71–80 of 111 posts
Intel's “cripple AMD” function (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24307596 - Aug 2020 (104 comments)
Intel's “Cripple AMD” Function - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21709884 - Dec 2019 (10 comments)
Intel's "cripple AMD" function (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7091064 - Jan 2014 (124 comments)
Intel's "cripple AMD" function - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1028795 - Jan 2010 (80 comments)
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AMD[1], NVidia[2] do "make" their own compilers. AMD is notorious for a "build it and they will come" mentality. Despite the fact that this hasn't worked. AMD needs to make it easy to adopt their hardware, and the way this is done is with software. When they finally get to the point that their driver/libs are as easy to install as Nvidia's , it might be too late. I've argued this with AMD folks before. The barriers t…
AMD is best on the linux right now. But thats mostly thanks to them opening up their hardware for driver developers.
I've got some Epycs and Zen2s at home here, and I have both compilers. Haven't done testing in recent months, but they've been updating them, so maybe I should look into that again. Thanks for the nudge!
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AMD[1], NVidia[2] do "make" their own compilers. AMD is notorious for a "build it and they will come" mentality. Despite the fact that this hasn't worked. AMD needs to make it easy to adopt their hardware, and the way this is done is with software. When they finally get to the point that their driver/libs are as easy to install as Nvidia's , it might be too late. I've argued this with AMD folks before. The barriers t…
> NVidia[2] do "make" their own compilers. Actually Nvidia bought the Portland Compilers And Intel's Fortran compiler is (has been, now its backend is LLVM) MS's compiler via DEC/Compaq/and HP - MS Visual Fortran 4 -> DEC Visual Fortran 5 -> Compaq Visual Fortran 6 -> Intel Visual Fortran ;).
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AMD[1], NVidia[2] do "make" their own compilers. AMD is notorious for a "build it and they will come" mentality. Despite the fact that this hasn't worked. AMD needs to make it easy to adopt their hardware, and the way this is done is with software. When they finally get to the point that their driver/libs are as easy to install as Nvidia's , it might be too late. I've argued this with AMD folks before. The barriers t…
You call Nvidia driver installation easy? Every bit of "ease" about that is hardly Nvidia's doing.
Its a 13 year old laptop, and still running strong (linux though). Desktops are Sandy Bridge based. The RTX2060 and RTX3060 are doing fine with the current drivers. I usually only update when CUDA changes.
But yeah, its pretty simple. I can't speak to non-linux OSes generally, though my experiences with windows driver updates have always been fraught with danger.
My zen2 laptop has an inbuilt Renior iGPU, and I use it with the NVidia dGPU also built (GTX 1660ti). I leverage the Linux Mint OSes packaging system there for the GPU switcher. I run the AMD on the laptop panel and the NVidia on the external display. Outside of weirdness with kernel 5.13, I've not had any problems with this setup.
Worth noting that Intel has dropped their "old" compiler and the newer "Intel" compilers are LLVM based. IMHO they will likely be pulling similar anti-AMD tricks with it and they are keeping their paid version closed source - which is allowed by LLVMs license. RMS was right that compilers should be GPL licensed to prevent exactly this kind of thing (and worse things which are haven't happened yet). On another compile…
> RMS was right that compilers should be GPL licensed to prevent exactly this kind of thing (and worse things which are haven't happened yet). The problem with this is that it wouldn't solve the problem in question: Intel would just have stuck with their old compiler backend instead of LLVM. Besides, LLVM wouldn't have gotten investment to begin with if it were GPL licensed, since the entire reason for Apple's invest…
So yes, he basically said that if you want to develop a proprietary compiler, it should cost you, and not take GCC as a base to freeload. Intel basing their new compilers on LLVM clearly saved them effort.
If Intel had shipped a library/compiler that did just use feature flags and didn't check the CPU vendor, and the resulting code used features that on AMD ran much more slowly than the equivalent unoptimized code, would people blame AMD for the slow instructions, or blame Intel for releasing a library/compiler that they didn't optimize for their competitor's processor? This isn't a hypothetical; quoting https://en.wik…
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Very likely, this was not done intentionally. I think we can simply imagine a common scenario: some employee working for Company X, developing a compiler suite, and adding necessary optimizations for Company X's processors. Meanwhile, Company Y's processors don't get as much focus (perhaps due to the employee not knowing about Company Y's CPUIDs, supported optimizations for different models, etc.). Thus, Company Y's…
The thing is: the bits to check for SSE, SSE2, ..., AVX, AVX2, AVX-512? They're in the same spot on Intel and AMD CPUs. So you don't need to switch based on manufacturer. The fact that they force a `GenuineIntel` check makes it seems malicious to many.
Looking forward to RISC-V pushing x86 into retrocomputing territory.
If Intel had shipped a library/compiler that did just use feature flags and didn't check the CPU vendor, and the resulting code used features that on AMD ran much more slowly than the equivalent unoptimized code, would people blame AMD for the slow instructions, or blame Intel for releasing a library/compiler that they didn't optimize for their competitor's processor? This isn't a hypothetical; quoting https://en.wik…
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-5....
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What should they have done instead? Built a compiler with a "cripple Intel" function? So people would have to download the executable that's fastest on their CPU, even though they use the same instruction set? The issue here is that they used a slower code path even on CPUs that could run the faster one, just because they were made by a competitor. You say "AMD should have made their own compiler", but why? What else…
AMD should concentrate on making LLVM and GCC work great on AMD processors, by contributing the needed code. They are already making some contributions but could be doing more, and they could be funding experts to work on that and giving those experts the information they need.