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Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

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Re: Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason, I doubt people in the server/workstation space don't know how to do this, especially if they are leaving double digit percentage gains on the table if they don't.

You are not supposed to disable the mitigations... Especially on servers and workstations... And keep in mind that the usual mitigations aren't even holistic. The only truly 100% secure fix for Spectre/Meltdown is to disable hyperthreading altogether.

For servers that aren't running arbitrary third party code, like PaaS or IaaS, why not?

Re: Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

#162
post #75

And if anyone from AMD is reading this. I'm truelly awaiting AMD's NUC in multiple price ranges of 150-700€, if possible :)! I'm currently building a DIY RPi 4 cluster for microservices/kubernetes setup and would like to replace my DIY home streaming setup. http://www.fanlesstech.com/2019/10/exclusive-amds-nuc-is-com...

And if you're reading this, I'm waiting for a very decent mATX PCIe4 board for EPYC, please make it happen!

I don't think we'll see socket SP3 Epyc on mATX for a few reasons. The chip itself is huge and you'd have to throw away a lot of PCIe lanes and DIMM slots that couldn't fit on the motherboard. Supermicro's ATX boards already halve the the number of DIMMs of their proprietary form factors or Gigabyte's eATX boards hold.

*Edited to clarify I meant socket SP3 boards rather than embedded.

Re: Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a proof-of-concept included in the whitepaper: https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf That's a working exploit, not a hypothetical.

No, that's not a working exploit, as is said in the paper: > Chrome intentionally degrades the accuracy of its high-resolution timer to dissuade timing attacks using performance.now() [62]. However, the Web Workers feature of HTML5 makes it simple to create a separate thread that repeatedly decrements a value in a shared memory location [24, 60]. This approach yields a high-resolution timer that provides sufficient r…

You're right. When the white paper was announced; it was pre-released to specific entities to work around. The fact that the exploits have since been patched doesn't remove the fact that they were a valid exploit.

Was heartbleed not an exploit because it's since been patched? Or the thousands of DOS TSR viruses? What is even your point or logic here?

Re: Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

#164
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, we're talking about desktops not used to browse the internet, and bare metal servers whose network stacks aren't exposed to hostile actors? To be fair the context here is HPC. Nobody is installing Chrome on something like IBM's Summit supercomputer. Nor is it running "untrusted" code. It's configured to go as fast as possible, nothing more. Anyone in cloud hosting or desktop would be insane to not install spect…

Is it though? There's a significant security bug that has a known fix, on your supercomputer. The second anything remotely security-related happens and it gets out that you've opted to hedge your bets that no untrusted code will ever execute on that machine... and you could be in some seriously hot water. I'm not really in the HPC space, but I can't really see any vp/cto/cio reasonably putting that asterisk on a secu…

I agree - factors involving insurance, compliance, auditing, etc... will play a big role for any company using such systems to process any kind of even slightly confidential information.

Any CIO that decides not to use such security patches will carry on his/her shoulders the full risk. Big bosses don't like risk and like even less to be personally accountable for anything => I don't see that happening.

Even if the tests mentioned in the article might be related to HPC, the HW is for general computing therefore its usage doesn't have to be restricted to HPC, but people might still decide to use (as well) those HPC-results to compare the types of CPUs.

Re: Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

#165
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new cloud based ARM cpus are new, and that's a reasonable motivator

They aren't new, and more to the point, most server software is not the stuff end users run.

One of the applications I've heard for the new ARM server CPUs is doing ARM builds. Seems convincing to me! Going forward, another catalyst will be an ARM laptop that appeals to developers, and that makes it easier for them to directly target ARM without going through a cloud service.

Re: Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

#166
post #122

They wouldn't have an answer to AMD untill 2021: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/2019-intel-investor-meeting/... Ps. Long AMD, perfect execution the last two years. It's crazy, even their late firmware fixes improve performance as it had bad press for a moment for false benchmarks advertisement ( it was not false so it seems, the firmware was just not ok yet. Not everything is fully ok now, it's the only minor nitpic…

"Long AMD" are you expecting a higher stock price? because their 90 PE TTM doesn't look like it's in line with the rest of the industry. don't get me wrong, i was also long AMD, and still partly am, but i don't think the stock can go higher than 36-37, or even maintain that level long term, without some some mega quarters. which according to their own estimates will not be the case.

Yes, i'm expecting stock price according how much they capture from Intel. And they are capturing it fast. As said before: Servers, laptops, ... are coming and that's the profit-market for CPU's and they aren't abandoning their nich ( semi-custom) also.

it was 40 in 2000, the current buy prediction is 40. They are doing way better now and they have another full year to win market share. I compare against Intel, not against AMD at the current ( minimalistic) state, mostly because OEM's weren't onboard in the previous financial quarter.

I have also explained my financial relation to them and my belief. Which seemed enough, no? PS. I'm probably one of the few to share my financial relation. Not because i'm scared, but because i'm confident :)

And also, i feel kinda sorrow for you that you don't attack my comments/facts. You just attacked my personal gain, which is a feedback loop to my arguments.

PS. I don't know of any other company that is in such a positive position. One full year untill their competition has a competitor to their "current" product line. That's insane. I haven't even mentioned TSMC 3 nanometer process for 2023 and theri future product line :)

Re: Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

#167
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a working JavaScript exploit for Spectre/Meltdown? I though it was just hypothetical.

There was a proof-of-concept included in the whitepaper: https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf That's a working exploit, not a hypothetical.

All the JS engines have been patched. As far as I'm aware there are no known spectre or meltdown exploits on any of the major JS engines.

Re: Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

#168
post #159
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Long AMD" are you expecting a higher stock price? because their 90 PE TTM doesn't look like it's in line with the rest of the industry. don't get me wrong, i was also long AMD, and still partly am, but i don't think the stock can go higher than 36-37, or even maintain that level long term, without some some mega quarters. which according to their own estimates will not be the case.

Agreed, while AMD has a lot of market potential, their stock is overvalued given current performance. I'm rooting for them, and I want to put money on them, but I sold my shares I got for <$10 and I can't imagine getting back in at over $30.

I was in the same situation ( 3 to 10 and then 25 to 36 now). It ain't going to stop untill 2022.

And if you believe Intel, it's 2021 instead of 2022 ;)

PS. Facts related: AMD Gains Chip Market Share in Nearly Every Category.

Re: Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have been saying this about ARM for more than half a decade. Why would people suddenly start porting stuff to ARM that they weren't before? I only see this happening if Apple replaces the Intel chip in their Macs with a desktop variant of their mobile chips.

The new cloud based ARM cpus are new, and that's a reasonable motivator

people are having trouble going AMD in cloud because their monitoring, while written for x86, is intel specific. All that virtualization software is going to take a few years to be rock solid on AMD.

Re: Intel publishes misleading benchmarks against AMD

#170
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used the Intel compiler. We know for a fact Intel’s compilers deliberately don’t optimize as well for non-Intel chips. That’s damning in and of itself.

That is a little disingenuous. The whole point of Intel’s compiler is to support Intel chips well. Results on other chips are what they are. No effort to make other chips perform eiher better or worse is expended. Keeping up with Intel chips is more than a full time job without other distractions. The question to ask is whether or not they used the best complier/swithes available for the other chips.

> That is a little disingenuous.

Nonsense. Please do some research before you comment.

In the past Intel would build the benchmarks with commonly available compilers (Intel, GCC, Clang) then select the best benchmark results, eg if GCC gave the best numbers on AMD chips they'd use GCC to compile the tests on AMD. That was a fair comparison.

They deliberately changed to using their own compiler specifically to disadvantage AMD in this comparison.

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