8 ms·

From a purely non-scientific standpoint my Latitude E7470 performance is below an acceptable threshold now. FWIW: I haven't done any benchmarks - This is purel

From a purely non-scientific standpoint my Latitude E7470 performance is below an acceptable threshold now. FWIW: I haven't done any benchmarks - This is purely anecdotal! I use VS 2017 / 2019 and the performance is definitely taken a noticeable hit since the last BIOS update. Opening projects is slow but once they're open the processor is pegged for longer and when using intellisense the process is pegged for longer now too. It's at the point where I looked to replace it even though it was fine up until Jan/Feb this year. I tried backing out the BIOS update but it failed so I am stuck with it now. I even bought a NVMe SSD which helped with IO a bit, and upped the RAM to 16GB but the processor is a huge bottleneck now. It is bad enough that I even had a Surface Book 2 15" for a week to test it and its performance is rotten as well so I returned it My desktop with an 8700K O/C to 5GHz hasn't had a BIOS update since early 2018 (I think) and is instantaneous for most things: needless to say, I have no intention of updating it. This is bad for Intel... really bad imo. Edit: Added the NVMe and RAM bit.

acdha 7y ago
This may be a vendor issue: I have a fully-patched Mac and while there are regressions in benchmarks it’s never noticeable in normal usage.
- pdimitar 7y ago
  Can you please add details? Which Mac exactly? And which benchmarks have been observably slower? I am pondering an iMac Pro and since it's gonna be a huge investment, I am trying to gather some information and see if its Xeon-W 2195 (18 cores) CPU will be heavily hit by the mitigations.
  - washadjeffmad 7y ago
    For most processing tasks like render, the effect will be negligible. Syscall heavy workloads we saw dip up to 50% on all pre-NVMe models with under 4 cores in both the U and HQ series. The practical effect was up to 10 minute logins for new users and glacial access times on models prior to 2017. We have 6 mid spec'd iMac Pros ($8-11,000/pc), and unless it's being purchased for you, they're a hard product to justify. With the same budget, I usually recommend building a 1-2U half rack node for compute and getting an LG OLED or Flanders Scientific display if you're doing anything VFX related. For half the expense, you can get equivalent or better specs and invest more where you actually need it. We buy Macs mostly to remote into other machines built to do the work. It's more economical and much less frustrating.
    - pdimitar 7y ago
      Thank you. If that's okay with you, I have a few more questions and notes: - For the moment I am not considering return-of-investment at all, or how pricey the iMac Pro is in general. I know it is more expensive than a competing Linux-based Xeon solution with a pro display (though I didn't believe the difference to be that huge as 50%!). - You mentioned the performance penalties on pre-NVMe models with <4 cores. But what about the hit on the NVMe and >4 core models? - I am not gonna do anything VFX related for now but I like having the option if I change focus in the future. Currently I am a programmer who wants to branch out to data science and, in general, analysis of big data sets (and to work on large parallel workloads like CPU multicore + GPU CUDA at the same time). I feel the 18 cores plus the huge L caches of the Xeon W-2195 will be of huge benefit -- but I could be wrong. - Additionally, I am sick of Linux' brittleness and would just like to use a Mac. I could probably setup a particular Linux to never fail to boot after an update but I have to admit I gave up on that years ago. Linux just seems to acquire bloat over time until one day an update bricks it -- and I don't want to look after it anymore. - Can you clarify why Macs are more frustrating in your day work? Your statement to me seems loaded with a context I don't have. - I saw one reviewer claiming the 14 and 18 core variants to be a waste due to the ECC RAM having only 4 parallel channels. Do you have an opinion or observations on that front? --- TL;DR: I don't care about the price since I am gonna do a lot of parallel programming where the extra cores' bonus should be very impactful, I am after a very solid machine that doesn't brick after an update (like many Linus distros do), and the NVMe SSD, the 18-core Xeon CPU and the tons of ECC RAM will help in my future endeavours a lot. I don't care about the world-class display (a normal 5K retina display would be just fine) so my money there wouldn't be that well spent but oh well, not gonna lose sleep over it. Is the iMac Pro a good work machine with these caveats, how do you think?
washadjeffmad 7y ago
Someone made a "Never AMD" promise in purchasing, so this has pushed up lifecycles on, without exaggeration, all of our hardware by at least two years. The mobile and servers are most affected. Worst is we support several thousand Macs, most mobile, and after I saw syscall performance choke after High Sierra, especially on apfs, I suggested we ask Apple to buy back or credit us for the loss in expected performance and lifetime. Instead we froze purchasing on all but high end models and pushed out the replacement timeline waiting for Intel's 9-series, which was supposed to have hardware mitigation. Now we know that even the 9-series are susceptible. The SMT patch was pushed out last week, and we're going to have some really interesting conversations in the coming weeks.
- mistrial9 7y ago
  Mr Jobs did a deal with the devil to put Intel-only across the product lines, before the iPhone. Now we get this unexpected penalty due to monoculture. Apple can stop bean-counting their cash hoard and start the long process of making amends, else F-U from this commentator
  - dfrage 7y ago
    If it had been practical to keep with the PPC line Mac users today would have the same problems, seeing as how POWER CPUs suffer from both Meltdown and Spectre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability)#Affected_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili... This theoretical analysis says G4 and up ones look worryingly vulnerable to Spectre: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-and-powerpc-or-why.html http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-an... Current Freescale/NXP PowerPC designs are vulnerable to Spectre: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/27/98 https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/27/98
slacka 7y ago
I also saw a measurable drop in my full rebuild times. As I do not run any untrusted code on that machine, I disabled all mitigations. There I use a dedicated browser for work related and NoScript for personal so I felt safe with this trade-off. Beyond javascript desktop machines should only be running trusted code. You do not need to downgrade your BIOS. You can regain all of your performance on the OS level. You can use this tool on windows[1] or edit the registry. On linux just add this to your grub.cfg. noibrs noibpb nopti nospectre_v2 nospectre_v1 l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier mds=off mitigations=off [1] https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm
- lightedman 7y ago
  Hiw do you get lost performance which is done by hardware back by using software? If HT is disabled at BIOS/UEFI level, how is software bypassing that low level block?
- sebazzz 7y ago
  InSpectre only disables part of the mitigations. Another part is microcode update via BIOS or OS updates, another is binary updates containing workarounds like retpoline.
  - slacka 7y ago
    I may have changed some addition registry settings from the documents over at: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4073119/protect-against-speculative-execution-side-channel-vulnerabilities-in https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4073119/protect-aga... According to the powershell app PS> Get-SpeculationControlSettings All mitigations are disabled. No need to do anything in BIOS.
what-the-grump 7y ago
If you are using 1809/1803 builds of windows, they are noticebly slower due random background crap consuming all ram and cpu. 1903 is more responsive. For azure workloads, patched server past 04.2019 see less cpu busy time for me. On older CPUs the specter mitigations <2019 have a significant performance impact. Other things I've noticed. The new ssms built on newer .net framework is significantly faster (gui) at everything.
panarky 7y ago
> This is bad for Intel... really bad imo. Certainly very bad for Intel's customers and partners, but is there any evidence that it's bad for Intel? Are they offering refunds? Is there a class action lawsuit likely to inflict significant damage? Any sign Intel is losing market share? Are they dropping prices to maintain share? If anything, Intel's fuckups are actually good for Intel. Customers must now buy more Intel cores to make up for all the compute lost due to their defects.
- josteink 7y ago
  > Any sign Intel is losing market share? Purely anecdotal but I just upgraded and consolidated 2 of my home-servers, and for me there was no doubt AMD was the right choice this time around. All other enthusiasts I know also consider AMD only, and even consider that alone reason enough to build a new rig. At work though we have a deal/partnership with Lenovo, so I can’t get AMD even if I threaten to quit. So for now I’m stuck with 4 core CPUs at work, like it’s still 2010.

acdha 7y ago

This may be a vendor issue: I have a fully-patched Mac and while there are regressions in benchmarks it’s never noticeable in normal usage.

pdimitar 7y ago
Can you please add details? Which Mac exactly? And which benchmarks have been observably slower? I am pondering an iMac Pro and since it's gonna be a huge investment, I am trying to gather some information and see if its Xeon-W 2195 (18 cores) CPU will be heavily hit by the mitigations.
- washadjeffmad 7y ago
  For most processing tasks like render, the effect will be negligible. Syscall heavy workloads we saw dip up to 50% on all pre-NVMe models with under 4 cores in both the U and HQ series. The practical effect was up to 10 minute logins for new users and glacial access times on models prior to 2017. We have 6 mid spec'd iMac Pros ($8-11,000/pc), and unless it's being purchased for you, they're a hard product to justify. With the same budget, I usually recommend building a 1-2U half rack node for compute and getting an LG OLED or Flanders Scientific display if you're doing anything VFX related. For half the expense, you can get equivalent or better specs and invest more where you actually need it. We buy Macs mostly to remote into other machines built to do the work. It's more economical and much less frustrating.
  - pdimitar 7y ago
    Thank you. If that's okay with you, I have a few more questions and notes: - For the moment I am not considering return-of-investment at all, or how pricey the iMac Pro is in general. I know it is more expensive than a competing Linux-based Xeon solution with a pro display (though I didn't believe the difference to be that huge as 50%!). - You mentioned the performance penalties on pre-NVMe models with <4 cores. But what about the hit on the NVMe and >4 core models? - I am not gonna do anything VFX related for now but I like having the option if I change focus in the future. Currently I am a programmer who wants to branch out to data science and, in general, analysis of big data sets (and to work on large parallel workloads like CPU multicore + GPU CUDA at the same time). I feel the 18 cores plus the huge L caches of the Xeon W-2195 will be of huge benefit -- but I could be wrong. - Additionally, I am sick of Linux' brittleness and would just like to use a Mac. I could probably setup a particular Linux to never fail to boot after an update but I have to admit I gave up on that years ago. Linux just seems to acquire bloat over time until one day an update bricks it -- and I don't want to look after it anymore. - Can you clarify why Macs are more frustrating in your day work? Your statement to me seems loaded with a context I don't have. - I saw one reviewer claiming the 14 and 18 core variants to be a waste due to the ECC RAM having only 4 parallel channels. Do you have an opinion or observations on that front? --- TL;DR: I don't care about the price since I am gonna do a lot of parallel programming where the extra cores' bonus should be very impactful, I am after a very solid machine that doesn't brick after an update (like many Linus distros do), and the NVMe SSD, the 18-core Xeon CPU and the tons of ECC RAM will help in my future endeavours a lot. I don't care about the world-class display (a normal 5K retina display would be just fine) so my money there wouldn't be that well spent but oh well, not gonna lose sleep over it. Is the iMac Pro a good work machine with these caveats, how do you think?

washadjeffmad 7y ago

Someone made a "Never AMD" promise in purchasing, so this has pushed up lifecycles on, without exaggeration, all of our hardware by at least two years. The mobile and servers are most affected. Worst is we support several thousand Macs, most mobile, and after I saw syscall performance choke after High Sierra, especially on apfs, I suggested we ask Apple to buy back or credit us for the loss in expected performance and lifetime. Instead we froze purchasing on all but high end models and pushed out the replacement timeline waiting for Intel's 9-series, which was supposed to have hardware mitigation. Now we know that even the 9-series are susceptible. The SMT patch was pushed out last week, and we're going to have some really interesting conversations in the coming weeks.

mistrial9 7y ago
Mr Jobs did a deal with the devil to put Intel-only across the product lines, before the iPhone. Now we get this unexpected penalty due to monoculture. Apple can stop bean-counting their cash hoard and start the long process of making amends, else F-U from this commentator
- dfrage 7y ago
  If it had been practical to keep with the PPC line Mac users today would have the same problems, seeing as how POWER CPUs suffer from both Meltdown and Spectre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability)#Affected_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili... This theoretical analysis says G4 and up ones look worryingly vulnerable to Spectre: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-and-powerpc-or-why.html http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-an... Current Freescale/NXP PowerPC designs are vulnerable to Spectre: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/27/98 https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/27/98

slacka 7y ago

I also saw a measurable drop in my full rebuild times. As I do not run any untrusted code on that machine, I disabled all mitigations. There I use a dedicated browser for work related and NoScript for personal so I felt safe with this trade-off. Beyond javascript desktop machines should only be running trusted code. You do not need to downgrade your BIOS. You can regain all of your performance on the OS level. You can use this tool on windows[1] or edit the registry. On linux just add this to your grub.cfg. noibrs noibpb nopti nospectre_v2 nospectre_v1 l1tf=off nospec_store_bypass_disable no_stf_barrier mds=off mitigations=off [1] https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm https://www.grc.com/inspectre.htm

lightedman 7y ago
Hiw do you get lost performance which is done by hardware back by using software? If HT is disabled at BIOS/UEFI level, how is software bypassing that low level block?
sebazzz 7y ago
InSpectre only disables part of the mitigations. Another part is microcode update via BIOS or OS updates, another is binary updates containing workarounds like retpoline.
- slacka 7y ago
  I may have changed some addition registry settings from the documents over at: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4073119/protect-against-speculative-execution-side-channel-vulnerabilities-in https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4073119/protect-aga... According to the powershell app PS> Get-SpeculationControlSettings All mitigations are disabled. No need to do anything in BIOS.

what-the-grump 7y ago

If you are using 1809/1803 builds of windows, they are noticebly slower due random background crap consuming all ram and cpu. 1903 is more responsive. For azure workloads, patched server past 04.2019 see less cpu busy time for me. On older CPUs the specter mitigations <2019 have a significant performance impact. Other things I've noticed. The new ssms built on newer .net framework is significantly faster (gui) at everything.

panarky 7y ago

> This is bad for Intel... really bad imo. Certainly very bad for Intel's customers and partners, but is there any evidence that it's bad for Intel? Are they offering refunds? Is there a class action lawsuit likely to inflict significant damage? Any sign Intel is losing market share? Are they dropping prices to maintain share? If anything, Intel's fuckups are actually good for Intel. Customers must now buy more Intel cores to make up for all the compute lost due to their defects.

josteink 7y ago
> Any sign Intel is losing market share? Purely anecdotal but I just upgraded and consolidated 2 of my home-servers, and for me there was no doubt AMD was the right choice this time around. All other enthusiasts I know also consider AMD only, and even consider that alone reason enough to build a new rig. At work though we have a deal/partnership with Lenovo, so I can’t get AMD even if I threaten to quit. So for now I’m stuck with 4 core CPUs at work, like it’s still 2010.