Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#351

Post by onli » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #229

ksec wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Before Zen, we all kind of assumed they were so far ahead that AMD were more likely to be out of business before they would ever be a credible threat again. It depends where about on the timeline. AMD's hired of Lisa Su and Jim Keller in 2012, we all thought it was too little too late. Look back at the Roadmap Intel were giving at the time, I used to joke about Tick Tock were like the sound of AMD's death clock. In…

> If you loathe Intel after all the lies they have been telling and marketing speaks, you should buy AMD. > If you love Intel still after all, you should still buy AMD, teach them a painful lesson to wake them up. But how do I choose which AMD CPU I need ? Back in my youth p4 and athlon were easy to compare (freq., IPS and a modifier because AMD) but now I can't even tell the differences between any i5/3/7 and when I…

The right answer to this is to look into benchmarks. It now works again to compare Intel and AMD clocks, but only of the current generation, and then there is core count and motherboard prices to consider, so on.

A project of mine is a hardware recommender, it also includes a meta-benchmark. I collect published benchmarks and build a globally sorted order of processors out of it. https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/cpu for games, https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/apps/cpu for application workloads (that one still misses a bit of work, the gaming benchmark is better). Legacy processors are greyed out, so this might be a good starting point for you. There is also a benchmark for gpus.

For most people this processor choice is also very easy, it is "Get a Ryzen 5 2600 or an Intel Core i5-8400."

Feel free to ask if you want some custom recommendations, email is in profile :)

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#352

Post by angry_octet » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #284

angry_octet wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they were all 2D. And the idea that GPUs would be used for mobile computing was not obvious.

Maybe 25 years ago. 10 years ago they were commonplace. Intel shipped integrated 3d graphics by no later than 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_810

Lol I don't know who bought that. Anyone who wanted 3D was buying Voodoo, RIVA TNT or ATI RAGE. Everyone else was happily 2D and running Word 95.

But, to clarify, I was speaking of consumer/mobile. The original iPhone was quite revolutionary for having a decent PowerVR graphics chip. High end symbian phones just had a CPU. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6110_Navigator or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Razr2

Even though GPGPU was already big in 2008, people still thought of it as a difficult to use coprocessor for big compute jobs. Much as people consider FPGAs now.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#353

Post by tomaskafka » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

headmelted wrote: post #50

Before Zen, we all kind of assumed they were so far ahead that AMD were more likely to be out of business before they would ever be a credible threat again. I actually thought Intel must have had some tricks up their sleeves in terms of performance gains that we hadn't seen yet, simply because there was no market need to roll them out and they had so many years of coasting on marginal gains. Seeing them taking this s…

Here's a Stratechery article, nothing more to add. https://stratechery.com/2018/intel-and-the-danger-of-integra...

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#354

Post by maxerickson » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:26 PM UTC

angry_octet wrote: post #352

maxerickson wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe 25 years ago. 10 years ago they were commonplace. Intel shipped integrated 3d graphics by no later than 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_810

Lol I don't know who bought that. Anyone who wanted 3D was buying Voodoo, RIVA TNT or ATI RAGE. Everyone else was happily 2D and running Word 95. But, to clarify, I was speaking of consumer/mobile. The original iPhone was quite revolutionary for having a decent PowerVR graphics chip. High end symbian phones just had a CPU. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6110_Navigator or https://en.wikipedia.org/…

I didn't highlight it as a desirable 3d processor, I pointed it out because 3d was essentially becoming default at that point.

And the first iPhone shipping with a powerful graphics chip is a counter to your argument that the future of mobile wasn't clear. The people with the ideas wanted a graphics processor.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#355

Post by saati » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #335

dr_zoidberg wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

13xx, 15xx, 17xx, ThreadRipper. For gen 2, that'd be: 23xx, 25xx, 27xx, ThreadRipper. I think they picked the names/numbers to show some kind of equivalence with i3/5/7, but that's not quite it.

ThreadRipper seems more like a Xeon competitor to me. Something for the server room crowd.

Epyc is the server Xeon competitor, Threadripper is a workstation cpu.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#356

Post by snaky » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:27 PM UTC

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #347

snaky wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Snapdragon 845-based Chromebook is on the way. > It comes as Microsoft continues its work with Qualcomm to optimize Windows for devices powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, including the forthcoming Snapdragon 850, which Samsung used for its first Arm-based Windows 10 laptop. So it appears there is some momentum behind the concept. https://www.zdnet.com/article/arm-on-windows-10-chromebooks-...

I think ARM could be a viable contender in the low-power laptop segment, kinda maybe possibly. However, I used to own a Tegra K1-based Chromebook, and that thing was sl-o-o-o-o-o-o-w, and it only got worse with successive updates. I'm not really optimistic when it comes to performance, absent highly-optimized apps. The state of Firefox and Chrome doesn't really fill me with confidence.

The state of Firefox and Chrome shows more than anything else that the many cores is good thing and especially that RAM size is the king actually. Modern smartphones with 6 and 8 GB of RAM make a difference.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#357

Post by thesz » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:31 PM UTC

snaky wrote: post #268

physicsguy wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing is that they're a nightmare to programme and they're expensive!

Yes, but speedup can be huge. For example, for NFA processing, using (a couple of) 2W FPGA against 200W GPU "GPUs underperform FPGA by a factor ~80-1000x across datasets" http://people.cs.vt.edu/~xdyu/html/ics17.pdf

The state transition table is encoded in logic for FPGA and as global memory table for GPU. Why didn't they try to encode state transitions as code on GPU?

Also, did they try to use enhanced locality introduced by processing several streams on GPU? E.g., if you keep states sorted as for tuple (state id, stream id) for all your streams, you may get more memory-controller friendly access pattern. I haven't seen mentions of that technique (which MUST be considered after Big Hero 6 [1] - they used that technique to never miss caches in whole movie rendering process). Big Hero 6 is 2014, the paper is 2017.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Hero_6_(film)

I really do not like papers like one linked by you. One system gets all of the treatment while other ones get... whatever is left.

I guess have they tried to use these techniques for GPUs, they would get performance gap that is much less than reported.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#358

Post by gsich » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:33 PM UTC

lordlimecat wrote: post #332

senozhatsky wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google innovate? -ss

Have you seen how many messaging apps theyve made in the last few years?

And it's still a mess that nobody wants to use.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#359

Post by tomaskafka » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:34 PM UTC

Rjevski wrote: post #169

dzdt wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But CPU+FPGA will forever be a tiny niche, right? I don't see any path where mainstream programs get a boost from FPGA.

I can see there being a market for that. The reason nobody uses FPGAs at the moment is because nobody has them outside of specialized applications. If Intel can release a CPU with a built-in FPGA and everyone has one, software developers will take advantage of them. I can see stuff like video editing programs, compression algorithms, etc taking advantage of that.

Looking forward to that, without 'you need to buy Skylake CPU that is just as fast as the one you had before to get H265 decoding'. Good riddance.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#360

Post by da_chicken » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #300

da_chicken wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that it is related to L1TF, but not to keep it secret. It's additional ammunition to use in court when they get sued for performance loss. > Cloud Company: Your honor, the security flaws in the hardware and microcode provided by the defendant necessitated the installation of updates, also provided by defendant, which resulted in a 30% loss of overall performance. Since our business model is predicated on sell…

"could not possibly prove" [without violating the license]. That doesn't invalidate the Cloud Company's claim, it only offers Intel an opportunity to countersue. In that case, they can likely only sue for copyright infringement damages.

I didn't say it was particularly strong. The point is that it's something. Intel could claim that it's there because benchmark software impact performance itself, and so they're explicitly making no claim of warranty when it's present. The point isn't that it's going to stick, just that it's more stuff to muck up the the legal process with to delay judgement.

Weighed against the normal risks of someone actually reading the EULA, it seems like a minor thing that may help in some way.