mickulty

Now that Country Cup 2023 is over and there are no longer stakes in terms of how the competition goes, I’m hoping we can have a sensible and constructive discussion about how it was run. Let me say up front, I know some people may find all this as a bit much. They might wonder why I care so much. The truth is, I care so much because it would be so easy to do the right thing - and when the right thing is easy, not doing the right thing is terrible. What Happened: During the competition, there ended up being several changes to stages. I can’t actually say for sure how many, since there’s no transparency about when stage rules are changed. However, there are two that I know for sure, and think are worth discussing. First, the superpi 32M bclk stage. This was changed to exclude socket 775 due to benchmate issues, and as a result the multi cap was raised from 8x to 9x to include socket 1156. I bring this up as an example of a stage where the changes were well justified. I want to show that I’m not just blindly opposed to any action, any change – even though that change wasn’t good for me personally. Second, the Cloud gate iGPU stage. At some point in “early november” – therefore at least 2 weeks into the competition – “Xeon CPUs allowed” was silently added to the rules of this stage. This had the effect of changing the optimal hardware to exclude one iGPU from a fully unlocked CPU, in favour of a BCLK OC’d Haswell Xeon (costing $100+ and with little reason to own for OC) that benefits from a separate hardware listing. The justifications given when this was talked about on Discord were, in chronological order: 1) “so people can complain and keep the discord thread alive” This was seriously the only justification given at first. 2) “This wasn't added recently fyi…” This was said on the 1st of December – since the change was silent a lot of people took a while to notice. That doesn’t make it better! 3) “Xeon iGPUs don't offer any significant advantage over their non server counterparts, in fact they will be less performant in this benchmark” This simply wasn’t true, as allowing xeons meant you could have HD 4600+P4600 rather than 4600+4000. CPU clock matters, but not that much. So ok, it was an error. But also – in that case what about the double-digit number of other stages where xeons would have genuinely offered no advantage? So, unlike the superpi stage, there was no real justification given for the change. Eventually, after having to drag Roman into it, I got one more drop of reasoning: 4) leeghoofd didn’t think there were xeons with iGPUs when the change was made. Had he been right about this, adding “Xeon CPUs allowed” would have had zero effect on what hardware could actually be used for the stage. OK. So it wasn’t supposed to have an effect. But then why make the change at all? Why play with fire? When I talked to Roman on the 4th of December he said he’d “try to follow up with Albrecht and that he gets in contact with you again”. A patient month later, that hasn’t happened. I am still none the wiser as to what led to the bright idea to make this arbitrary change in the first place. Why This Matters: This has happened before, and it earned hwbot a write up in igorslab, as well as completely turning off at least one participant from future involvement in hwbot: https://www.igorslab.de/en/the-dirty-business-behind-hwbot-competitions-a-field-report-as-editorial/ Those events, within the last year, led to a statement from Roman, including 2 key points: “I totally agree that it’s unacceptable to edit rules of the competition after it started.” “It is also not in [HWBOT mods] interest to cause any unnecessary conflicts or drama – nor do they personally benefit from it.” So… why did the “unacceptable” happen AGAIN, causing nothing but unnecessary conflicts and drama? Why was arbitrary hardware silently added to the cloud gate stage weeks into the competition? I was very enthusiastic about country cup when it started, participating very heavily and encouraging others to do the same. The fact that this change happened completely ruined the competition for me. Afterwards, I made one other submission as a favour to teammates with conflicting hardware. I honestly regret participating at all. The truth is, I’m not sure if I want to get involved in another hwbot competition now – and I know I’m not the only person to feel that way. What Next? Personally, I believe very strongly in seeing the best in people. I want to understand why this happened so that I can forgive and forget. But I can’t do that if the chain of thought that led to this change is kept a secret. I am begging leeghoofd to please meet me halfway here by explaining the thought process that inspired this change specifically being made. So far all I’ve heard is retroactive justifications. I’m sorry, but how can I trust that a mistake like this won’t be repeated if I’m not even allowed to know where the mistake came from? I would also love to hear from other users on what they think could be done differently so that problems like this don’t happen again. Not just “don’t do it again” – we had that back in March and it didn’t stick – but structural/procedural changes. There have been multiple competitions in 2023 tainted by unjustified after-the-whistle changes to rules. How can hwbot do better in the new year, and begin to mend what has been broken?

Nice! Any chance you can do Speed Way as well?

wow, amazing for dominator GT!

Hah. Yeah, it's not great... though I have a 3930K that weirdly does 2400 1T on the same mem with it.

Yeah it's fun! And I was serious about having a faster score incoming anyway, because this will get removed from the comp at some point even if no-one reports it.

Don't worry, I already have a walletectomy in progress to satisy the pointless arbitrary rule that I could swear wasn't there when the competition started. Faster, compliant score is coming.

nice hw gold for dogpile

Please add Plextor S3C series https://www.goplextor.com/Product/Detail/S3C#/Features

lol nice

First impression: isn't country cup normally shorter than team cup? I appreciate the configured stages are kinda random but here are my thoughts on them as they are: ycruncher 5b isn't a good idea, a nonstandard benchmark always causes problems. Could be removed to shorten competition. Intel HEDT 32M looks fun. Cinebench R24 per core count incl. AM3 is a good idea to get some subs going. Is it supported by benchmate yet? Thuban GB6 single is redundant because the CB24 stage includes thuban. Could be removed to shorten competition. Time Spy Extreme 4-core CPU you'll get a lot of people complaining about having to do the full run. There's argument for excluding LGA1700 because of AVX512 lottery. HWBOT x265 Core i5 kinda random but sure. 7zip 2-core could probably benefit from being per socket, otherwise it's all lga1700 bclk. Does 7zip benefit from AVX512? If so I'd prefer to see LGA1700 excluded otherwise the optimal hardware is gonna be rare. GPUPI 3.3 for CPU 6-core DDR4 looks fun. GPU Stages no strong opinions other than cloud gate probably needs a yos pass to figure out how to define hardware without loopholes/issues Memory Stages look great Misc Stages see attachment (but seriously... aquamark dogpile would just be swapping GPUs on a cold CPU and the comp is super long as it is)

I was 4 hours in, the IMC hated me because of thermals, and after being on for a couple of minutes the board would require a hard power cycle to restart which would also cause it to lose all settings.

I hate this board so goddamn much

The "4P" option represents one core per compute unit mode - certainly available on gigabyte boards, supposedly a certain bios on CHV, not sure about asrock and msi. It was added because it's vaguely analagous to p-core modes on ADL (rankings like 12900K (8P)). The difference compared to just disabling cores is that each core gets a full 3-wide decoder 100% of the time, a full 256-bit FPU 100% of the time, and an exlusive 2MB of L2 cache. You can look at ths as the "P-core" and the extra integer units that normally share these resources as the "E-core". Another way to think of it is disabling CMT. I found a screenshot of the settings on a 990FX-UD7 but even cheapo gigabyte AM3+ boards like the 78LMT-USB3 have the setting. Also attached are block diagrams (By Shigeru23 - Made by uploader, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17130259) annotated to show the difference. Realistically a 78LMT-USB3 even being a fairly bunnyextraction board but with true 1 core per cu mode will still beat a crosshair with disabled cores. Imagine 12900K with 4P and 4E-cores vs 8P...

thanks i love phantom throttling

Nice phase + nice ram