8 ms·

The return of the turbo button

80 points by d1stc 5y ago

MauranKilom 5y ago
TL;DR: Games may look at the efficiency cores of new hybrid Intel CPUs and determine the CPU is too slow to run the game. Intel fix: If enabled in the firmware, you can disable those cores (leaving only the beefy ones) by pushing scroll lock. (Disclaimer: No fact checking was performed on my end).
- Aerroon 5y ago
  >Better still, you won't need any new hardware, because it's repurposing something you already have but never use: your Scroll Lock key. But I do use it. It's a great key for toggling screen recording, because it's right next to Print Screen and makes logical sense in terms of positioning. It also doesn't do anything useful, or didn't. Obviously it's not a real problem, but you can't really assume people don't work buttons into their workflow that aren't normally used.
  - amyjess 5y ago
    In Final Fantasy XIV, Scroll Lock is the default key for hiding the UI, which is what I like to do when taking screenshots of my character.
rawling 5y ago
> Which is a problem if the hapless app finds a shiny new 12th-gen processor that looks like a bunch of Atom-class cores – it complains that this new-fastest-ever-chip isn't quick enough. From the article I assumed this was different from the DRM issue, but it links to the exact same Intel KB article.
- mlyle 5y ago
  It's basically the same thing. DRM and anticheat software is deliberately picky to make sure it's running in an expected environment: nothing that looks like processors changing, varying in speed, etc, that may indicate debugging.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  Years ago, Sim City 4 and The Sims 2 had a similar problem – depending on the processor frequency and GPU model they'd automatically enable or disable certain graphics features. The problem with that was that the processor frequency to high/medium/low-performance class mapping was being done based on Pentium 4 clock speeds, so if you were using an AMD processor (or even one of the first generations of Intel's own Core i-processors if you still happened to be playing those games a few years later) with a lower clock speed but higher IPCs (so a roughly equivalent performance), those games would mistakenly assume your processor was slow and disable various graphics effects and other settings. Somewhat annoyingly, Maxis/EA never fixed that issue even though AMD processors weren't totally obscure even at that time, either. The saving grace was that at least things weren't totally hard-coded – there was a rules file in a plain text-based format controlling the various things that should be enabled or disabled based on the detected performance level, and so it was comparatively easy to just change the expected clock speed levels to something more reasonable for a non-Pentium 4 processor. Later this was also helpful because the GPU detection started having its own issues a few years down the line: When AMD started recycling model numbers for its graphics cards, some newer models were then being mis-identified as some slow, older model that would require various workarounds/lower graphics settings, so again you had to manually edit the rules to fix things.
  - rasz 5y ago
    Unreal 1 engine had same issue - modern dynamic clock CPUs confuse it https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/ut-goty-and-framerates-speed-up.182599/#post-2231608 https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/ut-goty-and-framerat... From memory it was something like UT99 running a loop to determine CPU speed at the start when most modern CPUs are running at a lower clock, and when you start actually playing CPU speeds up and game engine goes crazy. ah found it https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=328803#p328803 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=328803#p328803 "UT uses the RDTSC instruction to measure time. This is an assembler instruction that reads the "Cycle Counter" value from your CPU."
    - Const-me 5y ago
      > This is an assembler instruction that reads the "Cycle Counter" value from your CPU." It did that ~10 years ago. On modern CPUs however, that instruction reads a counter which grows at the stock frequency of the CPU (e.g. at 3.6GHz for Ryzen 5 3600), regardless of frequency scaling of any of the cores.
raunometsa 5y ago
I never knew what the button did on my old computer. I tried to push it for more speed, but never worked!
- RedShift1 5y ago
  Back in the day when Pentium machines started appearing, lots of cases still had the turbo button but it wasn't connected.
- corysama 5y ago
  The original IBM PC could have been 5Mhz. But, it was set to 4.77Mhz instead because that way the NTSC out feature of the video card could piggyback it's signal generator off of the CPU clock rather than paying for an additional clock. That way you didn't necessarily have to buy a computer monitor. You could cheap out and use your existing TV instead. Later models obviously ran faster, but that broke the TV out feature. It seems bad to sell people a newer, more expensive model that loses a popular feature. So, a TV back-compat button was put in so you could still use your TV in cases where you really need to. Technically, you didn't lose the feature when you upgraded. Also, some games were written with the assumption of a fixed 4.77Mhz clock and would run unplayably fast on newer machines. The back-compat button would slow the machine down so you could still play last-year's games. But "NTSC Backwards Compatibility Button" is not a sexy name for a feature. So, some genius labeled it the "Turbo Button" even though it actually slowed down the machine. Once the early machines had it, all the later machines had to have it too. For a long time it simply cut the clock rate in half. Eventually, it did nothing and was abandoned soon after.
  - Beldin 5y ago
    <ShifL>-<Alt>-<ShiftR>!! (To switch between 4.77 MHz and 8 MHz)
  - phicoh 5y ago
    The 286 could still run at a low enough clock speed that changing the clock frequency made sense. On the 386 that didn't work anymore, but there was an external cache. So typically, the turbo button would disable external cache. Then the 486 came with built-in L1 cache. And it was always way too fast. At that point the turbo button didn't make sense any more. I guess there were software solutions, but I don't recall any name.
jraph 5y ago
Today's turbo button which does what it says (speed things up) is the two last buttons of uBlock Origin's first toolbar… which block web fonts and javascript. The fastest code is the one that is not downloaded and run.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  I bet there is a whole team at Google discussing how to prevent people from doing just that - and push it as a technological improvement.
  - kuu 5y ago
    Does Google Chrome sound familiar to you? In that case, I have some news...
  - keyle 5y ago
    Let me introduce you to my friend Safari...
  - totetsu 5y ago
    Changes to plugin access on Chrome?
themitigating 5y ago
Slightly off topic but Porsche came out with an EV and the top trim is called "Turbo S" which lines up with their other gas car naming. Some people got upset because it doesn't have a turbocharger in it and felt it was wrong to use the word in the name. Because of turbo buttons on PCs when i was growing up, turbo buttons on 3rd party console controllers, and many other experiences i always associated with just fast, not a specific car part.
- Shivatron 5y ago
  Critics of the Taycan Turbo badging usually make some argument about "Turbo" meaning the-model-that-has-turbocharger(s), but Porsche hasn't been consistent about that for some time. The iconic 911 Turbo is turbocharged, but since 2015 the regular non-Turbo 911 is as well. (Next we can discuss whether a "Mustang" is a kind of horse, a two-door sports car, a four-door electric crossover, or...)
  - Kye 5y ago
    Mustang is clearly a state alchemist.
the8472 5y ago
I sudo echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost (for AMD) to get constant clock rates when doing wall-time benchmarks. Sure, instruction counts would be more accurate but not everything has perf-counters built into it for measurements. I should hotkey that to have a turbo button too.
chungy 5y ago
> it's repurposing something you already have but never use: your Scroll Lock key. You can tell the author doesn't use Excel :)
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  I use Excel but now I'm curious.
  - macintux 5y ago
    I don't have a scroll lock key to experiment, but it appears that it changes the arrow key behavior. https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2018/05/23/turn-off-scroll-lock-excel/ https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2018/05/23/turn-...
    - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
      This is basically what the Scroll Lock key was meant for in the first place, but the convention never really caught on, so the continued presence of the key baffles a lot of people. I recall FreeBSD's console driver supporting using Scroll Lock in a similar way to move through the scrollback buffer, although I don't know whether this is still true in practice (e.g. if using a UEFI or drm console driver rather than old-school VGA).
  - musicale 5y ago
    Scroll lock mode (arrow keys scrolling the window rather than moving the cursor) is almost identical to the way the arrow keys work to scroll a web page – a sort of keyboard equivalent to using a mouse scroll wheel or 2-finger scrolling on a trackpad. It's particularly nice in that it scrolls a single row or column at a time, and particularly useful for spreadsheets (Excel) and text editors. I currently have a compact ("tenkeyless") keyboard which lacks the key, so I tend to use a spring-loaded setup where holding down alt/option/etc. and an arrow key scrolls the window.
- thwarted 5y ago
  In Linux, I have the scroll-lock key mapped to lock the screen.
foxes 5y ago
Lol why can’t the program/OS just handle this automatically. Is Apple that far ahead? You need to manually press a button? Windows moment.
butz 5y ago
Today's turbo button is "power savings" mode.
ryandrake 5y ago
> performance-hungry programs (read: games) sometimes have to check the spec of the PC they're installed on and tell the poor punter that their PC isn't fast enough. This seems like the root problem. Developers, please don't do this. Just let the user run the software, and if it's not fast enough for them, it will be self evident. Don't insert your own personal judgment about what kind of PC is "good enough" and if you absolutely feel you have to butt in like that, don't make the logic faulty like these games apparently do. When I buy a game, I expect to run it. If my PC is too slow, it will run slowly and I'll be motivated to upgrade or fiddle with the graphics settings. Trying to be this performance police is like saying "Your PC is pathetic. In lieu of letting you run this software you paid for, please accept this picture of my middle finger instead." I wouldn't want to do business with a developer that treats me like that.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  Also: Let API calls fail and return errors instead of trying to "predict" errors and be "helpful" to the user. You don't know how people are going to use the software you've written in the future. Example: Old software that can't handle larger-than-expected disk free space. There are AppCompat shims in Windows for lying to applications re: free disk space quantity because some old applications stored the result of disk free queries in 32-bit integers. Who would ever have more than 4GB of free disk?!? The integer overflows that result invariably cause unexpected behavior. Just make the API call to write to the disk. If that returns "disk full" let the user know. Don't "check" first.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    I want to know that there isn't enough disk space before going through a half-hour installation process...
    - spicybright 5y ago
      Surprisingly, some really old windows software installers will ask you want to run the install anyways even after it determines there's not enough space. That seems to be the ideal solution.
judge2020 5y ago
Slightly related, I think it would be useful to be able to force your program onto p-cores if it uses AVX512, as that is noticeably absent on e-cores. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core-i912900k-review-hybrid-performance-brings-hybrid-complexity/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core...
wmf 5y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29127435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29127435
karmakaze 5y ago
Terrible post. It's nothing like the turbo button. This iteration is based on aggressive DRM that gets it wrong. Maybe having different game threads on one or the other type of core might matter but that's not what the current problem is.
Animats 5y ago
There's a whole series of annoying problems which come from this mix of fast and slow CPUs. I want to put the refresh thread on a fast CPU, the asset loading threads on slow CPUs, and the network update thread on something in between. How do I tell the OS that? A problem right now is asking how much memory the GPU has. The NVidia driver for Linux will spill data out to main memory if the GPU memory fills up, but you take about a 50% performance hit when this happens. It's better to cut down distant detail and stay in fast GPU memory. But it's hard to find out how much GPU memory is available and how much a spill costs. With "onboard graphics", as in laptops, there may not be any dedicated GPU memory, so this isn't even a meaningful question.

80 points by d1stc 5y ago

TL;DR: Games may look at the efficiency cores of new hybrid Intel CPUs and determine the CPU is too slow to run the game. Intel fix: If enabled in the firmware, you can disable those cores (leaving only the beefy ones) by pushing scroll lock. (Disclaimer: No fact checking was performed on my end).

Aerroon 5y ago
>Better still, you won't need any new hardware, because it's repurposing something you already have but never use: your Scroll Lock key. But I do use it. It's a great key for toggling screen recording, because it's right next to Print Screen and makes logical sense in terms of positioning. It also doesn't do anything useful, or didn't. Obviously it's not a real problem, but you can't really assume people don't work buttons into their workflow that aren't normally used.
- amyjess 5y ago
  In Final Fantasy XIV, Scroll Lock is the default key for hiding the UI, which is what I like to do when taking screenshots of my character.

rawling 5y ago

> Which is a problem if the hapless app finds a shiny new 12th-gen processor that looks like a bunch of Atom-class cores – it complains that this new-fastest-ever-chip isn't quick enough. From the article I assumed this was different from the DRM issue, but it links to the exact same Intel KB article.

mlyle 5y ago
It's basically the same thing. DRM and anticheat software is deliberately picky to make sure it's running in an expected environment: nothing that looks like processors changing, varying in speed, etc, that may indicate debugging.
iggldiggl 5y ago
Years ago, Sim City 4 and The Sims 2 had a similar problem – depending on the processor frequency and GPU model they'd automatically enable or disable certain graphics features. The problem with that was that the processor frequency to high/medium/low-performance class mapping was being done based on Pentium 4 clock speeds, so if you were using an AMD processor (or even one of the first generations of Intel's own Core i-processors if you still happened to be playing those games a few years later) with a lower clock speed but higher IPCs (so a roughly equivalent performance), those games would mistakenly assume your processor was slow and disable various graphics effects and other settings. Somewhat annoyingly, Maxis/EA never fixed that issue even though AMD processors weren't totally obscure even at that time, either. The saving grace was that at least things weren't totally hard-coded – there was a rules file in a plain text-based format controlling the various things that should be enabled or disabled based on the detected performance level, and so it was comparatively easy to just change the expected clock speed levels to something more reasonable for a non-Pentium 4 processor. Later this was also helpful because the GPU detection started having its own issues a few years down the line: When AMD started recycling model numbers for its graphics cards, some newer models were then being mis-identified as some slow, older model that would require various workarounds/lower graphics settings, so again you had to manually edit the rules to fix things.
- rasz 5y ago
  Unreal 1 engine had same issue - modern dynamic clock CPUs confuse it https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/ut-goty-and-framerates-speed-up.182599/#post-2231608 https://forums.beyondunreal.com/threads/ut-goty-and-framerat... From memory it was something like UT99 running a loop to determine CPU speed at the start when most modern CPUs are running at a lower clock, and when you start actually playing CPU speeds up and game engine goes crazy. ah found it https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=328803#p328803 https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=328803#p328803 "UT uses the RDTSC instruction to measure time. This is an assembler instruction that reads the "Cycle Counter" value from your CPU."
  - Const-me 5y ago
    > This is an assembler instruction that reads the "Cycle Counter" value from your CPU." It did that ~10 years ago. On modern CPUs however, that instruction reads a counter which grows at the stock frequency of the CPU (e.g. at 3.6GHz for Ryzen 5 3600), regardless of frequency scaling of any of the cores.

raunometsa 5y ago

I never knew what the button did on my old computer. I tried to push it for more speed, but never worked!

RedShift1 5y ago
Back in the day when Pentium machines started appearing, lots of cases still had the turbo button but it wasn't connected.
corysama 5y ago
The original IBM PC could have been 5Mhz. But, it was set to 4.77Mhz instead because that way the NTSC out feature of the video card could piggyback it's signal generator off of the CPU clock rather than paying for an additional clock. That way you didn't necessarily have to buy a computer monitor. You could cheap out and use your existing TV instead. Later models obviously ran faster, but that broke the TV out feature. It seems bad to sell people a newer, more expensive model that loses a popular feature. So, a TV back-compat button was put in so you could still use your TV in cases where you really need to. Technically, you didn't lose the feature when you upgraded. Also, some games were written with the assumption of a fixed 4.77Mhz clock and would run unplayably fast on newer machines. The back-compat button would slow the machine down so you could still play last-year's games. But "NTSC Backwards Compatibility Button" is not a sexy name for a feature. So, some genius labeled it the "Turbo Button" even though it actually slowed down the machine. Once the early machines had it, all the later machines had to have it too. For a long time it simply cut the clock rate in half. Eventually, it did nothing and was abandoned soon after.
- Beldin 5y ago
  <ShifL>-<Alt>-<ShiftR>!! (To switch between 4.77 MHz and 8 MHz)
- phicoh 5y ago
  The 286 could still run at a low enough clock speed that changing the clock frequency made sense. On the 386 that didn't work anymore, but there was an external cache. So typically, the turbo button would disable external cache. Then the 486 came with built-in L1 cache. And it was always way too fast. At that point the turbo button didn't make sense any more. I guess there were software solutions, but I don't recall any name.

jraph 5y ago

Today's turbo button which does what it says (speed things up) is the two last buttons of uBlock Origin's first toolbar… which block web fonts and javascript. The fastest code is the one that is not downloaded and run.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
I bet there is a whole team at Google discussing how to prevent people from doing just that - and push it as a technological improvement.
- kuu 5y ago
  Does Google Chrome sound familiar to you? In that case, I have some news...
- keyle 5y ago
  Let me introduce you to my friend Safari...
- totetsu 5y ago
  Changes to plugin access on Chrome?

themitigating 5y ago

Slightly off topic but Porsche came out with an EV and the top trim is called "Turbo S" which lines up with their other gas car naming. Some people got upset because it doesn't have a turbocharger in it and felt it was wrong to use the word in the name. Because of turbo buttons on PCs when i was growing up, turbo buttons on 3rd party console controllers, and many other experiences i always associated with just fast, not a specific car part.

Shivatron 5y ago
Critics of the Taycan Turbo badging usually make some argument about "Turbo" meaning the-model-that-has-turbocharger(s), but Porsche hasn't been consistent about that for some time. The iconic 911 Turbo is turbocharged, but since 2015 the regular non-Turbo 911 is as well. (Next we can discuss whether a "Mustang" is a kind of horse, a two-door sports car, a four-door electric crossover, or...)
- Kye 5y ago
  Mustang is clearly a state alchemist.

the8472 5y ago

I sudo echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost (for AMD) to get constant clock rates when doing wall-time benchmarks. Sure, instruction counts would be more accurate but not everything has perf-counters built into it for measurements. I should hotkey that to have a turbo button too.

chungy 5y ago

> it's repurposing something you already have but never use: your Scroll Lock key. You can tell the author doesn't use Excel :)

fxtentacle 5y ago
I use Excel but now I'm curious.
- macintux 5y ago
  I don't have a scroll lock key to experiment, but it appears that it changes the arrow key behavior. https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2018/05/23/turn-off-scroll-lock-excel/ https://www.ablebits.com/office-addins-blog/2018/05/23/turn-...
  - 0xcde4c3db 5y ago
    This is basically what the Scroll Lock key was meant for in the first place, but the convention never really caught on, so the continued presence of the key baffles a lot of people. I recall FreeBSD's console driver supporting using Scroll Lock in a similar way to move through the scrollback buffer, although I don't know whether this is still true in practice (e.g. if using a UEFI or drm console driver rather than old-school VGA).
- musicale 5y ago
  Scroll lock mode (arrow keys scrolling the window rather than moving the cursor) is almost identical to the way the arrow keys work to scroll a web page – a sort of keyboard equivalent to using a mouse scroll wheel or 2-finger scrolling on a trackpad. It's particularly nice in that it scrolls a single row or column at a time, and particularly useful for spreadsheets (Excel) and text editors. I currently have a compact ("tenkeyless") keyboard which lacks the key, so I tend to use a spring-loaded setup where holding down alt/option/etc. and an arrow key scrolls the window.
thwarted 5y ago
In Linux, I have the scroll-lock key mapped to lock the screen.

foxes 5y ago

Lol why can’t the program/OS just handle this automatically. Is Apple that far ahead? You need to manually press a button? Windows moment.

butz 5y ago

Today's turbo button is "power savings" mode.

ryandrake 5y ago

> performance-hungry programs (read: games) sometimes have to check the spec of the PC they're installed on and tell the poor punter that their PC isn't fast enough. This seems like the root problem. Developers, please don't do this. Just let the user run the software, and if it's not fast enough for them, it will be self evident. Don't insert your own personal judgment about what kind of PC is "good enough" and if you absolutely feel you have to butt in like that, don't make the logic faulty like these games apparently do. When I buy a game, I expect to run it. If my PC is too slow, it will run slowly and I'll be motivated to upgrade or fiddle with the graphics settings. Trying to be this performance police is like saying "Your PC is pathetic. In lieu of letting you run this software you paid for, please accept this picture of my middle finger instead." I wouldn't want to do business with a developer that treats me like that.

EvanAnderson 5y ago
Also: Let API calls fail and return errors instead of trying to "predict" errors and be "helpful" to the user. You don't know how people are going to use the software you've written in the future. Example: Old software that can't handle larger-than-expected disk free space. There are AppCompat shims in Windows for lying to applications re: free disk space quantity because some old applications stored the result of disk free queries in 32-bit integers. Who would ever have more than 4GB of free disk?!? The integer overflows that result invariably cause unexpected behavior. Just make the API call to write to the disk. If that returns "disk full" let the user know. Don't "check" first.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  I want to know that there isn't enough disk space before going through a half-hour installation process...
  - spicybright 5y ago
    Surprisingly, some really old windows software installers will ask you want to run the install anyways even after it determines there's not enough space. That seems to be the ideal solution.

judge2020 5y ago

Slightly related, I think it would be useful to be able to force your program onto p-cores if it uses AVX512, as that is noticeably absent on e-cores. https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core-i912900k-review-hybrid-performance-brings-hybrid-complexity/2 https://www.anandtech.com/show/17047/the-intel-12th-gen-core...

wmf 5y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29127435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29127435

karmakaze 5y ago

Terrible post. It's nothing like the turbo button. This iteration is based on aggressive DRM that gets it wrong. Maybe having different game threads on one or the other type of core might matter but that's not what the current problem is.

Animats 5y ago

There's a whole series of annoying problems which come from this mix of fast and slow CPUs. I want to put the refresh thread on a fast CPU, the asset loading threads on slow CPUs, and the network update thread on something in between. How do I tell the OS that? A problem right now is asking how much memory the GPU has. The NVidia driver for Linux will spill data out to main memory if the GPU memory fills up, but you take about a 50% performance hit when this happens. It's better to cut down distant detail and stay in fast GPU memory. But it's hard to find out how much GPU memory is available and how much a spill costs. With "onboard graphics", as in laptops, there may not be any dedicated GPU memory, so this isn't even a meaningful question.