3 ms·

> This means the typical home and business PC user should not see significant slowdowns in common tasks such as reading email, writing a document or accessing d

by mcintyre1994 9y ago

> This means the typical home and business PC user should not see significant slowdowns in common tasks such as reading email, writing a document or accessing digital photos. How can Intel possibly continue to claim this when the majority of home and business PC users are on Windows, and probably mostly on hardware older than Skylake too?

ianhowson 9y ago
CPU performance isn't important for 'typical home and business' tasks. They're estimating 6% slowdown based on SYSmark 2014. I quickly skimmed the whitepaper and think this is probably reasonable; there's a mix of CPU-bound and I/O-bound tasks, and the CPU-bound tasks won't be impacted. Most home users are still on spinning disks, so that's your bottleneck for I/O, not the additional syscall overhead. A 6% slowdown is imperceptible to a human. For tasks that don't need a lot of CPU power (like office applications and web browsing) even a 30% slowdown is not that big a deal.
dspillett 9y ago
For most of those users the affected part of the system is not a key bottleneck: syscalls such as filesystem or hardware access. For most home/office tasks (web browsing, email, office documents) most of the time is spent waiting for user input or network responses. Even on a really slow old Atom-based netbook I suspect that the difference will be at worst "noticeable" and not significant for these tasks (i.e. it isn't going to make any difference while the app is waiting for your next key-press). Older games that make many small calls to the graphics hardware will be affected but unless you are running them on really old hardware you'll not notice that either as they won't tax newer hardware even with the extra work. Newer games will be using more efficient techniques anyway. Startup times are likely to be affected, both OS and individual application, but that is generally a once-per-session matter, and of course there will be some applications (or some workflows using applications otherwise relatively unaffected) that will see a difference, but not the majority. Older OSs may be more starkly affected because of design changes since. For instance until 10 Windows performed font parsing and rendering in the kernel so text heavy applications might see some extra display lag after these patches. Low-memory situations might be more affected too, as RAM starvation increases the amount of IO happening during normal operation. Developers are far more likely to notice, I've seen some bad before/after benchmarks for build processes. Long-running tasks, particularly those performing IO such as video encoding, are more likely to make the differences visible too (10% extra on a many-hour encoding task could add up to something pretty inconvenient). It is expected that certain server loads are going to be the worst hit. But none of this paragraph's "things that will be affected" are typical home/business use cases for the majority.

ianhowson 9y ago

CPU performance isn't important for 'typical home and business' tasks. They're estimating 6% slowdown based on SYSmark 2014. I quickly skimmed the whitepaper and think this is probably reasonable; there's a mix of CPU-bound and I/O-bound tasks, and the CPU-bound tasks won't be impacted. Most home users are still on spinning disks, so that's your bottleneck for I/O, not the additional syscall overhead. A 6% slowdown is imperceptible to a human. For tasks that don't need a lot of CPU power (like office applications and web browsing) even a 30% slowdown is not that big a deal.

dspillett 9y ago

For most of those users the affected part of the system is not a key bottleneck: syscalls such as filesystem or hardware access. For most home/office tasks (web browsing, email, office documents) most of the time is spent waiting for user input or network responses. Even on a really slow old Atom-based netbook I suspect that the difference will be at worst "noticeable" and not significant for these tasks (i.e. it isn't going to make any difference while the app is waiting for your next key-press). Older games that make many small calls to the graphics hardware will be affected but unless you are running them on really old hardware you'll not notice that either as they won't tax newer hardware even with the extra work. Newer games will be using more efficient techniques anyway. Startup times are likely to be affected, both OS and individual application, but that is generally a once-per-session matter, and of course there will be some applications (or some workflows using applications otherwise relatively unaffected) that will see a difference, but not the majority. Older OSs may be more starkly affected because of design changes since. For instance until 10 Windows performed font parsing and rendering in the kernel so text heavy applications might see some extra display lag after these patches. Low-memory situations might be more affected too, as RAM starvation increases the amount of IO happening during normal operation. Developers are far more likely to notice, I've seen some bad before/after benchmarks for build processes. Long-running tasks, particularly those performing IO such as video encoding, are more likely to make the differences visible too (10% extra on a many-hour encoding task could add up to something pretty inconvenient). It is expected that certain server loads are going to be the worst hit. But none of this paragraph's "things that will be affected" are typical home/business use cases for the majority.