Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by clamchowder 563 days ago
Note - I saw the article through from start to finish. For power measurements I modified my memory bandwidth test to read AMD's core energy status MSR, and modified the instruction bandwidth testing part to create a loop within the test array. (https://github.com/clamchowder/Microbenchmarks/commit/6942ab...)

Remember most of the technical analysis on Chips and Cheese is a one person effort, and I simply don't have infinite free time or equipment to dig deeper into power. That's why I wrote "Perhaps some more mainstream tech outlets will figure out AMD disabled the loop buffer at some point, and do testing that I personally lack the time and resources to carry out."

2 comments

Sorry, I totally didn't mean this as a slight to your work--I've been a fan for quite a while :)

More so that estimating power when you don't have access to post synthesis simulations or internal gas gauges is very hard. For something so small, I can easily see this being a massive pain to measure in the field and the kind of thing that would easily vanish into the noise on a real system.

But in the absence of any clear answer, I do think it's reasonable to assume that the feature does in fact have the power advantages AMD intended, even if small.

and given the size of the variance it's probably too small to easily pick up from external atx\eps12v monitoring solutions :\