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I think I see a comment to this effect on every post about AMD, that their software ecosystem isn't as advanced. But, isn't it a pretty narrow market that bene

I think I see a comment to this effect on every post about AMD, that their software ecosystem isn't as advanced. But, isn't it a pretty narrow market that benefits from Intel's tooling here? Startups running their entire business on JITed runtimes on top of multiple layers of virtualization in cloud providers aren't using this. Enterprises with enough resources to revise their entire stack to work on ARM (Cloudflare, Microsoft, Google, Amazon) likely have the internal resources and skills already to build the missing tooling and profile statistically using massive fleets of servers. How large is the target market of Intel purchasers that are large enough and performance sensitive enough that it's profitable to micro-optimize assembly, and yet not large enough that it's a rounding error to build similar tooling for AMD x86-64 or ARM or otherwise?

drewg123 7y ago
Its not a question of just building tooling. It is a question of AMD having fewer performance counters. So even organizations like Google with tons of SWEs can't do anything if there are no performance counters, or if the performance counters are not exposed. And we (Netflix Open Connect) kind of fit that middle ground that you're talking about.
- baybal2 7y ago
  > Its not a question of just building tooling. It is a question of AMD having fewer performance counters. So even organizations like Google with tons of SWEs can't do anything if there are no performance counters, or if the performance counters are not exposed. Have you tried JTAG?
- mda 7y ago
  Any examples of missing counters that are essential? I am curious because I rarely see people care about things further than TLB, L1, L2 misses (which exist on AMD).
hinkley 7y ago
If you have a large enough problem space that you have the capacity to develop a 'bench' of people to tackle deep analysis, you probably should do so, rather than relying entirely solely on tools to tell you what's going on. It's not enough to know how to do something, you have to have done it routinely enough that when it really matters you don't treat it like a rehearsal. > How large is the target market of Intel purchasers that are large enough and performance sensitive enough that it's profitable to micro-optimize assembly I'd like to think if a large customer picked up the phone and called Intel and asked why the new processors they got are slower than the old ones, that asking that they send someone to take a look at it would not be outside of the realm of reasonable requests. But not being in a position to buy millions of dollars worth of gear from Intel so I'll have to wait for someone to tell me what happened. If they bother to send someone out, that person would probably like to have - or even insist on - some decent tools. Reliable and informative, if not necessarily friendly enough for consumers. I wonder to what extent Intel's tools prevent such customer visits, versus being made to give small and medium sized customer a feeling that they have some secret weapon using Intel, rather than the reality of one. A pretty collar for the pig to wear to the Fair.
pjmlp 7y ago
Same applies to GPU debugging tools, and that isn't a narrow market, with HPC, FinTech, game engines, machine learning.

drewg123 7y ago

Its not a question of just building tooling. It is a question of AMD having fewer performance counters. So even organizations like Google with tons of SWEs can't do anything if there are no performance counters, or if the performance counters are not exposed. And we (Netflix Open Connect) kind of fit that middle ground that you're talking about.

baybal2 7y ago
> Its not a question of just building tooling. It is a question of AMD having fewer performance counters. So even organizations like Google with tons of SWEs can't do anything if there are no performance counters, or if the performance counters are not exposed. Have you tried JTAG?
mda 7y ago
Any examples of missing counters that are essential? I am curious because I rarely see people care about things further than TLB, L1, L2 misses (which exist on AMD).

hinkley 7y ago

If you have a large enough problem space that you have the capacity to develop a 'bench' of people to tackle deep analysis, you probably should do so, rather than relying entirely solely on tools to tell you what's going on. It's not enough to know how to do something, you have to have done it routinely enough that when it really matters you don't treat it like a rehearsal. > How large is the target market of Intel purchasers that are large enough and performance sensitive enough that it's profitable to micro-optimize assembly I'd like to think if a large customer picked up the phone and called Intel and asked why the new processors they got are slower than the old ones, that asking that they send someone to take a look at it would not be outside of the realm of reasonable requests. But not being in a position to buy millions of dollars worth of gear from Intel so I'll have to wait for someone to tell me what happened. If they bother to send someone out, that person would probably like to have - or even insist on - some decent tools. Reliable and informative, if not necessarily friendly enough for consumers. I wonder to what extent Intel's tools prevent such customer visits, versus being made to give small and medium sized customer a feeling that they have some secret weapon using Intel, rather than the reality of one. A pretty collar for the pig to wear to the Fair.

pjmlp 7y ago

Same applies to GPU debugging tools, and that isn't a narrow market, with HPC, FinTech, game engines, machine learning.