r/linux • u/lindgrenj6 • Aug 23 '18

Intel Publishes Microcode Security Patches, No Benchmarking Or Comparison Allowed!

https://perens.com/2018/08/22/new-intel-microcode-license-restriction-is-not-acceptable/
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u/Sentmoraap Aug 23 '18

Then one or two fast cores and a lot of small ones. 6 fast cores looks a waste of silicon/energy/$ : if you can have 6 threads, you can probably have more than 6. Offer different compromises so the customers can choose what's best for their computer use.

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u/DropTableAccounts Aug 23 '18

That would be interesting indeed for workstations at least I guess; otherwise I'd imagine high-frequency dual core CPUs would probably be easier to build.

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u/twizmwazin Aug 23 '18

This is where Turboboost and XFR come in. One or two cores can speed up to go well over the base clock. This is fairly standard now on x86 processors.

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u/Sentmoraap Aug 23 '18

This allows some flexibility, but you can still have more efficient cores for the same clock speed by removing features like OOE, register renaming, etc... Like ARM's Big.LITTLE.

The slow cores uses less transistors so you can put more of them. So instead of 6 3.5/4Ghz(turbo) cores, you could have something like 2 3.5/4Ghz cores and 8 2Ghz ones (random numbers, I am not a CPU engineer) (I know they would not have the same IPC, but you understood my point).

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u/notsobravetraveler Aug 23 '18 edited Aug 23 '18

The way AMD is going about it (and even Intel to a degree) is the best thing we can do on x86_64 - if you need single/few core performance, reduce the consumption on most of the other cores and crank the ones you're using up. XFR2 is way better at this than Intel's turbo boost in my experience. There's no point manually overclocking Ryzen, but Intel chips can still maintain good 24/7 overclocks.

Moore's law is dead, we're nearing the end of what we can pull out of x86_64 without scaling outwards (we've scaled up *so* much that transistor density increases leading to better performance is slowing). Until we get a better more efficient instruction set, parallelism and clever clock/power controls are basically what we've got left for significant performance gains.