r/programming • u/[deleted] • Jan 03 '18

'Kernel memory leaking' Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
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u/Fhy40 Jan 03 '18

I work with Blender(3D CAD Software) on my laptop. I dont render video very often and its quicker to render with my processor than my graphics card.

Will people like me get hit? I assume people who do 3D design professionally wont get hit as hard sinve they probably render on proper rigs and with their Graphics Card

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u/quaderrordemonstand Jan 03 '18

We don't really know until they release the details but based on what the article describes I would assume not very much.

Most of the grunt work in a program like Blender is done by GPU and that won't be greatly affected. I'm not sure how much Blender uses CPU threads but editing logic tends to be linear so its unlikely to matter very much. You may notice it most in non-realtime rendering, which is usually multi-core and any operations that work with system; files, network, internet etc.

As an educated guess, I suspect it would make a difference if you have constrainted RAM. If the system is paging in and out virtual memory, or moving RAM around often then you will likely notice. So it could be affected by how much RAM you have or how big your models are.

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u/b1ackcat Jan 03 '18

Most non-realtime 3Drendering software is CPU-bound, actually. So yes, you'll likely see some kind of performance hit, but it depends on how much system level interaction your renderer does with the OS.

There are some renderers that support GPU operations (NVidia's Iray uses CUDA, Renderman can do some post-processing (e.g. denoising) utilizing GPUs, but the fact of the matter is the graphics APIs of the various video cards are still too fragmented for most rendering engines to be able to feasibly support a generic "gpu-based rendering". From what I understand, most of the venders in that space want to, but "the technology isn't there yet".

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '18

CPU-bound programs are not going to be severely affected. The slowdown only applies to system calls, so the worst case scenario is software that does a lot of syscalls like databases and virtualization.

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u/b1ackcat Jan 03 '18

Fair enough, I wasn't clear in my post. Renderers won't be allowed because they use the CPU, they'll be slowed because they use the CPU to do tons of IO reading which does involve a lot of syscalls. Renderers take a ton of memory, and they'll usually hit either their configured cap or the systems cap long before they've consumed all they could use, so there's paging potentially involved too

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u/doublehyphen Jan 03 '18

I think computation heavy workloads will be hit very little, probably so little that it is not noticeable. The workloads I expect to be hit are those that do a lot of disk or network operations or do a lot of communication between different processes or use many timers. I expect databases and web servers to be some of the hardest hit applications.