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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes something in me starts thinking about if this regularly occurring slowing of chips through exploit mitigation is deliberate.

All of big tech wins: CPUs get slower and we need more vcpu's and more memory to serve our javascript slop to end customers: The hardware companies sell more hardware, the cloud providers sell more cloud.

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I think it’s more pragmatic. We can eliminate hyperthreading to solve this, or increase memory safety at the cost of performance. One is a 50% hit in terms of vcpus, the other is now sub 50%.

They also need some phony justifications though.

Can't just turn off hyperthreading.

These types of mitigations have the biggest benefit when resources are shared. Do you really think cloud vendors want to lose performance to CPU or other mitigations when they could literally sell those resources to customers instead?

They don't lose anything since they sell the same instance which performs less with the mitigations on. Customers are paying because they need more instances.

I imagine they're unable to squeeze as many instances onto their giant computers, though.

There are 3-4 year old servers with slower/fewer cores still operating fine and newer servers operating as well. The generation improvements seem to outweigh a lot of the mitigations in question, not to mention higher levels of parallel work.

Every CPU that isn’t pegged at 100% all the time is leaving money on the table. Some physical CPU capacity is reserved, some virtual CPU capacity is reserved, the rest goes to ultra-high-margin elastic compute that isn’t sold to you as a physical or virtual CPU. They sell it to you as “serverless,” it prints cash, and it absolutely depends on juicing every % of performance out of the chips.

edit: “burstable” CPUs are a fourth category relying on overselling the same virtual CPU while intelligently distributing workloads to keep them at 100%.

Sometimes its fun to engage in a little conspiratorial thinking. My 2 cents... That TPM 2.0 requirement on Windows 11 is about to create a whole ton of e-waste in October (Windows 10 EOL).

I'm not so sure. Many people still ran Windows XP/7 long after the EOL date. Unless Chrome, Steam, etc drop support for Windows 10, I don't think many people will care.

The home PC market is insignificant. The real volume is in corporate and government systems that will never run EOL Windows.

Side Note: Folks, don't run EOL operating systems at home. Upgrade to Linux or BSD, and your hardware can live on safely.

> Folks, don't run EOL operating systems at home.

Especially not EOL Windows.

There are many, many Windows XP systems still running today in many corporate and probably gov environments too. Even more Win 7 ones. There will be special contracts, workarounds, waivers, etc - all to avoid changing OS.

Hey, it's not nice to call Linux users "e-waste."

Why would big tech do this when customers bring it upon themselves by building Javascript slop?

Big tech isnt running their stack on js.

Maybe, but their cloud customers certainly are.

As long as the customer pays, why wouldn't they promote an option which makes them more profit?

All the large cloud-hosted infra I’ve encountered in my career were written in JIT or AOT compiled languages (C#, Java, Golang, etc.) This is basically necessary at any sort of scale.

Cloud usage is dominated by larger companies with much older codebases that predates modern js backend development.

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