Memes

45643 readers

1123 users here now

Rules:

Be civil and nice.
Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

705

Amd fan (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

113 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

For years, Intel's compiler, math library MKL and their profiler, VTune, really only worked well with their own CPUs. There was in fact code that decreased performance if it detected a non-Intel CPU in place:

https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49&v=f

That later became part of a larger lawsuit, but since Intel is not discriminating against AMD directly, but rather against all other non-Intel CPUs, the result of the lawsuit was underwhelming. In fact, it's still a problem today:

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/302650-how-to-bypass-matlab-cripple-amd-ryzen-threadripper-cpus

https://medium.com/codex/fixing-intel-compilers-unfair-cpu-dispatcher-part-1-2-4a4a367c8919

Given that the MKL is a widely used library, people also indirectly suffer from this if they buy an AMD CPU and utilize software that links against that library.

As someone working in low-level optimization, that was/is a shitty situation. I still bought an AMD CPU after the latest fiasco a couple of weeks ago.