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Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

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

#211

Post by ehsankia »

mizzack wrote: post #84
dzink wrote: post #20

Didn’t the Intel CEO just sell half of his shares/options? If he knew about these issues isn’t that illegal?

Looks like Krzanich sold $39.4M of stock on 11/28. Hard to say when the top brass knew about this flaw. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/insider-transactions?p=...

I don't understand this attitude that "top brass might not know about it". He's the CEO, isn't his entire job to know what's going on in the company? I know we get this idea that rich people just sit back and take in the money, but isn't the reason they are paid so much in the first place because they have in theory a big responsibility on what happens in the company?

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

#212

Post by chris_wot »

eptcyka wrote: post #187
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superficially, it seems like the performance hit mostly scales with IOPS or transactions per second, which might have some pretty serious implications for performance/dollar in the kinds of intensive back-end applications where Intel currently dominates and AMD is trying to make inroads with EPYC.

It has very little to do with what kind of syscalls (I/O or other kinds) and all to do with how many syscalls a given application makes per given time period. Compute bound applications are already avoiding syscalls in their hotter parts. This will mostly be a blow to databases, caching servers and other such I/O limited applications.

That’s terrible - these are precisely the sort of customers who will suddenly get hit with a performance hit that will negatively impact their operations!

This sounds like it’s positively evil for outfits that rely heavily on virtualisation also.

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

#213

Post by hinkley »

ashelmire wrote: post #81
dsign wrote: 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…

From what I've read, this slowdown only affects syscalls, which, since they aren't usually a huge percentage of processing in the first place, should not have such an effect. You're more likely looking at a few percent at most, which is not going to be enough to make AMD outperform Intel. Let's stop the fear mongering and wait for actual metrics.

Software development workflows have some of the worst syscall profiles out there. This is going to hit most of us where we live.

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

#215

Post by mtanski »

kllrnohj wrote: post #195
surajrmal wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't flash devices use nvme (eg userspace queues) now and avoid the kernel all together for read and write operations? Shouldn't they have no impact?

Not by default they don't. That only works if you're willing to dedicate that entire physical drive to a single application anyway.

In the future this possible on Linux with the filesystems that support DAX. Currently this all pretty experimental with lots of work being done in this space in the last two years.

But this will require you to have the right kind of flash storage, right kind of fs, right kind mount options, and probably a different code path in userspace for DAX vs traditional storage.

So we're a little ways away from this.

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

#216

Post by fatratchet »

mizzack wrote: post #84
dzink wrote: post #20

Didn’t the Intel CEO just sell half of his shares/options? If he knew about these issues isn’t that illegal?

Looks like Krzanich sold $39.4M of stock on 11/28. Hard to say when the top brass knew about this flaw. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/insider-transactions?p=...

The article that started most of the discussion listed the first publicly seen patches at middle of november from Microsoft, and one would assume that a bug that could cause major performance impacts like this makes its way upstairs pretty quickly to Intel.

https://twitter.com/aionescu/status/930412525111296000

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

#217

Post by agumonkey »

mandeepj wrote: post #200
aeleos wrote: post #194

What started as speculation about recent kernel developments has really turned into a shitshow for Intel. I can't imagine they thought that these massive changes would get through without anyone finding out. However, there really isn't any other better option for Intel, so it seems they are in a lose lose situation with no way out. Or at least a way out that doesn't involve them going bankrupt trying to repair the da…

> going bankrupt trying to repair the damage. I think you took it a bit too far. May be, I am missing something. Is it really that bad?

Bankrupt might be a wild guess, but it is one of the largest blunder I can recall. 12 years lineup affected, large penalty fix, hardwired. Intel is gonna enjoy a healthier diet for a while.

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

#218

Post by Brockenstein »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #191

Does anybody know if the 30% performance reduction would apply to Macbook pros from within the past 2 years?

They run Intel CPUs made within the last ten years so would be subject to this issue. But the performance hit is really dependent on the computing that you're doing. It's not a guaranteed 30% or a guaranteed 5%.

Are you doing a lot of really CPU intensive tasks that make a lot of syscalls? Most people aren't. If you are, you'll probably feel that pain. And if you're not, you probably won't notice a difference. And if you don't know you can either research if what you're doing typically is going to be affected, or wait and see.

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

#220

Post by jacksmith21006 »

joncrane wrote: post #204
prewett wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't be so quick to blame. You might have read it yesterday, but he reported it on Nov 29, which means that the transaction happened either within two days prior or about a month, depending on if you believe the SEC's website or NASDAQ's website. But the question isn't when he sold his shares, the question is when did he put in the order to sell those shares. Those guys put their buy/sell orders in months in advance…

Evidence shows this bug was known in November. It only blew up this week.

Probably even earlier.
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