this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023
1 points (100.0% liked)

Hardware

33 readers
1 users here now

A place for quality hardware news, reviews, and intelligent discussion.

founded 11 months ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
1
When Intel’s Efficiency Cores Cause Inefficiency: APO Benchmarks & +30% Performance Tech Demo (youtu.be)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
17 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (4 children)

Not sure why is so pessimistic about future support after seeing all the effort Intel has put into Arc drivers, which are obviously manual tuning too. APO will never ever come to every game, most games wont even benefit much from it, and it would be far too much work, but all they would need to do is look at like the top 100 games played every year, quickly go through them and see which are under performing due to scheduling issues (not hard to do), then hand tune the ones they expect to find performance left on the table.

Finding an additional 30% performance, and lower power consumption is definitely worth the effort, its far cheaper for Intel to go down this route than it is to get these gains in silicon. And its not like Intel has any plans to move away from heterogeneous designs anytime soon, even AMD is now doing them and they have their own scheduler issues (X3D on 1/2 CCDs and Zen4+Zen4c).

I'd obviously like to see support on 13th gen and the midrange SKUs too, and ideally not have a separate APO app.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

but all they would need to do is look at like the top 100 games played every year

My main hypothesis on this subject - perhaps they already did, and out of the top 100 games only 2 games was possible to accelerate via this method, even after exhaustively checking all possible affinities and scheduling schemes, and only on CPUs with 2 or more 4-clusters of E-cores.

The support for the hypothesis is the following suggestions:

  1. how many behavioral requirements the game threads might need to satisfy
  2. how temporally stable the thread behaviors might need to be, probably disqualifying apps with any in-app task scheduling / load balancing
  3. the signal that they possibly didn't find a single game where 1 4-core E-cluster is enough (how rarely is this applicable if they apparently needed 2+, for... some reason?)
  4. the odd choice of Metro Exodus as pointed out by HUB - it's a single player game with very high visual fidelity, pretty far down the list of CPU limited games (nothing else benefited?)
  5. the fact that none of the games supported (Metro and Rainbow 6) are based on either of the two most popular game engines (Unity and Unreal), possibly reducing how many apps could be hoped to have similar behavior and possibly benefit.

Now, perhaps the longer list of games they show on their screenshot is actually the games that benefit, and we only got 2 for now because those are the only ones they figured (at the moment) how to detect threads identities in (possibly not too far off from as curiously as this), or maybe that list is something else entirely and not indicative of anything. Who knows.

And then there comes the discussion you're having, re implementation, scaling, and maintenance with its own can of worms.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

that makes a lot of sense...

load more comments (2 replies)