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bluedino

I wish core counts hadn't gone crazy. Our developers are using PHP, Python, and Visual Basic so none of it gets used.

A 6-core system is perfect. However, we end up buying 12, 14, 16 cores.

And to make it worse, we buy dual CPU's on the servers. The buyer has determined core count > *

Give me 8 cores and all the clockspeed I can get (for our workloads)

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> Our developers are using PHP, Python, and Visual Basic so none of it gets used.

Why aren't they being used? Even for single threaded languages you can spawn multiple processes.

Making programs concurrent is hard, especially if you don't have good support from the language. I, too, would hesitate before attempting to make a highly concurrent application in PHP, Python, or Visual Basic. And even then you're looking at considerable investment rewriting stuff that already works.

Maybe it works out if the cost savings from being able to purchase fewer machines outweighs the rewrite and the risk of new concurrency bugs.

Still, even single threaded applications can be distributed across the cores by the simple fact that you can run many of them.

And web browsers eat a lot these days :-|

That's the trick: they can't make single cores faster so they just throw more cores at the problem and call it a day. Obviously that doesn't work but who cares? It looks good in benchmarks.

Thats why they should sell cpus that sacrifice security for speed. I'll take a cpu thats vulnerable to spectre/meltdown if its 20% faster.

You mean slower

Are you sure that they sacrifice speed for security? It's not obvious to me. Hardware fixes are supposed to be fast. That 20% slowdown comes from software implementation (and you can actually disable it).

I wasn't aware that the fixes for spectre and meltdown had no impact on performance.

At least on Linux it's pretty easy to disable the mitigations: https://linuxreviews.org/HOWTO_make_Linux_run_blazing_fast_(...

I'm not sure how easy it is to disable on Windows though.

It isn't the hardware developers' job to make you design good infrastructure.

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