Carlie Coats (coats@baronams.com) on 1/3/11 wrote:
>
>And all this apparently with "least-common-denominator" executables
>that are not compiled for Sandy Bridge, and presumably cannot take
>advantage of its floating point improvements.

Well, the biggest improvement is likely just the memory
pipeline, so even without actually using AVX, I do think
those tests are really taking advantage of sandybridge.

Even with old binaries, you'll be doing more loads per
cycle etc.

Sure, there's probably more to be had, but I think it's
very healthy to primarily care about older binaries. If you
need to recompile to get the advantage of a new uarch,
there's something seriously wrong with the hardware.

The one "new executable" thing was obviously the GPU assist
for video transcoding, which seems to be a fairly useful
thing (unlike the CUDA assists, which have apparently never
worked reasonably).

It is kind of sad how many of the desktop chips are of the
HD2000 variety, but maybe that's just me. It looks like the
CPU cores are all very solid, but nobody ever really doubted
that part. It's the "reasonable IGP performance" that I
think is the market changer.

Linus