If you wondered why Intel sucks on Fedora read this

[john wendel]

Steven W. Orr wrote:

> On Saturday, May 16th 2009 at 15:00 -0000, quoth g:
> 
> =>Valent Turkovic wrote:
> =>
> =>> If you wondered why Intel sucks on Fedora read this article, it
> =>> expains all complexities of Intel drivers and for me it shows hope
> =>> that Intel drivers are becoming better.
> =>
> =>intel sucks on anything but ms, because intel joined the ms whore house
> =>years ago along with many other oem suppliers because of their fear of
> =>not being included in ms specs.
> =>
> =>in off quote of b.g., 'exclusively ms or be left out'.
> =>
> =>many 'old heads' are aware of this, and it is what has made building
> =>linux drivers for a lot of good software very difficult when oem refuses
> =>to release specs on systems.
> =>
> =>given enough time, driver writers will be able to over come the ms
> =>monopoly so that there will be more hardware working in other than ms.
> 
> I need to go back and see the beginning of this thread, just in case 
> anyone thinks I know what I'm talking about...

I don't know what I'm talking about either.

> 
> But for years now, I have had a marked preference for AMD processors. This 
> is based on my past experience in compilers, especially in optimizers. 
> 

AMD seems to be having some manufacturing problems, as well as financial 
problems, but they do know CPU design. Some of us always cheer for the 
underdog. And it looks like AMD just won big in the EU court decision.

> The Intel line is so massively pipelined that it's almost impossible to 
> write an optimizer that doesn't have to flush its entire cache every few 
> instructions. 
> 

Intel finally realized that pipeline flushing was the main thing the 
processor was doing. The "new" (I7) architecture has fixed this problem, 
with very impressive results.

> Not that it matters, but the Alpha chip was one impressive processor. That 
> thing could clock off as many as 6 instructions per clock tick because of 
> intelligent pipelining.

Most of the Alpha crew went to work for Intel. I think it paid off for 
Intel.

> 
> The AMD line doesn't run as fast as the Intel chips on a clock-cycles per 
> dollar basis, but it makes up for it in how it caches instructions. That's 
> both why they're comparable and why it's even possible to write an 
> optimizer for it.

You'll notice that both AMD and Intel have turned down the clocks speeds 
and are trying to make up lost performance with more cores per chip. For 
some HPC workloads, it isn't working.

> 
> Gcc is a truly amazing piece of work, and it certainly even qualifies as 
> art. It supports a very wide range of architectures, but I would have to 
> say that it does a better job of optimizing AMD code than Intel code. Then 
> facton in that the processor itself does a better job of caching 
> instructions, and you can see where I get my preferences.
> 

Agreed. You'll see better performance on Intel chips using the Intel 
(ICC) compiler.

Regards,

John