[GTALUG] NUC NUC NUC

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Giles Orr via talk <talk at gtalug.org>

| Lennart: One problem with claiming "my 6 year old X has higher specs" is
| that it doesn't account for the generational differences in the Intel
| chips.  Our desktops got "upgraded" at work, but I was thoroughly
| unimpressed because we went from an i5 to an i5, and from 8G to 8G ... but
| we also went from 3rd to 8th generation.  A clunky Python script I run
| weekly to process web statistics went from 20 minutes to 2 minutes.  (Part
| of this could be throughput on the motherboard, or from the change from
| spinning disk to SSD, but I think it's mostly processor.)  An order of
| magnitude is nothing to scoff at.

For the CPU's Lennart was talking about, the modern CPU is a little
faster, but no enough to notice

<http://hwbench.com/cpus/intel-core-i7-8550u-vs-intel-core-i7-3820qm>

(The i7-8550u is in the NUC; the i7-3820qm is my guess at what
Lennart's ThinkPad W530 has.)

Desktops are a bit different.  But I would not expect even a factor of
two difference in comparable processors of these two generations.

Which processor models were/are in your (Giles') two systems?

- DDR4 (8th gen) is faster than DDR3 (required by 3rd gen).  But most
  programs don't seem to be affected much by this.  Does your program
  bust the (rather large) L2 cache?

- 3rd gen i5's often have half the cores of 8th gen i5's.  This may
  make a big difference.  But Python programs often don't exploit
  multiple cores.

- a few instructions have been added, but I don't imagine that they
  affect your python program.  AVX2 for floating point, for example.

My best guess is that the program sped up due to (NVMe?) SSD vs HDD.

| Evan: From a security point of view (Rowhammer, Fallout, RIDL, ZombieLoad
| ...) I would encourage you to consider an AMD processor.

Perhap AMD flaws haven't been discovered yet.  But the current score
shows AMD ahead.

My take on rowhammer is that it is a bug in the DRAM chips and should
be fixed under warranty.  They just don't meet specs.  Exploiting
rowhammer (as opposed to just making a machine go wrong) requires
knowing the memory mapping, and that can be facilitated by some
processor bugs.