The Peculiar State Of CPU Security Mitigation Performance On Intel Tiger Lake

[mlau]

I seem to recall Intel claiming that Tiger Lake would feature hardware mitigation, maybe turning off the mitigations in the way that Michael did bypasses the hardware optimized mitigations and that results in lower performance.

I think intel also optimized the internals to speed up processing of the common mitigation code patterns. I wouldn't be surprised if that opened another hole though..

[sophisticles]

Who told you that???? LOL!! The Covid Pandemic has driven enterprise IT spending through the roof, most IT departments in 2020 were spending money like crazy to support all the new telework and remote access requirements. Tech stocks were literally the #1 sector for 2020, by a wide margin, due to all the crazy IT spending. Do you not watch the stock market?? You missed out big time!


Uh, no, just no. You're overthinking this. Or maybe you don't understand how enterprise software licensing works? Or IT department tech refresh cycles? Or enterprise hardware support agreements?

• We priced out new servers to replace the old ones, as the old ones (R810) were EOL. Dell R7415's with AMD EPYC processors, and R740's with intel Xeon processors. For a similar level of performance, based on core count, frequency, and published benchmarks, a 42 U rack full of R740's costs more than $100,000 *more* than a 42 U rack full of R7415's, at least with the processor and options we selected. Ergo, we saved over $100,000 by selecting AMD EPYC powered servers rather than similarly spec'd intel Xeon servers.
• Since it sounds like you're unfamiliar with enterprise IT, most enterprise software is licensed annually, to include the technical support contract. On many enterprise software suites, the licensing costs are per core, or per socket. Our software is licensed per socket. An R7415 is a single socket server. An R740 with intel Xeon with the same core count and memory footprint requires dual-socket. Ergo, the cost per annum of our enterprise software is literally cut in half by selecting AMD EPYC over intel Xeon for our recent tech refresh.

Again, there is no "added to what they already spent" when the old hardware has been fully depreciated financially, and is EOL from the vendor. With enterprise hardware, the vendor support costs go up every year, to where supporting old equipment costs MORE each year than buying new equipment would. So enterprise IT throws out the old and buys new every few years, to keep their costs down. And the software is not purchased like consumer software is, it is essentially "leased" by paying an annual "subscription" for licensing and technical support. FYI Enterprise IT works a whole lot differently than the consumer peecee market.

I have no idea what kind of company you work for but I work for one of the largest medical labs in the world; if you watched when POTUS brought the CEO's of numerous major labs to the WH, then you saw the my company's CEP on TV with POTUS. I can tell you this, our company has been hoarding cash since the pandemic hit, Our IT department did have to spend some money, but not on upgrading our server farm, we use DELL EMC's, they spent it on acquiring some cheap laptops to give to everyone that suddenly had to work from home. Nearly all of these laptops are dual core with 4Gb ram, and 32 bit Win 7, some of the developers and analysts got slightly higher tier laptops with quad core, 8 Gb ram and 64 bit Win 10 and the few that needed higher specs where set up with remote vpn access to our server farm.

The one place our IT department did spend significant amounts of money was in upgrading our network security as our networks, as all lab's networks, have been under constant attack from what appears to be state sponsored actors in China, Russia and North Korea.

But the nonsense you spewed? I don't believe a word you said for a minute, it's complete silliness and the type of fantasy that plays out in the mind's of AMD fanboys.

And for the record I like AMD processors, I am eagerly waiting for Zen 3 APUs, but you have no idea what you are talking about as evidenced by the hallucination you shared and your claims about IT stocks.

[torsionbar28]

Our IT department did have to spend some money, but not on upgrading our server farm, we use DELL EMC's, they spent it on acquiring some cheap laptops to give to everyone that suddenly had to work from home. Nearly all of these laptops are dual core with 4Gb ram, and 32 bit Win 7, some of the developers and analysts got slightly higher tier laptops with quad core, 8 Gb ram and 64 bit Win 10 and the few that needed higher specs where set up with remote vpn access to our server farm.

As I said, enterprise IT works very different from client side peecee's. It's clear we work on different parts of the IT spectrum. I don't touch client peecees and don't know or care what happens there.

The one place our IT department did spend significant amounts of money was in upgrading our network security as our networks, as all lab's networks, have been under constant attack from what appears to be state sponsored actors in China, Russia and North Korea.

Quite true, everyone is dealing with these very same state sponsored bad actors. They are taking advantage of the fact that so many large businesses have very rapidly procured and installed an enormous amount of new server and remote access capability. This security aspect is further driving the record IT spending in 2020.

But the nonsense you spewed? I don't believe a word you said for a minute, it's complete silliness and the type of fantasy that plays out in the mind's of AMD fanboys.

Uhh ok. Clearly you don't work in enterprise IT. When you're dealing with racks and racks of servers, SAN, LAN, etc. gear, it's a very different cost equation from the client peecee side of things.

And for the record I like AMD processors, I am eagerly waiting for Zen 3 APUs, but you have no idea what you are talking about as evidenced by the hallucination you shared and your claims about IT stocks.

Not really sure how to respond to this. It sounds like you missed out on the tech stock boom of 2020, which is unfortunate. It has been like free money since the pandemic dip in mid March. AMD and Apple both up 100%. Amazon up 50%. Qualcomm up over 150%. Microsoft up 75%. Truly incredible gains. About the only tech stock I can think of that hasn't seen amazing 2020 growth is Intel, for obvious reasons.

[qarium]

Will the linux foundation be buying everyone new CPUs to go with it?

would be a good business modell to give you free cpu if you have to pay it back later if you get better means faster and more secure product in the future...

but i know people like you ... you would even break a deal like this.

people like you are like this: you want a faster cpu now and this for free and later you want faster and more secure new cpu for free for sure.

so it does not even make sense to speak to you because you seem not to unterstand long term benefit of a decision compared to your sneaked oil of short term benefit ego trip traitor.

[qarium]

As I said, enterprise IT works very different from client side peecee's.

it does not look like sophisticles is a sane IT professionel or lets say there are 2 different class in the mean of quality of IT proessionals.

First class always go to tech companies like: IBM/google/redhat/microsoft,facebook/AMD/Nvidia/NSA
means the REALLY REALLY big players...

second class like people sophisticles they go to smaller companys the one whos main business is not IT but in his case it is a medical lap and they only do IT as a side effect to maintain main business in medical.

and it looks like what sounds very sane to the first class IT profess like you are torsionbar28 does not sound sane to people like sophisticles

but it is clear why he works for a company outside of IT and only USE it ... and you sound like one who is inside of big IT business who has the main purpose to only do IT...

for one who only do IT it is a no brainer to buy amd to save money on hardware and software licenses.

for people like him they do "sneak oil" IT means use EOL servers to save a little money and it is sneaked oil because of the old hardware breaks the damange of this act will be max.

[kcrudup]

Another "feature" of Tiger Lake ... is the removal of the S3 sleep state in favor of the new S0ix suspend mechanism.

Cite, please? I've been trying to find a source on this.

[Alex/AT]

torsionbar28
Indeed we transitioned our massive ISP in-process and out-offered virtualization farms to EPYC Zen2 24C 1P based Dells as well from our old Intel Dell park (1P/2P Silvers), saving in all the power, rack space, maintenance of mitigations and costs, both hardware and licensing. So yes, I can confirm heavy IT definitely works that way.

[curfew]

it's almost as if you don't believe that Michael doesn't know how to control variables like this - imagine, a reviewer of things for so many years just not understanding how to benchmark something!

He runs benchmarks using out-of-box configurations exactly for the reason that then he does not need to know anything nor care about the details.

"I just run everything using defaults, not my problem if the defaults suck."

[boxie]

He runs benchmarks using out-of-box configurations exactly for the reason that then he does not need to know anything nor care about the details.

"I just run everything using defaults, not my problem if the defaults suck."

... and that's quite a valid way of doing it! The defaults are what is used most widely - not everyone has Gamers Nexus levels of time/patience/skill to tweak the ever living feck out of a system to get the best out of it.

And being that most people will use the defaults unless they have a specific reason to not use them - testing what most people use is a wonderful thing.