Nazo
2[H]4U
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2002
- Messages
- 3,672
So this may sound crazy. But almost by the day now it seems like new exploits involving speculative execution are found. Since AMD seems to rely on MB manufacturers for microcode updates (and even then it takes a while besides) I actually started wondering: is it even possible and, if so, how viable would it be just to turn that off? Obviously it would hurt performance -- that's a given by definition. Though the real question is how much does it in real world uses (eg gaming or whatever.) That obviously gets trickier to define... What I do know is the only things I can run that ever come even remotely close to actually using 100% of my current CPU are encoding and of course stuff like Prime95. Actual gaming struggles to ever push any actual core past somewhere in the upper 50% ranges (and that's with SMT off, so when it says 56% of a core I know that means it's actually 56%, not some averaged factor.) Even load screens seem to struggle to 100% my CPU. My GPU is generally more limiting if anything. A reasonably small loss is likely no big deal.
I did dig through my BIOS settings to see if there was anything obvious. Nothing specifically said that, however, I did find "L1 Stream HW Prefetcher" and "L2 Stream HW Prefetcher" (none for L3 -- I assume it doesn't prefetch at that level since L3 is kind of above all that?) This sounds an awful lot like that, but I can't be quite 100% sure. I have tested turning it off and so far in the games I've tested in I'm still finding the GPU to be the most used thing by a significant margin. It's very difficult to really tell since games naturally have variance in everything, but I'd almost even swear CPU usage is actually lower now. Of course that may be a completely different thing and not even related for all I really can be sure. It sounds like this would just affect caching rather than execution. But it's the closest I could tell in the BIOS so far.
Possibly a crazy idea, but anyway, I'm curious at least about its viability. Any thoughts?
I did dig through my BIOS settings to see if there was anything obvious. Nothing specifically said that, however, I did find "L1 Stream HW Prefetcher" and "L2 Stream HW Prefetcher" (none for L3 -- I assume it doesn't prefetch at that level since L3 is kind of above all that?) This sounds an awful lot like that, but I can't be quite 100% sure. I have tested turning it off and so far in the games I've tested in I'm still finding the GPU to be the most used thing by a significant margin. It's very difficult to really tell since games naturally have variance in everything, but I'd almost even swear CPU usage is actually lower now. Of course that may be a completely different thing and not even related for all I really can be sure. It sounds like this would just affect caching rather than execution. But it's the closest I could tell in the BIOS so far.
Possibly a crazy idea, but anyway, I'm curious at least about its viability. Any thoughts?
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