Considering they didn't give samples to any of the linux press... ?

AMD changed their mind and are now sending samples to Phoronix (albeit too late for a launch day article).

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ryzen-Seg...

> We will also now be receiving Threadripper and Epyc hardware for testing to confirm their Linux state.

Haha, I'll be waiting to purchase until Linux reviews surface or MicroCenter offers the same discount on TR and i9 chips.

I mean I could guess one way it'd fail - if they market it heavily to the PC gaming market, and their single threaded performance isn't as good at similar price points. There's still lot of workloads out there that can't take advantage of 4 threads, let alone 16/32+. I would assume they don't market it heavily to gaming, but it's like the second thing they mention on their main landing page, so... idk.

AMD is already making a big marketing push about "you need 32 lanes for SLI/CrossFire!".

Which is utterly false, at 3.0 speeds x8x8 only costs you a few percent at most. Strangely x16x16 can actually hurt you in a few titles, which suggests we may just be seeing some other kind of variation/noise anyway.

http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2488-pci-e-3-x8-vs-x16-per...

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Titan-X-Performan...

Threadripper is no better than a Ryzen 7 at gaming, and in fact is often worse (often closer to a Ryzen 5). If you really buy into the need for x16x16 then getting a 6850K is really the obvious answer, it competes with Ryzen core-for-core in both performance and efficiency and since it's a HEDT product you get the 40 PCIe lanes as well as quad-channel RAM. Somewhat pricier than Ryzen, given, but actually much cheaper than Threadripper.

Wasn’t the segfault issue determined to be a bug in the php steps?

Some of it was, but not all. There are still issues in some chips and some customers are getting RMAs.