It Must be the Antivirus

I recently got access to a sparkling new demo machine for VLAB. Based on an AMD 9950X3D processor coupled with fast RAM and a blazing SSD. This is a perfect machine for running virtual platforms, with arguably the best microarchitecture available and a huge L3 cache (which is known to benefit code like simulations). Installed in a box that allows sustained 5GHz+ clocks. Nice. But when I started to run VLAB, things did not seem right. It took a long time to start a new simulation and some things just seemed “off”. What could be wrong?

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Intel Blog Post: “Quit Thinking and Look” – Mea Culpa Chasing a Performance Bug

I have written before about the debug advice to “Quit thinking and look.” It means that you should not form conclusions prematurely. Stop and look at what is going on instead of guessing and cooking up theoretical scenarios. Sound advice that I completely failed to follow in the case that I just chronicled on my Intel Blog: https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2020/03/18/quit-thinking-and-look-chasing-simics-performance

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