Better yet: make it writable. That way the OS could change it per process/thread...

wmf · on Jan 3, 2010

VIA has a writable vendor string which they have used to reveal this type of shenanigans in the past.

rbanffy · on Jan 4, 2010

I always liked those guys. The über-486 Centaur built was briiliant design and out-of-the-box thinking from top to bottom.

Weren't the VIAs able to trounce Xeons in some crypto stuff?

wmf · on Jan 4, 2010

Weren't the VIAs able to trounce Xeons in some crypto stuff?

Yes, since they had crypto instructions and nobody else did. Now I would expect Westmere to be faster.

sophiebits · on Jan 4, 2010

From the end of the article:

It is possible to change the CPUID of AMD processors by using the AMD virtualization instructions. I hope that somebody will volunteer to make a program for this purpose. This will make it easy for anybody to check if their benchmark is fair and to improve the performance of software compiled with the Intel compiler on AMD processors.