Unless you have an AMD CPU – then you can feel smug right now.

This is a major **** up by Intel – very very bad and with no fix other than to use a clumsy o/s fix that will slow everything down.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/

That’s a big cock up….

yep was told about this earlier, not sure if the article mentioned it but potentially 2-30% performance hit, though I believe the 30% is only for (very) specialist tasks in linux.

EDIT: Article suggests 17 to 23%,hmmmm

z1ppy – Member
yep was told about this earlier, not sure if the article mentioned it but potentially 2-30% performance hit, though I believe the 30% is only for (very) specialist tasks in linux.

Anything that does a significant amount of system calls (i.e. mostly everything) will be affected. 30% seems unlikely except for very odd workloads though.

Must say I’m not overly impressed with Intel of late, after this and learning of the IME exploits.

ETA: if i’m reading the postgres example correctly, what they’re timing is how fast their DB can connect and essentially do nothing (well, return a 1 anyway), and it’s over a loop back, so no network overhead, minimal work to parse the sql and no i/o. In other words it’s probably not too relevant to most database applications.

Grounds for a refund for my cpu?

Blah blah blah performance hit blah blah malware blah blah exploit blah vulnerability blah speculation…. nothing we haven’t seen before.
Maybe this is fake news put out by Intel to get people to buy new processors…

From what I can gather, its only data centers, people who run VM’s…

We don’t know how performance will be with further optimizations, only the initial patch based on the phoronix benches, which seem to show it probably won’t affect 99% of what regular users do.

The CEO of Intel sold a large amount of his stock in the company yesterday.

Coincidentally.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/19/intels-ceo-just-sold-a-lot-of-stock.aspx

EDIT: Me and wwaswas playing snap!

It was back in November, by the looks of it, probably when he had a good idea of what was coming down the track, but the markets didn’t.

A class action of some kind is inevitable if people start seeing 30% drops in CPU performance.

Grounds for a refund for my cpu?

Well this is the interesting bit. *If* Intel have to refund/replace all CPU’s made in the last 10 years it’ll ruin them.

Be interesting to keep an eye on and see what comes of all of this.

nothing we haven’t seen before.
Maybe this is fake news put out by Intel to get people to buy new processors…

No, this is a very significant security flaw and the only processors people will be buying as a result of it are AMD ones.

The reason for the performance hit is because the only way to deal with the issue to prevent the CPU from undertaking certain tasks that it would normally do that speed everything up.

This is right down at microcode level – deep deep within the CPU. This is not a fudge or fake news. Trust me – it *could* send Intel under.

No windows benchmarks yet, but bad news for servers, SQL etc: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-415-x86pti&num=2

Gonna be a lot of angry data centers with angry customers.

And realtime cloud computing at Google etc.

How about if you’re running a 150,000 core Xeon 16C machine, do you think that might be a problem?

Gonna be a lot of angry data centers with angry customers.

And mountain biking forums.

Likely hood of the CEO knowing about this is high, reported that OS programmers knew about it and was trying to fix it back end of November early December. Selling his stock seems very fishy now. They brought forward all their new cpu’s to 2017 because AMD’s Ryzen chip was better than expected on all accounts, if that has anything to do with it. Faulty rushed coding?

I think the Champers will be flowing in the AMD boardroom today 😯

The CEO of Intel sold a large amount of his stock in the company yesterday.

Coincidentally.

I lol’d. Can that be legal? Even if he holds the minimum required of a CEO, surely its some kind of insider dealing.

This going to break the internet quicker than Kardashians with Kittens. Or sell AMD 17-30% more CPUs …

I lol’d. Can that be legal? Even if he holds the minimum required of a CEO, surely its some kind of insider dealing.

It says a lot about his competencies as a CEO that he clearly thought he’d get away with it.

Live footage from AMD HQ

mattyfez – Member
Live footage from AMD HQ

- /* Assume for now that ALL x86 CPUs are insecure */
- setup_force_cpu_bug(X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE);
+ if (c->x86_vendor != X86_VENDOR_AMD)
+ setup_force_cpu_bug(X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE);

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2

Normal users don’t seem to be hit, but the server market is thier bread and butter:

https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.php/news/hardware/prozessoren/45319-intel-kaempft-mit-schwerer-sicherheitsluecke-im-prozessor-design.html

Does that mean this place will get even more slowerer?

is that possible?

How about if you’re running a 150,000 core Xeon 16C machine, do you think that might be a problem?

I reckon your framerate might drop a bit on FIFA 🙁

No, this is a very significant security flaw and the only processors people will be buying as a result of it are AMD ones.

Most people just buy a laptop online and neither know nor care what processor it uses…

Are you sure Singletrack didn’t post this as fake news to explain why the site has been slow lately? 😉

what intel processors does it affect?

seosamh77 – Member
what intel processors does it affect?

For now, all intel CPUs.

what intel processors does it affect?

Everything from Clarkdale/Westmere (2010) onward, so yes effectivley all of them unless youve got a really old PC/server

Hmm… ARM sell off now looks like a daft move…

The sooner we have open hardware, the better.

scaredypants – Member
I reckon your framerate might drop a bit on FIFA

Dammit – Rpeak (TFlop/s) reduced to 3,750 – but WoW should be ok, no?

Everything from Clarkdale/Westmere (2010) onward, so yes effectivley all of them unless youve got a really old PC/server

Looks like I’ll be fine, then. (-: Mine’s… Penryn I think, off the top of my head.

I wonder, will they be patching all OSes, or just the ones with affected CPUs? Kind of a bit shit being forced to patch a vulnerability I don’t have.

I wonder, will they be patching all OSes, or just the ones with affected CPUs? Kind of a bit shit being forced to patch a vulnerability I don’t have.

The Linux kernel option can be disabled on the kernel boot line, and there’s a patch floating around to disable it for AMD.

It also affects Aarch64.

Intel shares down 4.2% since this morning, that’s a shed load of money.

AMD shares up 7.2%.

The fix is to separate the kernel’s memory completely from user processes using what’s called Kernel Page Table Isolation, or KPTI. At one point, Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines, aka ****, was mulled by the Linux kernel team, giving you an idea of how annoying this has been for the developers.

I was about to return my laptop as the speakers have gone all crackly…got another 18 months on the warranty so I might hold fire incase they end up replacing it with an updated processor!

ARM sell off now looks like a daft move…

Arm processes may be affected also – see article for further details.

Still got a XT 286 so I win!!

Unless it’s still broken from that Millennium bug

Intel shares down 4.2% since this morning, that’s a shed load of money.

AMD shares up 7.2%.

Correction:
Intel now at -4.4%

But AMD still climbing at +8.2%