5 ms·

I am usually not a free market extremist, but if Intel makes an excellent software product after years and millions of dollars in R&D, and make it only work for

by aeonsky 13y ago

I am usually not a free market extremist, but if Intel makes an excellent software product after years and millions of dollars in R&D, and make it only work for certain platforms, power to them.

wmf 13y ago
The problem is that they penalized AMD without telling anyone. The market only works if you know what you're buying.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mikeash 13y ago
  To make an obligatory car analogy, imagine if Ford opened up gas stations that sold really good gas, but this gas was somehow made to run much less efficiently in non-Ford cars. And further that they didn't tell anyone this, and just left you to assume that if you filled up your Prius with Ford gas and subsequently got 20MPG, the car was to blame.
  - fnimick 13y ago
    It's even worse than that - since companies are distributing binaries compiled with icc, it's more like a Ford gas refinery distributing gas to normal gas stations that secretly runs terribly in other cars. There simply is no way for the consumer to know what they're getting.
    - sitkack 13y ago
      This nock on effect is where the real harm is done. The fact that Intel is not checking for feature flags, but rather the existence of an Intel processor is actionable. They aren't following their own best practices for accessing optional features of the chip.
  - corresation 13y ago
    That analogy worked in 2005, but eight years on the fact that the Intel compiler optimizes primarily for Intel processors is common knowledge, and is explicitly stated by Intel repeatedly on all product materials. Invariably someone will bring up the "but what about benchmarks corrupted by this compiler" conspiracies, without a single example of a benchmark so contrived. It's worth noting that performance and processors isn't as simple as "it has the feature, so use it". Each instructions have timings that vary on different models, and something like SSE(2|3|4) or AVX(2|512) can vary dramatically in its net benefit or detriment by the number of words, alignment, and so on. Many people with the ICC and code that they think will be super fast using it often are surprised to find it hasn't chosen to use them at all, simple setup and teardown eating all possible benefit. In an ideal world we would have an open compilers that made best in class code for all major processors. Sadly that doesn't exist, and even now we have a case where a lot of the complaints about the ICC are "it crippled the code for my AMD....but still made better code than every other compiler".
    - mikeash 13y ago
      People have pointed out that the "Intel" code is faster than the "AMD" code even on AMD chips, so the stuff about performance being difficult to achieve across different CPUs, while true, does not seem to be relevant. All in all, you seem to be downplaying this far more than it deserves. It is not a case that the "compiler optimizes primarily for Intel processors". If it simply produced code built to be good on Intel and with no attention paid to AMD CPUs at all, that would be fine. Nobody would complain. Nobody would expect anything else, really. But that's not what they do: instead, they generate code that checks for an AMD CPU and then deliberately chooses a suboptimal path in that case. So it's not a case of "optimizes primarily for Intel processors", but rather "intentionally cripples performance on non-Intel processors". That is to say, there is a vast gulf between indifference and purposefully making things worse.
      - corresation 13y ago
        Your first statement does not follow at all. Do people realize that we're talking very specifically about auto vectorization? This is a very unique, niche area of software (and it is absolutely an optimization, various hysterics notwithstanding), and this notion that various random software you're running are being "crippled" is utterly nonsensical.
Spooky23 13y ago
You cannot give these companies an inch with stuff like this. In 2014, we're spoiled and for the most part don't realize that our network providers aren't the only potential toll keepers nickel and dimeing us. I don't know if you are familiar with mainframe or similar computing technologies. When you buy an IBM mainframe (or Power unix box to a lesser extent), you're essentially metered by a CPU budget. You're not permitted to use the full capacity of your system unless you pay. This case is a little different, but the point stands. Companies should not be allowed to sabotage the competition or hobble the ability of a device capable of doing a task from doing it. The free market works when the stakeholders don't cheat.

by aeonsky 13y ago

I am usually not a free market extremist, but if Intel makes an excellent software product after years and millions of dollars in R&D, and make it only work for certain platforms, power to them.

wmf 13y ago

The problem is that they penalized AMD without telling anyone. The market only works if you know what you're buying.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mikeash 13y ago
To make an obligatory car analogy, imagine if Ford opened up gas stations that sold really good gas, but this gas was somehow made to run much less efficiently in non-Ford cars. And further that they didn't tell anyone this, and just left you to assume that if you filled up your Prius with Ford gas and subsequently got 20MPG, the car was to blame.
- fnimick 13y ago
  It's even worse than that - since companies are distributing binaries compiled with icc, it's more like a Ford gas refinery distributing gas to normal gas stations that secretly runs terribly in other cars. There simply is no way for the consumer to know what they're getting.
  - sitkack 13y ago
    This nock on effect is where the real harm is done. The fact that Intel is not checking for feature flags, but rather the existence of an Intel processor is actionable. They aren't following their own best practices for accessing optional features of the chip.
- corresation 13y ago
  That analogy worked in 2005, but eight years on the fact that the Intel compiler optimizes primarily for Intel processors is common knowledge, and is explicitly stated by Intel repeatedly on all product materials. Invariably someone will bring up the "but what about benchmarks corrupted by this compiler" conspiracies, without a single example of a benchmark so contrived. It's worth noting that performance and processors isn't as simple as "it has the feature, so use it". Each instructions have timings that vary on different models, and something like SSE(2|3|4) or AVX(2|512) can vary dramatically in its net benefit or detriment by the number of words, alignment, and so on. Many people with the ICC and code that they think will be super fast using it often are surprised to find it hasn't chosen to use them at all, simple setup and teardown eating all possible benefit. In an ideal world we would have an open compilers that made best in class code for all major processors. Sadly that doesn't exist, and even now we have a case where a lot of the complaints about the ICC are "it crippled the code for my AMD....but still made better code than every other compiler".
  - mikeash 13y ago
    People have pointed out that the "Intel" code is faster than the "AMD" code even on AMD chips, so the stuff about performance being difficult to achieve across different CPUs, while true, does not seem to be relevant. All in all, you seem to be downplaying this far more than it deserves. It is not a case that the "compiler optimizes primarily for Intel processors". If it simply produced code built to be good on Intel and with no attention paid to AMD CPUs at all, that would be fine. Nobody would complain. Nobody would expect anything else, really. But that's not what they do: instead, they generate code that checks for an AMD CPU and then deliberately chooses a suboptimal path in that case. So it's not a case of "optimizes primarily for Intel processors", but rather "intentionally cripples performance on non-Intel processors". That is to say, there is a vast gulf between indifference and purposefully making things worse.
    - corresation 13y ago
      Your first statement does not follow at all. Do people realize that we're talking very specifically about auto vectorization? This is a very unique, niche area of software (and it is absolutely an optimization, various hysterics notwithstanding), and this notion that various random software you're running are being "crippled" is utterly nonsensical.

Spooky23 13y ago

You cannot give these companies an inch with stuff like this. In 2014, we're spoiled and for the most part don't realize that our network providers aren't the only potential toll keepers nickel and dimeing us. I don't know if you are familiar with mainframe or similar computing technologies. When you buy an IBM mainframe (or Power unix box to a lesser extent), you're essentially metered by a CPU budget. You're not permitted to use the full capacity of your system unless you pay. This case is a little different, but the point stands. Companies should not be allowed to sabotage the competition or hobble the ability of a device capable of doing a task from doing it. The free market works when the stakeholders don't cheat.