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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

“As for why the Ryzen 7000 series performance is actually slower if disabling the Spectre V2 mitigations, that's likely something only AMD can effectively answer but presumably…”

Just ask!

Seriously. You can ask AMD. Maybe they won’t tell you, but they might. It might be really good info. Why not ask someone who is really knowledgeable about this stuff like a kernel developer who works on x86-64 or worked on the mitigations?

This is what I never understand about Phoronix. People link to them all the time but they run a bunch of benchmarks and then end on “there you go”. I’d like investigation into why. You won’t always get an answer but you should try.

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> Seriously. You can ask AMD. Maybe they won’t tell you, but they might.

Seriously? By far the most likely outcome is that they don't even bother responding.

That's how corporations operate in 2022. If you're a journalist from the Washington Post, you might get a three-line statement from a spokesperson. Everyone else gets a canned reply from a bot, or nothing at all.

I don't blame Michael for not even bothering to try. Phoronix is the only game in town for much of the topics it covers. The fact that it exists at all, and is effectively run by a single person, is nothing short of amazing.

> That's how corporations operate in 2022. If you're a journalist from the Washington Post, you might get a three-line statement from a spokesperson. Everyone else gets a canned reply from a bot, or nothing at all.

This is not true, I write to AMD security team for spectre/meltdown/CPU flaws and get reasonable responses. Intel security team is also quite good. The usual wait time is 3-4 days.

Admittedly I do write from my work address.

That's great, but I suspect the address you write from indeed plays a big part here. Direct responses from engineers of that caliber within a matter of days is most certainly not standard.

Probably somewhere in A.A. County.

What’s your work, out of curiosity? I suppose security researcher?

Red Hat Kernel security team.

I answer engineers from other companies all the time but never answer journalists. Engineers give a vibe of “cares about what you do and wants to collaborate”.

Talking to journalists is like talking to the police - as an engineer you don’t understand the situation well enough and you need to involve an (expensive) professional to navigate it.

The question going through my head when I get journalist emails is “can I ignore this and save the hours of work with legal/pr?”.

True that

On most places only the PR team is even allowed to talk to journalists. Exactly because that "is like talking to the police" issue.

It's a very sensible and correct policy.

Thats a good point, I had never thought of that.

> By far the most likely outcome is that they don't even bother responding

So, "likely" the same outcome as when you don't ask, except unlike when you don't ask, there is a different outcome when you do ask? Sounds like you just made the argument in favour of always asking questions.

Under the assumption that time is not valuable. Writing such an email is still an investment of time.

I don't think Phoronix has time and budget for that. It is a single man, a few scripts and heavy automation. Sometimes he founds bugs and reports it, but there is no time to follow such rabbit hole!

if anything, industry should reach out to him imo. he has a lot of mind share in the IT community

Phoronix is a one man show literally doing everything: hw managemen, tests, articles, news reports, forum admin, premium users management...

Remembers me about the 'supercow powers" question at StackOverflow (unixStackExchange): everybody just guessing, I dared to ask Jason Gunthorpe and he didn't answer me... he made post about it:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190322061230/https://plus.goog...

> Just ask! Seriously. You can ask AMD.

But it's Phoronix - short reprints, not well-done benchmarks, 1-3 paragraphs long "articles" and backlink spam on forums, wikis and wherever possible. They may ask AMD but that will be another "article" and another wave of spam.

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