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Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all

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Re: Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all

#181

Post by Fnoord »

neogodless wrote: post #80
philliphaydon wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ryzen 6000 series for laptops will support usb 4 with tb3. What does tb4 offer over 3?

https://plugable.com/blogs/news/what-s-the-difference-betwee... The short answer for Thunderbolt 4 over Thunderbolt 3 is "a second 4K display" thanks to double the PCIe bandwidth, 16Gbps vs 32Gbps. (The main data channel is 40Gbps in both.) USB 4 is actually a bit more constrained than Thunderbolt 3, at 20Gbps data channel, and no guarantee of PCIe bandwidth. > Thunderbolt 4 guarantees support for one 8K display or t…

Right now I use a machine with USB-C for video out at 1080p one monitor. But I don't use an eGPU with that, and its officially an Android device.

I got 2x 1440p monitor and won't upgrade either any time soon. So I suppose if I were to use both of these, I'd be fine with TB3 and eGPU?

Re: Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all

#182

Post by jacquesm »

im3w1l wrote: post #132
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. You “tolerate” this practice just long enough to win the critical initial wave of reviews and benchmarks. Interested buyers will look at those charts for years to come. That’s not what happened here. The AVX-512 instructions not only weren’t enabled by default, they couldn’t be enabled at all unless you went out of your way to disable the efficiency cores completely. They also wouldn’t benefit your workload unle…

Comparing the facts to all the suspicious people here, it made me realize something. Our zeitgeist sure is a cynical one.

Let's see: Intel

- ME https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21534199

- Anti Trust: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2239461/intel-and-antit...

- The cripple AMD function in their compiler: https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49

I could keep this up quite a bit longer if you want. Intel well deserves any skepticism and cynicism it is targeted with.

Re: Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all

#183

Post by nitrogen »

gambiting wrote: post #70
antman wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good example. It’s like buying a car and finding out it has a nice radio that was not advertised. After a few months the car dealership sends someone to break into the car and rip it off. Fair enough since it wasn’t advertised, right?

Well, breaking into your car is still illegal, so no, not fair enough. More like you buy a car without paying for a satellite radio(or that feature isn't advertised and isn't in the spec sheet), and then that feature gets removed next time you bring the car in for service. That is absolutely fine.

Based on the lawsuit about Tesla removing features from a used car it seems like it's not fine.

Re: Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all

#184

Post by fsflover »

Fnoord wrote: post #180
fsflover wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> your uncompromising way of doing things (including not loading microcode 'because it is closed source') Libreboot disagrees with that: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2022-... . Also, FSF would never endorse an Intel CPU with disabled Intel ME. It must be fully removed to get the RYF certification.

..and still, a Fairphone is more free than almost every smartphone out there. And still, a Framework is more free than almost every laptop out there. Because they are easily repairable because of their modularity. Something, yes, Thinkpads used to be too. But you're bound to old, refurbished ones (X230/T430 apparently) [1]. You don't care about that, you only care about one thing, and the rest is seemingly rationaliz…

> Fairphone is more free than almost every smartphone out there

Except it relies on proprietary drivers, which will not be updated by the vendor, resulting in a brick after some years. Librem 5 and Pinephone will receive software updates forever.

> But you're bound to old, refurbished ones (X230/T430 apparently) [1].

Not necessarily: https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/community-recommended-computers....

> Librem 5 delivers awful performance

What do you mean? It can run 3D games and provides full desktop mode. What else do you need?

Re: Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all

#185

Post by mackal »

codeflo wrote: post #11

If all of this was planned (and I’m not saying it is), that would have been very clever. It would work like this: 1. You “accidentally forget” to disable the feature in hardware. Given how competitive the market is, motherboard manufacturers can be relied upon to enable it in their “1337 OVERCLOCKZ” mode. No conspiracy is needed. 2. You “tolerate” this practice just long enough to win the critical initial wave of rev…

I wonder if it's more just they had higher yields if they treated the AVX-512 bits as dead silicon :P

Re: Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all

#186

Post by vanderZwan »

marcan_42 wrote: post #155
vanderZwan wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be a fun way to test and demonstrate robustness of various parts of computer hardware, actually. It's already been done with ADSL for example: [0] https://www.revk.uk/2017/12/its-official-adsl-works-over-wet...

My comment was actually a self quote from a talk I gave about PS4 hacking where I described that PCIe will happily run over bare soldered wires without much care for signal integrity, at least over short distances (unlike what you might expect of a high-speed bus like that) :) Not literally wet string, but definitely low tech. ADSL is special though, not many technologies can literally run over wet string :-)

Well, then we could make it a scale of what the worst transmission medium is that two pieces of hardware can (sort of) communicate across :)

Re: Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all

#187

Post by colejohnson66 »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #131
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've voiced this before but I think AVX-512 is completely irrelevant in the consumer spac Don’t forget that reviewers made a huge deal out of the fact that CPUs downclock themselves when running AVX instructions. Several reviewers tried to make this into some sort of scandal at the time, which I’d guess contributed to Intel wanting to remove the feature from consumer CPUs. Of course, many of those same reviewers ar…

To me, it does seem really weird that they opted to downclock the entire CPU rather than increase the latency of the instructions that caused overheating. That feels like it would have been a much less disruptive solution that would work strictly better.

If you increase latency, the ROB fills up quicker, and could get full which would back up the pipe. It makes sense why they’d choose to use the default “downclock on overheat” rather than add more circuitry to deal with that specific issue.

Re: Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all

#188

Post by marcan_42 »

jeffbee wrote: post #176
marcan_42 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECC costs $0 to support in motherboards (8 extra traces per DIMM slot; traces are free). Memory is where the consumer gets to choose whether to spend extra on ECC or not. There is absolutely no reason why consumers should be forced to pay extra for a CPU to get ECC when they are literally getting the same piece of silicon.

It's odd how indifferent you are being about the energy costs of ECC. Memory now dominates the energy story of many systems. Filling an x86 cache line from DDR4 costs 1000x as much energy as a double-precision multiplication operation. ECC memory costs 12.5% more energy. That's a big, big difference.

I'm not saying everyone should use ECC, I'm saying ECC should be an option for everyone.

Re: Intel completely disables AVX-512 on Alder Lake after all

#190

Post by marcan_42 »

fsflover wrote: post #152
Fnoord wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets compare it to all the other options, shall we? Perfect is the enemy of good, and your uncompromising way of doing things (including not loading microcode 'because it is closed source') is, to put it simple: harmful. And unusual, as well (its not a dealbreaker for many people). The laptop is modular and repairable, just like a Fairphone is modular and repairable. Its a great step forward and, while not perfect an…

> your uncompromising way of doing things (including not loading microcode 'because it is closed source') Libreboot disagrees with that: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2022-... . Also, FSF would never endorse an Intel CPU with disabled Intel ME. It must be fully removed to get the RYF certification.

The FSF endorse ThinkPads with two or three chips running secret firmware blobs with full access to system memory via the LPC bus. They also endorse Bluetooth dongles running hundreds of kilobytes of proprietary firmware blob (which doesn't count for them because it's in ROM, not /lib/firmware).

RYF certification is absolutely meaningless, both from the freedom and security/privacy perspectives. It is actually actively harmful to freedom, as it encourages manufacturers to hide blobs to get through its backdoors (ROM blobs are OK, RAM blobs are not), when doing the opposite is actually more accountable and open, and allows for user-controlled replacement of blobs with free versions in the future.

Also, Stallman had personally said he wouldn't give the Novena open hardware laptop RYF certification unless they permanently fused off the GPU, "because otherwise users might be tempted to install the (optional, not distributed with the product or endorsed in any way) GPU blobs". Literally the same product segmentation nonsense we're bashing Intel for here. This was before open drivers became available, which they eventually did. Imagine how wrong the situation would've been if bunnie, the creator of Novena, had actually listened to this; "RYF" certified Novena owners would own crippled machines unable to use 3D acceleration, while the rest would own machines capable of running a 100% libre desktop including 3D acceleration.

> Libreboot disagrees with that

You do realize that that post is Leah politely saying that RYF sucks and is completely broken, and she's given up on strict compliance, right? FSF policy is indeed that you shouldn't upgrade your microcode (see e.g. endorsing linux-libre, which censors kernel messages telling you about important microcode updates).

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