Zombieload. The AMD machines don't have this particular issue but are doing updates to support the 3rd generation Ryzen CPUs even on older motherboards. I took the opportunity to update all the machines.


Other news
We got a bit of a cold snap in the weather so the two machines with GTX 1660 Ti cards have been running 24/7. This has greatly improved their output.

I resurrected my Milkyway@home account, which I haven't used since 2012 and did a burst of GPU work for them. Their GPU app is written in OpenCL and so is slower on Nvidia cards. The Milkyway simulations took slightly under 4 minutes to complete on the GTX 1660 Ti.


Ryzen upgrades
At Computex 2019 (last week) AMD announced 5 of their 3rd generation Ryzen CPUs. The official specs of these CPUs were somewhat different to the leaks on the internet. We're expecting more official announcements on the 7th of July as that is the release date. Only another 5 weeks to go...

At the moment I am looking at ASUS X570-Pro motherboards with DDR4 3200MHz memory, but I am not sure how much memory because that depends on how many cores they have. Which CPU they'll get is undecided until the rest of the Ryzen line-up is officially announced. I will swap all 4 machines out with the exception of reusing the GPUs so that will mean new cases, power supplies, CPU cooler and NVMe SSD's to replace the hard disks.

The Ryzen 1700's that I currently use are 65 watts and have 8 cores/16 threads. For a GPU cruncher I was hoping for a lower wattage CPU, probably with a lower core count. The X570 chipset uses 15 watts so that will eat any power saved.