Comment by fidotron
2 days ago
> The latter have been emulated in software using trap handlers, but there was a significant performance penalty.
This is a thing SoC vendors have done before without informing their customers until it's way too late. Quite a few players in that industry really do have shockingly poor ethical standards.
I'm not sure if it's intentional. AWS doesn't have CPU features in their EC2 product documentation, either. It doesn't necessarily mean that they can disable CPU features for instances covered by existing customer contracts.
> I'm not sure if it's intentional
This is the sort of comment that makes people lose faith in HN.
There totally are cases where it's intentional, and no they are not discussed on the internet for obvious reasons. People in the industry will absolutely know what I'm on about.
I didn't intend to dismiss your experience. From the opposite (software) side, these things are hard to document, and unclear hardware requirement documentation result from the complexity and (perhaps) unresolved internal conflict.
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I'm sure it is in footnote in datasheet
No, they really are that grimy and will pull tricks like this until you call them out on them.
They will then issue errata later, after millions of devices have been shipped.
In 6pt mandarin.