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Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

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61–70 of 567 posts

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#61
post #52

Can someone help me understand why this is such a big deal? This doesn’t seem to be a flaw in the sense of the Pentium FDIV bug where the processor returned incorrect data. It doesn’t even seem to be a bug at all, but a side channel attack that would be almost expected in a processor with speculative execution unless special measures were taken to prevent it. And it doesn’t seem like it can be used for privilege esca…

It's a bug, even if it's a side-channel attack only. Notice that AMD chips aren't vulnerable to this attack.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#62

Honest question, does the performance hit from this patch actually hit Intel's best processors enough to make them perform worse than AMD's best? I don't keep up on these kinds of metrics, but I'm under the impression that Intel still dominated CPU benchmarks berfore this issue, so if this question is answered in the negative then I doubt it will affect Intel very much.

It depends on what your program is doing. If your program uses a lot of syscalls, then it'll be slower. If it hardly uses them at all, then it won't be as affected.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#63
post #15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How you hold this stock is a mystery to me. With it bouncing between $10 and $15 constantly last year it just seems far to volatile. I'd be panic buying / selling every day to adjust which seems stressful... Maybe why its a favorite of /r/wallstreetbets

>/r/wallstreetbets Guilty as charged. >I'd be panic buying / selling every day to adjust which seems stressful... Just treat it as numbers on a screen rather than money. Keeps the emotions at bay.

[deleted]

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#64
post #41
post #27

This piece is (IMNSHO) trash. It's trying to stare into some crystal ball guessing at the cause of market fluctuations; but there's no real evidence they're right. Not to mention it's pretty misleading about technical stuff, saying e.g. "Chip design errors are exceedingly rare. More than 20 years ago, a college professor discovered a problem with how early versions of Intel’s Pentium chip calculated numbers." So, the…

Major chip design errors, of this magnitude, are exceedingly rare. Especially in comparison to the software industry where bugs are released to production a couple orders of magnitude more frequently. How many other Intel hardware bugs can you point to that are comparable to the ones below? "All computers with Intel chips from the past 10 years appear to be affected... The security updates may slow down older machine…

That's what you're saying (and indeed what I said too!), but that's not what bloomberg published. What you're saying makes sense! But they didn't qualify this by major. And the qualification is important to the heart of the story, since the way they phrased it suggests that chip design is largely reliable and thus that this is an exceptional error, when in fact errors are common, and impact is merely exceptional. In effect: they're overstating the signal-to-noise ratio this event implies.

Worse, they understated the noisiness of the chip error "signal" but they also understate the noisiness of the stock value signal. And hey presto; if you conveniently present only the data you want all of the sudden a correlation looks really meaningful!

Furthermore, even the qualification "major" isn't really deserved quite to the extent that bloomberg implies; specifically there have been worse chip errors much more recently than 20 years ago (e.g. amd's somewhat similar phenom issues). What makes this one worse isn't just the bug, it's how chips are used: cloud computing makes this much more relevant than similar bugs not too many years ago.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#65

Honest question, does the performance hit from this patch actually hit Intel's best processors enough to make them perform worse than AMD's best? I don't keep up on these kinds of metrics, but I'm under the impression that Intel still dominated CPU benchmarks berfore this issue, so if this question is answered in the negative then I doubt it will affect Intel very much.

[deleted]

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#66
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw that rumor spreading last night, but have yet to see any trustworthy reporting on any such action. Edit: Here's trustworthy reporting on that action that also predates this announcement: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/19/intels-ceo-just-so...

I don't think there needs to be much "reporting". Intel has a rule where c-suite and up execs who have been at the company 5+ years must hold a minimum amount of stock. For the CEO, that number is 250,000. The CEO recently exercised options and immediately sold them, holding onto the absolute minimum required (250k). This is all available on the SEC's website, trades like this are reported to the SEC and are consider…

Small correction, but generally someone like that exercises their options and sells them for profit, keeping their shares that they've had since whenever. In this case, he exercised the options, sold those shares, and then lowered the amount of shares he had beyond that to the absolute minimum (250k).

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#67
post #52

Can someone help me understand why this is such a big deal? This doesn’t seem to be a flaw in the sense of the Pentium FDIV bug where the processor returned incorrect data. It doesn’t even seem to be a bug at all, but a side channel attack that would be almost expected in a processor with speculative execution unless special measures were taken to prevent it. And it doesn’t seem like it can be used for privilege esca…

Reading secret data out of kernel memory is very bad on cloud environments. Keep in mind that the kernel deals with a lot of cryptography.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#69
post #43
post #19

This is a clusterf /big deal. Beyond the security implications, it means that all companies paying for computing resources will have to pay roughly 30% more overnight on cloud expenses for the same amount of CPU, assuming that they can just scale up their infrastructure. I know that bugs happen and that there was nothing intentional on this one, but at times like this is hard to held at bay the temptation of claiming…

> I know that bugs happen This isn’t an excuse for Intel consistently having terrible verification practices and shipping horrendous hardware bugs. From 2015: https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/ There have been more since then. I’ve talked to multiple people who work in intel’s testing division and think “verification” means “unit tests”. The complexity of their CPUs has far surpassed what they know how to manage.

This is typically what happens when you go for a long time without real competition. You get way too comfortable and bad habits start to pile up.
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