5+ Years Late: LLVM's AMD Excavator Target Was Missing Two Features

[pal666]

GCC impairs developer's freedom heavily

it impairs thief's freedom to steal

LLVM is the future of OSS compilers.

you hate oss so much that you hope for monoculture?

[pal666]

A puzzling question is whether to upgrade to Zen3 (DDR4) or wait for the first DDR5 (AMD or Intel) benchmarks which are likely to be published in the second half of 2021.

no doubt ddr5 will be faster. especially 2022 or 2023 ddr5(frequencies inside one generation grow with time, first products will be much closer to previous generation). but then will come ddr6 which will be even faster. waiting month or two could make sense. if you could wait year or two, maybe you don't really need upgrade

[szymon_g]

About 3 times more.

more if one uses a laptop

[pal666]

About 3 times more.

if you go with cheapest motherboard and memory. the memory is especially interesting, its speed is not specified in your link, so maybe they were comparing ddr3 1033 vs ddr4 3866 and results will not translate to ddr3 1866 -> ddr4 2133 upgrade

[pal666]

I don't understand how it is possible for your mind to generate posts adding either nothing or going in a negative direction

it's not my fault that your mind can't comprehend addition

Why aren't you challenging yourself to write better posts every time you intend to post something?

if you were writing better posts to begin with, i wouldn't be having this discussion

[Guest]

xxmitsu
The RDRAND instruction in the CPU itself isn't buggy, only the firmware implementations (and AMD obviously did not care to make OEMs implement it correctly).

Excavator is still used in the AMD Chromebooks that are sold today, and it was quite recently that Google started selling AMD Chromebooks. Given that Chrome OS uses the LLVM compiler, that may help performance minimally.

Also Excavator APUs aren't that bad, the CPU has AVX2 support and the GPU is GCN 3, the 4C/4T parts were roughly on par with the 2C/4T Pentiums of their time, and those lacked AVX2.

They're pretty bad. I have two different laptops eith pre-Ryzen CPUs, they're really bad. Opening YouTube website is a slow and frustrating experience. That's how bad it is.

[brad0]

you hate oss so much that you hope for monoculture?

Funny because it's GPL zealots that push for a monoculture and then complain about it. So two faced. When the tables have turned these same fools complain from the opposite perspective, but it still makes them look like hypocrites.

[brad0]

How? Or perhaps you meant it doesn't allow proprietary to leech on it so easily?

GCC is the definition of playing stupid games you get stupid prizes. It's known for making stupid design decisions because "bad people" might use our code. Well there are consequences to that. For a long time people begrudgingly used GCC. Now there is another player in town. People don't have to deal with GCC's bullshit. On top of it there are a hell of a lot of technical advantages switching away too. It's a win win.

[Guest]

it impairs thief's freedom to steal
you hate oss so much that you hope for monoculture?

No, I hope for sane tools.. and, healthy BSD-like ecosystem, instead of CLA-ed "GPL" software. You can call it stealing, others call it voluntary sharing of reusable libraries and tools.

[Guest]

To address the "developer's freedom" thing for the bazillionth time:

copyleft takes away the recipient's freedom to release a proprietary copy or proprietary fork, and the benefit of the license is transitive. That is, if you release something copyleft, and I modify it and release the modified version, and some third person modifies my version or your version and releases it, all of us get access to the modifications.

permissive license takes away the developer's freedom to access all of the modifications and improvements other users might make.

Neither is "more free" than the other, it's just a question of which set of freedoms you value more. If you just want to use other people's work without giving back, I'd call you a parasite but then, hey, clearly permissive license is the model for you. If you want everyone that uses the software to benefit from the work that anyone does with it, then copyleft is the way to go.

And before someone says it: no, copyleft is not anti-capitalist. It just switches the software industry business model away from paying for copyrighted work towards paying for labor. Instead of buying a proprietary LLVM front-end from you, I just pay you to write and release under the GPL a GCC front end.

So, you call all spring framework users parasites? It's voluntary sharing and cooperation on development of reusable tools and libraries for proprietary domain specific applications. GPL just enforces freedom as in free beer, which must be given by all derived software developers. So, it is anti-capitalist. And, socialism works the best for lazy parasites, who don't want to put effort into quality work.