Zen 2 Missives – AMD now delivering efficiencies that are double that of Intel

Re:Zen 2 Missives – AMD now delivering efficiencies that are... by gameswithgo on Monday August 26, 2019 @09:36AM (#20799750)

> PCIe Gen4 does matter. M.2 NVMe has been read limited for a long time already (NAND bandwidth scales trivially). The I/O section of this article is basically nonsense.

It probably does for a great many special use cases on servers or other specialty workloads. But for programming/gaming/normal productivity workloads it really doesn't. The net difference in load times/compile times/boot times is tiny even going from a cheap ssd to the latest pci4 ssds.

If you do huge sequential reads/writes, then yeah, large differences are getting unlocked.

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Re:Zen 2 Missives – AMD now delivering efficiencies that are... by lumost on Monday August 26, 2019 @09:56AM (#20799881)

Has anyone tried adding branch prediction to disk operations? While it would confuse a network, or other peripheral a preemptive random read from a disk ought to have minor impact.

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Re:Zen 2 Missives – AMD now delivering efficiencies that are... by zrm on Monday August 26, 2019 @02:38PM (#20802465)

Operating systems have supported readahead for a long time. It's even more benefit for spinning rust than SSDs because the benefit of a correct prediction is larger when the drive is slower. But it's also a trade off, because if you predict wrong you're wasting scarce I/O resources fetching useless data.

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