Patch will slow down Intel CPUs up to 30%

[fese]

I wonder why it is that people with obviously no knowledge of the technical details immediately start thinking up conspiracy theories and wild speculations when the simple truth is usually:
1. companies f**k up here and then
2. Internet gets hysterical about it

Good to hear that the impact on DAWs doesn't seem severe, but I am curious to see what happens when we update our companie's vsphere infrastructure. Although, to be fair, usually the biggest performance problems stem from developers not doing a proper job than from the hardware or OS ("my application is so slow, I need more CPUs!!!" - "shouldn't you put an index on that database field?" - "...").

[Coxy]

Didn't Apple just get caught and now admits to throttling their iphones?

Makes you wonder if these people get together to discuss methods to get consumers to consume more and faster. A disposable society lead by greedy shot callers.

A Conspiracy to give people more sustained battery life over the long term to offset Li-Ion degradation?

I like how talk of ANY huge corporation and there's an automatic assumption / belief that anything they do or have done can NEVER be for good reasons.

It just couldn't be like that for every corporation, the law of averages alone wouldn't allow it. There are some companies at the top that truly want to lead, inspire and innovate. And they do it so well they make millions, billions even.

But people naturally become suspicious of it's intent. Human condition I guess.

[tooneba]

I don't get people's motivation trying hard to defend the habit of hiding the information of throttling the performance. Do you defend 3 Michelin starred restaurant which let 1 week trained chef cook for lunch time because customer wants to eat asap?

[Coxy]

I don't get people's motivation trying hard to defend the habit of hiding the information of throttling the performance. Do you defend 3 Michelin starred restaurant which let 1 week trained chef cook for lunch time because customer wants to eat asap?

I stated information about the battery situation. What’s trying hard about that.

Secondly, bad analogy. Has no relational characteristics at all. Nice try though.

Cheers.

[Daags]

Didn't Apple just get caught and now admits to throttling their iphones?

Makes you wonder if these people get together to discuss methods to get consumers to consume more and faster. A disposable society lead by greedy shot callers.

A Conspiracy to give people more sustained battery life over the long term to offset Li-Ion degradation?

They throttled performance. They throttled performance silently. The 'moar battery life, honest!' excuse is exactly that, the excuse given when caught red handed. There's literally no good reason that they could not have made this throttling optional, as part of 'battery saving mode' or some such.

and it's not like this behaviour is out of sync with general Apple policy anyway.

[Coxy]

They throttled performance. They throttled performance silently. The 'moar battery life, honest!' excuse is exactly that, the excuse given when caught red handed. There's literally no good reason that they could not have made this throttling optional, as part of 'battery saving mode' or some such.

and it's not like this behaviour is out of sync with general Apple policy anyway.

Cool.

[tonedef71]

My advice, do not install the Windows patch manually. If it hasn't installed it yet automatically, then you may be using incompatible antivirus or security software. Windows looks for a specific registry key created by your security software and if that's not present, then the specific KB will not be offered or installed. Forcing the install with incompatible software can render your machine into a constant BSOD boot loop. This is a kernel level change that doesn't play nicely with some existing software.

More info on compatible software: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... g&sle=true

Hope this helps.

Thank you for the heads-up!

[GoldieK]

I can only speak from my own experience, as I installed the patch manually on a Win 7 Sp1 i5 3rd generation quad Dell Vostro today.I have Trend Micro, and waited a few days for them to take care of the needed changes to allow this install. Everything went normally. and I have tested most of my more cpu intensive programs, and I can see no difference. If anything, it seems faster. I use Ableton 8 32 bit and Ableton 9 64 bit as my main Daws. I also have FL12, Mixcraft 7, Pro Tool Express which I use only for specific purposes. I tried all of them with various VST's and again I see no difference in performance. I also tested with Sound Forge 11 and Spectralayers 3, no difference.

Again, I can only speak from my own system, and have not updated my Mac Mini yet. I am still using Mavericks, and will probably have to update to at least Yosemite to resolve the i7 patch for that system.

Hope this is useful to someone.

[jonljacobi]

It has nothing to do with CPU intensive, it has to do with kernel intensive. Generally, this would have to do with I/O. You might notice a performance degradation with file writing or copying, or gaming if indeed there is one. They may have found a fix that's benign. These estimates were from the news before the white papers came out.

[tooneba]

I don't get people's motivation trying hard to defend the habit of hiding the information of throttling the performance. Do you defend 3 Michelin starred restaurant which let 1 week trained chef cook for lunch time because customer wants to eat asap?

I stated information about the battery situation. What’s trying hard about that.

Secondly, bad analogy. Has no relational characteristics at all. Nice try though.

Cheers.

Now, you didn't try your best. I'm disappointed.

[poonna]

I wonder if multi-core enabled plugins (like some of u-he’s) will be affected, as they might have some kernel calls for thread synchronization.

[jonljacobi]

Yeah, the Windows task scheduler is part of the kernel. It stands to reason that multi-tasking will be adversely affected, but how much? No idea. I'm sure we'll see testing as the weeks roll on.

[lfm]

I installed the patch yesterday and haven't noticed any performance degdrading. My CPU is Xeon E5-1230v3 and OS is W10 Pro.

This whole matter might not be noticed - if at 30% or so - and just at some particular software.

My experience over the years upgrading computers/cpu's is that double in benchmark tests is where you clearly notice. It's not even worth upgrading a MB if not at that range.

Overall a bit relieved if that is where is stays.

More worried about possible stability issues that might arise with such a major change in core.

But thought of buying new computer this year will wait until Intel has chips that fixed this at the root of the cause and new models out. so probably two years away. If you invest $3000 to triple benchmark tests, from machine I have, you want your moneys worth. If there even will be Windows versions with pending patch now reversed - which one can doubt.

I think put that money on another camera instead.

[Coxy]

Now, you didn't try your best. I'm disappointed.

Thanks.

[DuX]

Maybe it's an opportunity for programmers to start writing more optimised, as in leaner, faster, more efficient software and give that lost performance back to us?