Meltdown and Spectre

[ZenOps]

http://www.popularmechanics.com/tech...el-processors/

Its a big one, protected memory access on a one in a billion speculative execution. Just had to know that the branch predictor would have a flaw somewhere. This is much bigger than the simple divide by flaw found last decade.

Intel down 6%.

[eglove]

It will be interesting to see the benchmarks after the patch is implemented

[Xtrema]

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It will be interesting to see the benchmarks after the patch is implemented

Linux results are in: 15-20% off.

[rage2]

Proof of Concept demo'd this morning. This affects virtualization more than anything, not a good thing at all. The performance hit isn't going to be fun at all, and won't really be solved by scaling out either. Sigh.

[revelations]

Like so many things in the IT world designed to facilitate nefarious use (think Firewall backdoors in certain products), I dont think this was designed by "accident".

Found by accident, yes.


More detail here:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/0...u_design_flaw/

[Buster]

Does this mean I get to build a new computer earlier than expected?

[Xtrema]

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Does this mean I get to build a new computer earlier than expected?

Too early to say and depends on your workload.

Gamers, video editors, people who runs databases, may be. But this impact everything Intel built so far, it may be a while before Intel will put out processors that's patched/fixed.

Then the next issue is do we have another Takata on our hands. If Intel is to replace all current CPUs with fixed versions, do they even have the fab capacity to pull it off. If they don't and everyone is accelerating buying new hardware that are fixed, would that create shortages?

And once you have fixed processor, can you selectively undo the OS patch to get your 20% back?

Too many unknown at this point but this is one hell of way to start the new year as an IT guy. 80% of world runs on Intel x86 procs. Goes to 90% when it comes to server and storage.

The fact that Azure and AWS are forcing mandatory reboots next week means this is one nasty bug.

[Masked Bandit]

So I know little to nothing about I.T. in general but if I have the basic idea right, there's a hole in the security of pretty much every computer out there that uses an Intel chip?

The AMD chip mentioned in the first article, is that brand generally considered second rate? I just remember when I bought my last laptop a year ago the guy at the store wasn't a fan of AMD processors.

[Xtrema]

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So I know little to nothing about I.T. in general but if I have the basic idea right, there's a hole in the security of pretty much every computer out there that uses an Intel chip?

The AMD chip mentioned in the first article, is that brand generally considered second rate? I just remember when I bought my last laptop a year ago the guy at the store wasn't a fan of AMD processors.

AMD processors are cheaper and until 2017, they are 40% slower and more power hungry than Intel counterparts.

AMD finally caught up in 2017 with Ryzen and EPYC processors that rival Intel's in price/performance.

While AMD isn't impacted, the kernel of the OS is shared regardless which x64 CPU is used. So far for Linux, it's indiscriminate and all x64 processor will slow down after kernel update.

This was disclosed by Intel around Nov 21st.
http://fortune.com/2017/11/21/intel-...ecurity-minix/

Linux has a patch out since Nov 30th, MacOS was patched Dec 7th and Microsoft sent out Azure warning just before Christmas about outages next week.

The big news is mainstream didn't know about the performance implication of the fix is til yesterday.

[g-m]

Weak so my AMD system will be slowed for no reason? Hopefully you can selectively patch it

[rage2]

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Weak so my AMD system will be slowed for no reason? Hopefully you can selectively patch it

No. The patch won't affect AMD's performance at all (at least that's what AMD has asked the patch teams). Nor will it affect future iterations of Intel's chips that has the hardware fix. Of course, won't know until OS patches are released. As for performance, anything that uses large amount of I/O is going to be affected. Databases are going to suck.

As for how long it would take to physically fix this on Intel's part, it's at least 1 year to go from design to production. No way they're replacing chips in the wild with OS patches fixing the problem with PTI. Probably going to be class action lawsuits though with the performance hit.

This is absolutely going to suck for DBA's, where all of a sudden their 20% capacity headroom becomes 0% for the same workloads.

[revelations]

I guess this means cheap i7 processors in the mean time

[Darell_n]

I just bought a new computer with the Kaby Lake i7. Where do I sign up for the class action lawsuit? This is bullshit.

[rage2]

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I just bought a new computer with the Kaby Lake i7. Where do I sign up for the class action lawsuit? This is bullshit.

It's not going to affect your usage much. Games, probably zero effect. Copying files, probably slower. Copying files over network, a little slower than local. The performance hit is going to be mostly with enterprise. Virtualization, high I/O workloads such as databases, those are going to take some big performance hits.

[Xtrema]

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It's not going to affect your usage much. Games, probably zero effect. Copying files, probably slower. Copying files over network, a little slower than local. The performance hit is going to be mostly with enterprise. Virtualization, high I/O workloads such as databases, those are going to take some big performance hits.

Benchmarks are out that games get impacted the least, 3-5% only.

It's apps that need to access storage and network that will be impacted the most.

[Darell_n]

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It's not going to affect your usage much. Games, probably zero effect. Copying files, probably slower. Copying files over network, a little slower than local. The performance hit is going to be mostly with enterprise. Virtualization, high I/O workloads such as databases, those are going to take some big performance hits.

I don’t have any games on my iMac. Just use it for movies, photos and videos. Basically all large data files.

[A790]

Unlikely you'll notice.

[D'z Nutz]

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I just bought a new computer with the Kaby Lake i7. Where do I sign up for the class action lawsuit? This is bullshit.

You make it sound like you've been negatively impacted and inconvenienced when you probably wouldn't have even noticed had this not been brought up.

[rage2]

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I don’t have any games on my iMac. Just use it for movies, photos and videos. Basically all large data files.

That's not large data files lol. Movies might be a large file size, but it's accessed over a course of 1.5 hours for a movie.

You're not going to notice anything whatsoever if that's your use case.

[rx7boi]

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I just bought a new computer with the Kaby Lake i7. Where do I sign up for the class action lawsuit? This is bullshit.

This quote is hidden because you are ignoring this member. Show Quote

You make it sound like you've been negatively impacted and inconvenienced when you probably wouldn't have even noticed had this not been brought up.

+1

1. Doesn't have a goddamn clue
2. Join lawsuit if possible
3. ???
4. Profit