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Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

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

#411

Post by holtalanm »

dragontamer wrote: post #407
holtalanm wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

same. i _was_ looking at getting an HP Spectre x360 with the i7 8550U. Now, I'm going to look explicitly at laptops with Ryzen chips. I think the Spectre might have a Ryzen model, but don't know.

AMD is severely behind on the Laptop space. In the Desktop space, I can definitely recommend AMD. But Laptops are totally Intel right now. There are AMD Laptops, but they are hard to recommend. Most are low-end offerings at best (laptop manufacturers don't put the high-end stuff with AMD). As long as high-end HP / Dell / Lenovo / Asus / Acer / Apple / Microsoft Surface are all Intel-based, you're basically forced to…

the new HP Envy x360 13z doesn't look bad.

Kind of waiting to see what the Lenovo ThinkPad A285 looks like, as well.

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

#412

Post by naasking »

wruza wrote: post #401
naasking wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On Intel's side you have features turned on and off for different i3/5/7/9, AVX speed difference etc I don't even want to bother looking it up. Seriously, Intel has always been way too confusing with their processor lineup. AMD has always been straightforward: leave in the kitchen sink on nearly every CPU and performance scales with price. Not linearly of course, but it's much simpler to choose an AMD CPU.

I don’t get it. You just look at popular apps&games benchmarks and decide your hw stack. You don’t need to synth-bench AVX differences unless you’re writing bleeding edge specialized software that depends on it.

I write all kinds of different types of software. The feature matrix of Intel CPUs has always been remarkably inconsistent, like you get AVX, but don't get virtualization extensions, or vice versa, etc.

Basically, if you don't want the headache you just buy one of the highest end/most expensive CPUs on offer and you're probably fine. With AMD the feature set is pretty consistent, so you have considerably more choice to find a good price point.

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

#413

Post by cyphar »

jve wrote: post #176
cyphar wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are upset because Intel is not allowing people to run benchmarks on their CPUs (the language is so vague that you could argue that running non-CPU benchmarks, or benchmarks for other software unrelated to Intel would violate this license). So you can't really make a "choice between performance/security", because nobody is allowed to publish data that would let you make an informed choice.

Quoted text talks about being upset because of perf, not because of Intel not allowing benchmarks. Not allowing benchmarks - yeah, agree to that, that is a reason to be dissapointed or upset. But people throw words around: lawsuits, upset, etc.

All the recent microcode patches to fix CPU security flaws have caused performance degradation, so it's fair to mention that people have been upset about this in the past (anecdotally, I know first-hand that people have disabled the patches because it's started to break software that has significant timeouts -- and they were obviously not happy that this was necessary).

It's also (somewhat) fair to assume that this patch would also affect performance until proven otherwise, and Intel changing their license to disallow sharing comparative performance tests doesn't give me much faith that I'm wrong in that assumption.

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

#414

Post by Filligree »

snaky wrote: post #199
jdietrich wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can spin up an FPGA-accelerated EC2 instance right now. There are a few highly specialised applications where every scrap of performance matters, but for the most part the software development costs are prohibitive compared to just spinning up more CPU or GPU instances. https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f1/

There are some interesting ideas about programmability, like automagically offloading some computation parts to FPGA. http://conal.net/blog/posts/haskell-to-hardware-via-cccs http://conal.net/blog/posts/circuits-as-a-bicartesian-closed... https://github.com/conal/lambda-ccc/blob/master/doc/notes.md

The software needed to drive them needs to become much better (documented, ergonomics, everything) before that will be a realistic option.

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

#415

Post by jimmaswell »

dhimes wrote: post #250
bluecalm wrote: post #100

Here is one thing we can do about it: make public service announcement to our users that we no longer recommend Intel CPUs because of security holes, censorship and crippled performance. I am going to do that today. While we only have several thousand users they do CPU intensive work, buy a lot of new CPUs and rent a lot of servers. My small contribution will likely amount to low-mid 6 figures out of Intel pocket in…

I am in the market for a new rig- looks like I'll be going with AMD.

Is Intel not still leading in per-core performance? That's what I'll decide my next cpu on, since I care more about use cases like emulation/games (many games don't use multiple threads or use them effectively)

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

#416

Post by ArPDent »

Keyframe wrote: post #306
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…

They did hire Keller, no? I wonder if AMD has an answer to AMD in the coming years. Not only CPU, GPU as well. Especially GPU. They missed the boat on AI, and now Nvidia is pushing RTRT left and right. That's seemingly two areas they still don't have an answer to. It's a big battlefront, and intel is only a step or two away from possibly bringing an answer to AMD. Not to mention whole laptop domination by intel, and…

> Not to mention whole laptop domination by intel, and mobile by ARM

traditionally yes, intel has absolutely dominated the laptop market however i have been seeing a lot more laptops lately with a Ryzen processor and Vega graphics

AMD making gains into a very lucrative market

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

#418

Post by unethical_ban »

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…

I just want to throw it out there that it might be impossible for AMD to actually go out of business. They're Intel's only major x86 competitor, IIRC their x86 license is non-transferrable, and no way Intel would be permitted in the USA to have an actual monopoly on x86 production.

I kick myself for not buying AMD at $2 (or buying a LOT more at $5).

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

#419

Post by kscz »

djsumdog wrote: post #364
jdietrich wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Equally troubling for Intel is the fact that they're losing their advantage in fabrication. The performance of their architecture is going backwards with every microcode patch, while their move to 10nm is hugely delayed. https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-cpu-10nm-earnings-amd,n...

I'm kinda curious to see how Zhaoxin, Hygon and other manufacturers in the x86_64 space are going to play out. It would be nice to see some real competition, not just Intel vs AMD, in this space. There are other services like Packet that offer bare-metal hosting on small Atom and ARM processors. It'd be nice to see some alt x86 processors in this space.

Hygon is just AMD's EPYC CPU [0]. I am uncertain if they will differentiate themselves more as time goes on, but at the moment almost the only difference in the kernel is that it has a different name.

I think you're more likely to see some ARM CPUs which have comparable performance to low-end and mid-range x86 before you see a new x86 competitor [1] - the overhead to making x86 perform well is just so high that I can't imagine anyone new bothering to get into the space. VIA has been in the market forever as the third seller of x86, and despite the theoretical benefits of entering into the datacenter CPU market, they've never made that leap (though I don't know enough about their history to know if they tried).

I'm hoping that ARM becoming competitive in the client CPU space ends up making the cross-compile overheads of enough drivers/kernel stuff that we can start to see some more diversity in the CPU market overall. I'm excited about RISC-V, especially now that they have shipping hardware you can play with today [2]. The Mill CPU sounds super cool in a bunch of ways, but the architecture has made so many decisions that I'm unsure will play out in practice I'm holding my excitement until I see real silicon somewhere [3]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/china...

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/16/arm-says-chips-will-outp...

[2] https://www.sifive.com/products/hifive-unleashed/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_architecture

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

#420

Post by AsyncAwait »

unethical_ban wrote: post #418
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…

I just want to throw it out there that it might be impossible for AMD to actually go out of business. They're Intel's only major x86 competitor, IIRC their x86 license is non-transferrable, and no way Intel would be permitted in the USA to have an actual monopoly on x86 production. I kick myself for not buying AMD at $2 (or buying a LOT more at $5).

> I just want to throw it out there that it might be impossible for AMD to actually go out of business.

Even if you buy this, (I don't), there's no point for them to stay in business with absolutely non-competitive products. The remarkable thing is that thanks to Zen that did not happen and Intel actually feels some heat for the first time in years.

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