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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

#441

Post by blablabla123 »

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…

Pretty stupid that they didn't continue their Itanium architecture. It does have In-Order-Branch-Prediction and we are at a point again where a significant number of users don't really care what kind of CPU they are using.

ARM and RISC-V have become a serious thread and are on the way to get standardized ecosystems...

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

#442

Post by agwa »

wolfgke wrote: post #147

My thougt based on the HN headline "Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed" (after having read the article, of course): Doesn't this show that it is time for someone to set up some kind of "ScienceLeaks" website, where scientists can upload research (results, papers, ...) anonymously which they are are not allowed to do legally because of various such "research-restricting" laws. ---…

> UPDATE: Before people ask the potential question how the researchers are supposed to get their proper credit - my consideration is the following: Each of the researchers signs the paper with their own "public" key of a public-private key pair. This signature is uploaded as part of the paper upload. The "public" key is nevertheless kept secret by the researchers.

> When the legal risk is over and the researchers want to disclose their contribution, they simply make their "public" key really public. This way, anyboy can change that the signature that was uploaded from beginning on, indeed belong to this public key and thus to the respective researcher.

Commonly-used public key signature systems (RSA, ECDSA) do not provide the security properties necessary for this. Someone else who wants to claim credit for the research could cook up their own key pair that successfully validates the message and signature. This is called a duplicate signature key selection attack (https://www.agwa.name/blog/post/duplicate_signature_key_sele...)

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

#443

Post by _0w8t »

Bartweiss wrote: post #389
carlmr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they've nothing significant to show for all that time and money spent when they were raking it in without a serious competitor. Big companies rarely innovate without competition around.

I don't think this is necessarily true for big hardware companies. If you're selling a subscription to a best-in-market service, there's not a lot of motive to innovate, agreed. Maybe you'd try a new product or a premium variant, but there's no reason to sink effort into advances that won't let you expand userbase or raise prices. But for Intel? Before AMD got going, Intel's biggest competition was itself 9/18 months…

It is really a nice point about competing with themselves. The volume of Intel is rather big that they have to sell to the same customer each 2-3 years even if CPUs are in principle can last 10 years or more. So they must increase the performance substantially to justify the sales.

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

#444

Post by pas »

topspin wrote: post #405
wolfgke wrote: post #147

My thougt based on the HN headline "Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed" (after having read the article, of course): Doesn't this show that it is time for someone to set up some kind of "ScienceLeaks" website, where scientists can upload research (results, papers, ...) anonymously which they are are not allowed to do legally because of various such "research-restricting" laws. ---…

That's not the way. The tech press isn't powerless here. The media that has been performing such benchmarks for decades and have thus earned a large and faithful audience can organize and simultaneously publish the relevant benchmarks in the US, complete with an unapologetic disclosure right at the top as to the why this is happening. Put Intel into the position of suing every significant member of the US tech media…

How is the 1st Amendment relevant when private parties deal with each other? (As far as I know, it's not.)

It's contract law and tort law that's relevant. Intel's defective product, Intel's ToS, and maybe fair use. (As the tester could get the patch without an explicit license and try to claim fair use.)

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

#446

Post by Y_Y »

bearjaws wrote: post #238
giancarlostoro wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn't this show that it is time for someone to set up some kind of "ScienceLeaks" website, where scientists can upload research (results, papers, ...) anonymously which they are are not allowed to do legally because of various such "research-restricting" laws. I don't go there since 2008 but why not just wikileaks?

Wikileaks is a Russian propaganda machine. They are only interested in Anti-America leaks, not all leaks.

Ya, there's a huge niche in the market for pro-American leaks.

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

#447

Post by btym »

moolcool wrote: post #328
jstanley wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has actually been perfectly viable to escape Intel and (especially) Microsoft for a very long time. Lots of people on HN have done so. Buy an AMD machine, install Ubuntu, and you're done.

>gaming PC >Ubuntu Hope he likes Mahjong and Tux Racer

WINE + DXVK can pretty much run any modern game (with varying performance).

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

#448

Post by janoc »

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.

That's nonsense. PCI/PCIe FPGA accelerator boards have been around for ages, mostly used by the finance traders and for machine learning/math-intensive computations before cheap GPUs with much simpler programming models (no need to write e.g. matrix multiplication in VHDL/Verilog anymore) like the various programmable shaders, CUDA and OpenCL have pretty much relegated them into obscurity.

FPGA is great if you need to talk to some hardware very fast/on many pins. E.g. something like a network router where you are shuffling packets between many high speed interfaces. Or doing a lot of measurements/interfacing a bunch of high speed sensors.

But not for general purpose software - GPUs are both faster, easier to develop for (and with good tooling) and much cheaper for doing that today.

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

#450

Post by fivefive55 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #415
dhimes wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

They're neck and neck at this point, within a few percentage points. Zen 2 should close that gap to negligible hopefully.
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