What is it with the AMD Adrenaline Software?

Very quick one, I've taken delivery of a new Graphics Card... (oooooo ahhhhh).

And it's a seed change for me as this is my first ever AMD graphics card, so this is of course going in my own main PC, which itself is my first ever AMD CPU powered machine I am therefore all Team Red for the first time ever... EVER!

I have been so excellently impressed with the performance of the Ryzen Zen 2 chip at the heart of my machine and my old EVGA 1080 GTX Superclocked was showing its age.  It was therefore time.

Unfortunately I made a huge mistake... No, it wasn't the model, no it wasn't the price, no it wasn't even paying to import it (because it was cheaper by a margin to have the card fly all the way to me through customs from California than actually buy it here in the UK - Thanks Brexit! - Not).

Anyway, it arrived and I plugged it in, and my monitor didn't come to life; I then found the signal was going to my massive 4K TV (on the HDMI) not my monitor (on the display port - go figure).

That sorted I then needed drivers, so I went to the AMD site and looked and found what it said was the best package to install on Windows 10 64bit for this card....

I don't know ANYTHING about the AMD software, and oh boy is that a mistake.

I installed it and was immediately REALLY REALLY IMPRESSED with it!  Yep, it's beautiful (even if it is backed by Qt and I hate Qt) and smooth and does wonderful things.

Unfortunately, and this is key, it was taking a lot of CPU whilst doing this work... So I closed it... and it STILL took a bunch of CPU, nearly 10%!

Just idle at the desktop, 10% CPU.

I was properly baffled by this, it must be doing something, so I went through all the settings and disabled everything I could see, everything turned off, clean reboot, and it was still taking 10% but now was peaking to 14% on odd occasions just idle!

What the heck, a bunch of goodling and I can find a bunch of folks complaining about exactly this, and one guy properly threatening to boycott their brand unless they explain how to just install the drivers without this software suite.  There was no answer to these please, and they were old posts, like there's been an apparent hard reset of the search results for this kind of question.

I spent a bunch of time trying to fathom this issue to no avail, so I like my forebears in the search results set about trying to find JUST a driver package.  I could not find one,

I therefore just decided to pull the card and possibly return it.  And so uninstalled the AMD Adrenaline Software, it took its time... And really grated on me as it spent about two minutes showing me the text "We value your feedback"... without ever giving me a link or contact in order to tell them anything... and this is during an uninstall process; surely someone when they added this eye stabbing annoying message thought "Oh we need to have them able to give me feedback!" ... Nope, seems not.

Now completely uninstalled and the package opens a website... This website... which I link only for you to see... as it's an advert... for a version of the very card I am uninstalling the software for.... Yes, AMD that's pretty tone deaf, also... WITHOUT YOUR DRIVERS INSTALLED YOU CAN NOT VIEW THAT SITE, so double double own goal there .... Less Advanced Micro Devices and Anyone Might Despair.

Here I am then, flabbergasted, back to a tiny resolution, opening chrome and trying to find just a raw driver package and I can't find one.  My machine has now cooled and I hear the CPU pump has ceased whirring away, as it was constantly with the 10% load on it!

I sat looking for ages when I first installed the card, really ages, we're taking an hour before I went with this Adrenaline stuff.

When suddenly Windows itself kicks into life and installs the Microsoft supplied WHQL driver, and guess what?  Yes, it's the same base driver, and it works absolutely brilliantly... and crucially my machine is not taking any CPU when idle, it's gone quite quen idle, I'm sat now typing this with a YouTube video playing, about 6 chrome tabs open and a copy of Visual Studio Code open too and it is silent, the machine is silent, just as I built it to be (unless under load).

Looking about I see AMD are recruiting software engineers, I have no idea what for, but if they see these pages - I'd suggest a bunch of refactoring is due over there folks.

Code Locality & Concurrent Systems

Let us talk Software Design, let us talk about code locality.  What do I mean by locality?  Well, in Software Engineering we often talk about code being self documenting, a fabulous place to be if the code performing the work is right in front of you.  But to be honest systems get pretty big pretty quickly.  So you're very much more likely to me making calls to API's or just bunched of functions you have to blindly trust, unless you have the leisure of digging into them.

And there's usually precious little time in development which is invariably taken up with writing new code, not going over the old (unless you're very lucky - but that's a conversation for another day).

Now, these API's can encapsulate large features, and they don't always achieve the amount of descriptive power we'd like in the call site location we're at.  I therefore advocate for a comment around that point.

And so we are immediately at odds with the wish for our code to be as accessible, local, as it can be, but also encapsulating the large unrelated tasks elsewhere.  For me this is the dichotomy of code locality in a nut shell.

Where can it come unstuck?  Well, back in the day (and I have to be honest with most engineers still thinking linearly even today) you could be forgiven to writing out your big system block diagram, connecting things with events or signals and just going about your business, when your code called "BigFooFunction" in "BarBarBlackBox" library you didn't pay it much mind.  Today however, as Moore's Law runs aground on the rocks of pumping ever more cores into a system we have to think in concurrent terms and it is in just such a scenario that I want to pick up thinking about Systems Design and Code Locality.

Let us perform a thought experiment.  We have a system which progresses from Eggs to Birds, it controls the state of the entity laid as an egg, being incubated, then hatched, fed and tended until they start to fledge and ultimately turn into a bird.  All this transmogrification of the state from Egg to hatchling to fledgling to bird happens asynchronously in the background in a big slap of system you do not have to worry about.

All you worry about is a signal coming into you saying "predator", and when this signal arrives you need to stimulate all the little birds you have into action, they all need to take flight.

for(auto& bird : flock)

{

   bird.TakeFlight();

}

This is the locality of our change to the property flight on each bird, we are absolutely unaware of each individual possible state the bird can be in and so we rely on the API and code backing our call to "TakeFlight".

Now, let us assume the members of "flock" are all of the base type "Bird", so they all have a TakeFlight function?  Well, they might, if Bird looked something like this:

class Bird

{
   public:

       virtual void TakeFlight() = 0;

};

Then at compile time all the derived classes would have to implement "TakeFlight".

class Egg : public Bird

{

    private:

        uint64_t mTimeLaid;

        float mTemperature;

    public:

        void Incubate();

        void TakeFlight() override;

};

And because we know this is an Egg we know it can't fly and so we know that this override of the function will do nothing.

This is perfect code-locality for that derived type, but for bird itself it leaves us the open question, well what does it do?  Does it do anything??  Should "TakeFlight" return us some code to indicate the bird took flight and an error if not, but an egg not flying is not an error, so must it be some compound it returns.

Now, I am straying into API design somewhat, and they are related fields, but really here we're thinking about where the active code sits, what is its locality compared to our callsite in the loop?

And for a function, you can see we can define this and know.

Now lets us change our example:

class Bird

{
    public:

       bool mInFlight { false };

};

and

class Egg : public Bird

{

    // As above

    public:

        void TakeFlight () override { 

            // Intentionally Empty 

        }

};

Our egg can not fly, or can it? for now with a public member we're flying somewhat in the wind of a contrived example, but anything can now set the value of mInFlight, our for-loop upon the predator signal can now achieve its aim:

for(auto& bird : flock)

{
   bird.mInFlight = true;

}

And this is correct, this loop in review would pass, who can argue?  The bird took flight, it did, it is true.  And this is code locality in action, for at the location we needed it the functionality was available to mutate the value and achieve our goals, no matter what the state of the rest of the system was.

This is a very dangerous place to be.

Especially with an asynchronous system, lets say this is not a trivial call, lets say that the call site is to loop through a series of resources and start them loading, and upon that call each is pending load, but not yet loaded?

for(auto& item : objects)

{
    item.StartLoad();

}

We can assume this code is starting the load, but now lets package this into some context, we like to have our code be self-documenting after all.

class Loader

{
    private:

        bool mEverythingReady { false };

        std::vector<Objects> mObjects;

    public:

        void Load()

        {

            for(auto& item : mObjects)

            {

                item.StartLoad();

            }

            mEverythingReady = true;

        }

   };

Can you already spot the problem?  The local code here is communicating that EVERYTHING READY, when it is anything but that, you have simply started some other action elsewhere, you have not checked the state, you have not deferred until ready, you have started load and that is all you know, but you code here locally is communicating something subtly different.

And in huge systems you must not fall foul of this kind of behaviour, you need your code locally to communicate what it intends, to do as it intends and if you spot silly public interfaces like this do not be affraid to fix them, the bravery to address an issue, if only to raise it to the owner, is a step in the right direction with massive software systems.

Operational Embarassment

Today I bring you a story, a true story, from my very own past.  You may have seen the "broken feet" link on this very page, so yeah I broke both my ankles at the same time falling off a roof.

Fast forward just under two years and I need an operation as the joint are going bad.

On the day of the operation I am handed a lovely double hospital gown and the lady checks who, what and why I am there... The surgeon see's me and puts a big big black arrow on my right leg and I am shown into the pre-op waiting room to just wait.

I am the first case, but they want to pre-op everyone, and slowly the waiting room fills with men in the same garb.

No-one speaks.... No-one.

This is quite strange with us blokes, and to be honest I find it a little freaky, as I'm sat there with my big black felt arrow on my ankle I just joke... "Bet we can guess what I'm having done".

ALL OF THEM, and there's like six guys now, all stony faced.  They don't look at me, they don't look at one another.... Nothing, nada, zip.

What the heck?

So I'm up first, off I go, limping out and am taken to theatre.

I am a quirky case, as not only am I first, but I am to be awake during the procedure, I get an epidural and then a tourniquet is applied and I get to watch them work on my ankle in this freezing cold room.

An hour or so later I'm in resus, first in, first out... I am surrounded by empty bays.  Slowly as the morning wears on and my leg starts to awaken in cramping pins and needles the first of the other guys is brought through... No idea what procedure he's had.

Then another.

Then another.

Until all six bays around me are full and I'm not allowed a drink, some toast and encouraged to rub some life into my leg.

I am very clearly the only patient in this state, the others are all coming around from general anesthetics.

My surgeon pops to see me, he's very happy, I'm very happy and sure enough in the next hour I get up and for the first time since the original accident I'm not in pain in my ankle!

These other guys then start to awaken, and they don't want the nurses helping them, the female nurses, they're all deadly coy and a bit embarrassed, as I'm up and about moving my leg and getting it wrapped and a cast applied.

 "Sorry"

This voice comes across the ward.

 "Sorry for ignoring you earlier, you were just breaking the ice"

And we have a chat..... And then he drops me into the most embarrassment ever....

 For you see... he... and seemingly all the other men in the ward... have all had dick operations.

 Yes, that's right... In a room full of men about to have their john-thomas tucked or worse I made a joke about "Guess what I'm having done".

I wanted the floor to open up and swallow me.

Everyone then promptly burst into laughter at the look on my face.

A couple were having later life circumcisions due to tight foreskins, one was having a lump removed, one was just have it biopsied or something... but all dick ops...

That's why they were silent and jealous of me with my big black felt marker arrow marking me out as the luckiest bastard in that room with the least to worry about.

I think about this today, my big black felt arrow, never have I been more relieved after hearing their procedure stories.  Though they went a little pale when I said "Oh I was awake during the op and watched".