Opt-in for providing basic Hardware Information

[tannergooding]

As per the discussion that started on https://twitter.com/xoofx/status/1572286062315311104?s=20&t=vlg_eVRuF3LDg3C-4_W-og

It might be beneficial for there to be an opt-in for users to provide basic hardware information as part of telemetry collection. It may likewise be beneficial for .NET to do semi-annual surveys in which users can self-report this information to help gather additional datapoints.

The Steam Hardware Survey publishes monthly and contains a wealth of information. However, that information is really centered around the gaming industry and doesn't necessarily correlate to .NET developers.

Almost all of the metrics that Steam collects could be beneficial to help drive decisions both for .NET itself and for the community developing on .NET. Thus I would suggest that the data be provided as available alongside the existing telemetry: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/platform/telemetry. It might be further beneficial for the hardware data to be represented in a more friendly user manner like it is for Steam.

For the purposes of the runtime, the most interesting information is likely:

• CPU Count (both Physical and Logical)
• CPU Features (namely which optional ISAs are supported)
• CPU Cache Sizes (I don't believe Steam collects this one)
• CPU Speed and RAM amount may also be good information

These can be used to better tune where optimizations are focused and help further fine-tune specific scenarios like thread-pool sizes and concurrency primitives.

[jkotas]

This would help runtime if this information is collected on all machines where .NET runtime runs, including production machines. If you collect this information only in places where .NET SDK runs, I do not think it is very useful for the general runtime decision making.