111–120 of 567 posts
Here are some numbers quantifying the problem. Big caveats apply as they are very preliminary, but the hit due to the software patches looks extremely significant: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-41...
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…
Didn’t the Intel CEO just sell half of his shares/options? If he knew about these issues isn’t that illegal?
Its impossible for him to not know something that is this serious.
If he actually did knew about this, then this is a proof of some serious incompetence.
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…
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.
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.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Isn't why this problem even exits the exact opposite? Intel was losing on the mobile market and changed internal testing to iterate faster by cutting corners. Found a quote: "We need to move faster. Validation at Intel is taking much longer than it does for our competition. We need to do whatever we can to reduce those times… we can’t live forever in the shadow of the early 90’s FDIV bug, we need to move on. Our comp…
Overall it’s a depressing story of predictable market failure as well as internal misbehavior at Intel, if true. Few buyers want to pay or wait for correctness until a sufficiently bad bug is sufficiently fresh in human memory. And if you do want to, it’s not as if you’re blessed with many convenient alternatives.
Didn’t the Intel CEO just sell half of his shares/options? If he knew about these issues isn’t that illegal?
http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/intc/insider-trades
Most of trades are "automatic sells" which should mean the trades were setup days in advance. And the selling was reported on the back of the Intel issue only.