Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Thu 31st Jul 2008 20:51 UTC, submitted by snydeq
While using an AMD Barcelona server to create a portable benchmarking kit, InfoWorld's Tom Yager discovered something unexpected: "I could incur variances in some benchmark tests ranging from 10 to 60 percent through combined manipulation of the server's BIOS settings, BIOS version, compiler flags, and OS release." Yager put this matter to AMD's performance engineers and was told he was seeing an effect widely known among CPU engineers, but seldom communicated to IT - that the performance envelope of a CPU is cast in silicon, but is sculpted in software. "Long before you lay hands on a server," Yager writes, "BIOS and OS engineers have reshaped its finely tuned logic in code, sometimes with the real intent of making it faster [...] sometimes to homogenize the server to flatten its performance relative to Intel's."
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Member since:
2007-12-13
I have a friend that works as an engineer for GM and he used to work on the computers in the cars. In his own car, he modified the computer to have a cartridge slot where he could load different chips of his own design to alter the performance characteristics of the car. He had a sport module and an economy module that he kept in the glove compartment, along with a module that was the standard program that came with that model.