Spectre doesn’t make much difference since its not making syscalls.
If you can somehow keep the CPU fed it becomes obvious there is more oomph behind the Intel device. That said how often are you running hand rolled assembly routines?
As an additional datapoint liblzf is faster on the Ryzen. But its limited by pipeline stalls so doesn’t get to take advantage of the extra resources.
Given that, I'd prefer they had shell access as a low privilege user than be able to read my ssh keys from RAM...
Obviously if you compile software as your regular linux user account like most users, you're already a sitting duck, so might as well throw in a few more vulnerabilities.
It took 3 days of tuning to get to a point where Intel started pulling away from my Zen2 chip. No matter what I did the Zen2 would not get faster because it was already at max utilization.
Lemire had a blog [1] talking about this on here a few months ago as well. Most people were surprised because frankly Zen2 is very competitive with Intel for normal compiled code.
https://lemire.me/blog/2019/12/05/instructions-per-cycle-amd...
We know Intel has that problem with AVX-512. You can get a lot of throughput per cycle with those instructions but the cost is they cause the processor to run hot and have to downclock. It's possible (and really expected) that the same thing happens to some extent at unusually high IPC. Getting 15% higher IPC doesn't really buy you anything if the processor has to lower its clock speed by 15% to execute that type of code.
The issues I’m talking about are execution resources for scalar code. Things like how many ALUs and which execution ports are able to execute which instructions.
