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> So to be honest I don't see the merit of this study. This study is essentially how fast is your interconnect so it can survive bad software that allowed to run untrammelled.

It seems like a worthwhile study if you want to know what CPU to buy to play specific old games that use bus locks. Games that will never be fixed.

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It seemed to me that the issue with the games was that they did split locks at all, and when Linux detected that and descheduled the process, performance was trash. I didn't think they were doing frequent split locks that resulted in bad performance by itself.

You don't need to be a careful shopper for this; just turn off detection while you're playing these games, or tune the punishment algorithm, or patch the game. Just because the developer won't doesn't mean you can't; there's plenty of 3rd party binary patches for games.

> It seems like a worthwhile study if you want to know what CPU to buy to play specific old games that use bus locks. Games that will never be fixed.

Fair.

> old games that use bus locks

Yes the bus locks here are unintentional since LOCK on cache line is not sufficient, the CPU falls back to locking the bus.

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