On the dangers of Intel's frequency scaling
Nov 10, 2017Vlad Krasnov
Summary
This post investigates the performance degradation observed when using Intel's AVX-512 instruction set with cryptographic operations like ChaCha20-Poly1305. It details how dynamic frequency scaling, triggered by AVX-512 usage, can significantly reduce CPU performance, leading to a decrease in server throughput even when AVX-512 code constitutes a small percentage of the workload. The post highlights the trade-offs between using modern, high-performance ciphers and the potential for performance penalties due to hardware frequency scaling, and suggests disabling AVX-512 for general-purpose workloads if not strictly required for specific high-performance tasks.
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