Spectre mitigations murder userspace performance
I would love to see new chips that take all of the transistors used for speculation and use them for more cores. I asked electrical engineers once how many of the transistors on a chip serve speculation, and they said, &quot;To a first approximation, 100%.&quot;<p>That means we could add a lot more cores. Add enough, and the OS could easily pin basically all processes&#x2F;threads to their own cores.<p>And that, I believe, might win some performance back.<p>I have more ideas at [1].<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gavinhoward.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;computing-is-broken-and-how-to-fix-it&#x2F;#hardware" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gavinhoward.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;02&#x2F;computing-is-broken-and-how-...</a>