Intel's "cripple AMD" function • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#81

Post by pvandehaar » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 5:37 AM UTC

rbanffy wrote: post #52

jey wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I find Intel's compiler to outperform GCC on pretty much all of the numerical work I do. I build with "-O3 -xHost" and make use of OpenMP. Dynamic linking of the OpenMP library is almost certainly not the cause of the slowness you're observing. If you really want to force the Intel OpenMP runtime to use all 8 cores: export OMP_DYNAMIC=false export OMP_NUM_THREADS=8 export KMP_LIBRARY=throughput # "KMP_BLOCKTI…

"I find Intel's compiler to outperform GCC on pretty much all of the numerical work I do." It's only a question of time. I suspect that if more companies decided to pool resources around GCC (or any other free C compiler, like pcc or clang), they will pretty much bury Intel. Intel is a chip company. The only conceivable reason for them to want to maintain a C compiler is to make a C compiler that's better than the co…

A good compiler without bias would help the whole market, but not enough to be worth the expense.

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#82

Post by drewcrawford » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 8:17 AM UTC

djcapelis wrote: post #62

drewcrawford wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was one guy who was strung up as a leaker ten years ago. Don't remember his name, but it was a big deal. AMD's culture is just different than Apple's. For one, there are no "secret teams" like iPhone, iTablet, etc. (well, at least none that I knew about). For another, developers have real autonomy to make business decisions, something that would never happen at Apple. For instance, I, a lowly intern, redeployed…

> For instance, I, a lowly intern, redeployed software to the > production line during an emergency. If something went > wrong, chips would actually stop rolling out of the factory. While I'm all for letting engineers react to things progressively, that you were in position where a screw up could have shut down a fab as an intern is nothing short of terrifying to me.

> That you were in position where a screw up could have shut down a fab as an intern is nothing short of terrifying to me.

To me, the converse is a lot scarier: what if I, feeling no personal responsibility for yield, wasn't there after-hours looking for bugs in the first place? Or what if I did find the critical bug, but had to wait weeks for forms before it was pushed through? Or was blocked by office politics?

There's nothing more disheartening as having a fix for something serious that you can't push through. I've worked at companies like that: taking away the power to break something means taking away the power to make it better.

Not to say that I somehow dislike code reviews or generally fly by the seat of my pants: the situation really was a real emergency. I can't talk specifics, but the bug had already cost more than the damage it would do to if I broke something.

Re: Intel's "cripple AMD" function

#83

Post by regularfry » Tue, Jan 05, 2010, 12:35 PM UTC

djcapelis wrote: post #62

drewcrawford wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was one guy who was strung up as a leaker ten years ago. Don't remember his name, but it was a big deal. AMD's culture is just different than Apple's. For one, there are no "secret teams" like iPhone, iTablet, etc. (well, at least none that I knew about). For another, developers have real autonomy to make business decisions, something that would never happen at Apple. For instance, I, a lowly intern, redeployed…

> For instance, I, a lowly intern, redeployed software to the > production line during an emergency. If something went > wrong, chips would actually stop rolling out of the factory. While I'm all for letting engineers react to things progressively, that you were in position where a screw up could have shut down a fab as an intern is nothing short of terrifying to me.

Toyota have a very similar rule that they actively promote: every worker has a button with which they can shut the line down if they see something wrong.

It seems to work for them...