Hacker News Reader

Comment by tectonic | Hacker News Reader

> Wait. Oh no. Some game developer somewhere is going to try to use this as a synchronization primitive, aren't they. Please don't. The world has enough cursed code already. Don't do it. Stop it. Noooooooooooooooo

View on HN

Cross-core communication without going through the kernel seems like a very useful performance feature for games.

Am I missing something or is it somewhat likely this will be "abused" by games?

This thing communicates at 1MB/s. A “performance feature” it ain’t.

throughput and latency are different measures.

Games usually live in the realm of latency.

That begs the question, what is the latency, and what kind of feature would you anticipate this could be useful for?

Synchronization primitives AFAIK don't need to transfer huge amounts of data in a short time. One bit for every "okay" signal would suffice. At the given speed you can perform 8 million syncs per second between two threads.

who cares, it's not like you're going to use it to send textures from one thread to another

You can already communicate between apps without going through the kernel by using shared memory - with a much higher bandwidth. And even just the regular write/sendmsg/etc calls are probably more efficient despite going through the kernel due to being able to carry much more bytes.

This was really just a good joke touching how the game industry in the past used non-common hardware features for optimization purposes.

Even if it were a performance saver (it isn't), it'd break when new silicon is released with this issue fixed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com