Hi Ian, Firstly, I appreciate the live b,logging coverage of Hot Chips, warts (typos) and all. IMO, that's the price of near real-time coverage, and I am happy to incur it. My next comment is in reference to Andrei's excellent coverage of Samsung's M3 core. You write "up till today we still didn’t know much about how the M3 microarchitecture actually worked." As we learned from Andrei's deep dive earlier this year plus his demonstration of a partial fix for the M3's performance problems, I am really wondering if Samsung's software side was equally in the dark about the M3 microarch when they wrote the immature low-level software the Exynos in the S9 was shipped with. Is this suggestive of a program and project management deficiency in Samsung's in-house processor development? Would love to hear from you, Andrei, and anybody else who has insight into this - thanks!
This is simply a case of developers needing to have the hardware to work with and time to optimise for it. When AMD releases a new GPU their launch drivers are usable but over the course of the next 6 months the performance often increases by a good 20-30% as the developers have more time to implement and test ideas they may have had leading up to launch. Yes they have a simulator beforehand, yes they have early silicon for a couple months. These articles are written most of a year after the silicon as been out. There's just no comparison. It's also part of why sometimes launch day performance of new devices don't match manufacturer hype for the components. That isn't to say that the device won't get there after a couple firmware patches. A good example was the Playstation 2. Kutaragi came up with a hardware concept that scaled in ways the developers were not expecting and were inexperienced with and it took literally years for the game houses to adjust. So please forgive Samsung's developers and release managers, lol. It's really not their fault.
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eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, August 21, 2018 - link
Hi Ian, Firstly, I appreciate the live b,logging coverage of Hot Chips, warts (typos) and all. IMO, that's the price of near real-time coverage, and I am happy to incur it.My next comment is in reference to Andrei's excellent coverage of Samsung's M3 core. You write "up till today we still didn’t know much about how the M3 microarchitecture actually worked." As we learned from Andrei's deep dive earlier this year plus his demonstration of a partial fix for the M3's performance problems, I am really wondering if Samsung's software side was equally in the dark about the M3 microarch when they wrote the immature low-level software the Exynos in the S9 was shipped with. Is this suggestive of a program and project management deficiency in Samsung's in-house processor development? Would love to hear from you, Andrei, and anybody else who has insight into this - thanks!
linuxgeex - Thursday, August 23, 2018 - link
This is simply a case of developers needing to have the hardware to work with and time to optimise for it. When AMD releases a new GPU their launch drivers are usable but over the course of the next 6 months the performance often increases by a good 20-30% as the developers have more time to implement and test ideas they may have had leading up to launch. Yes they have a simulator beforehand, yes they have early silicon for a couple months. These articles are written most of a year after the silicon as been out. There's just no comparison. It's also part of why sometimes launch day performance of new devices don't match manufacturer hype for the components. That isn't to say that the device won't get there after a couple firmware patches. A good example was the Playstation 2. Kutaragi came up with a hardware concept that scaled in ways the developers were not expecting and were inexperienced with and it took literally years for the game houses to adjust. So please forgive Samsung's developers and release managers, lol. It's really not their fault.