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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

#271

Post by ricardobeat »

paulmd wrote: post #257
DocSavage wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prelim benchmarks show a significant impact (~20%) on Postgresql benchmarks.

20% when running SELECT 1; over a loopback network interface, not in real-world workloads. The other benchmark that has generated some consternation is running 'du' on a nonstop loop. Both of these situations are pathological cases and don't reflect real-world performance. My guess is a 5-10% performance hit on general workloads. Still significant, but nowhere near as bad as some of the numbers that are getting throw…

Why should we trust your guesses over numbers being thrown around?

Your last link is all gaming benchmarks, which as the article mentions are not affected much.

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

#272

Post by mtanski »

eropple wrote: post #265
mtanski wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment further down thread mentions it's 20% in Postgres. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16061926

...when running SELECT 1 over a loopback socket. The reply to that comment is accurate: that's a pathological case. Probably an order of magnitude off.

We're still learning, but it looks like pgbench is 7% to 15% off:

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20180102222354.qikjmf7...

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

#273

Post by abakker »

panarky wrote: post #244
mtanski wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned in the other thread yesterday database and database like applications are going to be hit particular hard. Even more so on fast flash storage. Double whammy compared to apps just doing network IO. And while databases try to minimize the number of syscalls they still end up doing a lot of them for read, writeout, flush.

How would you trade this knowledge? Intel has already dropped and AMD is up. Maybe there's more to move, but first-order effects are at least partially priced in already. But what about second-order effects? Seems like virtualization should be vulnerable (VMWare and Citrix), but maybe they actually benefit as customers add more capacity. Software-defined networking and cloud databases should also suffer though it's u…

Arguably, the only sane trade here would be to buy Intel and short AMD if you think the size of the move is greater than it should have been. However, there are many reasons not to do this until there is more information, and as that information comes out, it will likely be incorporated into the continual corrections in price. As to second order effects, don't count on this mattering. Unless you are planning on trading huge amounts of money, the risk/reward is probably not great. If you have to ask...

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

#274

Post by cookiecaper »

chx wrote: post #98
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?

You can be sure there's a young hotshot with sparkling eyes at SEC who is already typing a letter to Mr. Krzanich politely asking about the circumstances of that sell. At the same time, noone is doing eight figures transactions which require reporting to the SEC without talking to a lawyer. Right? Right? They really dislike insider trading, it's one of the few things where even rich people can get imprisoned -- and t…

> They really dislike insider trading, it's one of the few things where even rich people can get imprisoned -- and the typical jail sentence has been steadily climbing up for decades now.

Insider trading, like many white-collar crimes, exists primarily for its value as a weapon. There is nothing actually illegal about the act of selling a stock; it's all about casting aspirations as to intent and who-knew-what-when.

In other situations, intent is usually an aggravating factor, enhancement, or affirmative defense. It is not the thing that qualifies an otherwise 100% legitimate act as a bad thing.

My anecdotal, unsubstantiated perspective is that insider trading is unlikely to be an issue for anyone who hasn't made enemies, and that it may suddenly become an issue for anyone naive enough to make enemies recklessly. cf. Martin Shkreli, who couldn't be linked to a specific "bad trade" so was brought on generic "securities fraud" instead.

Not playing ball with the people wielding these powers seems to be the dangerous thing.

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

#275

Post by mizzack »

ehsankia wrote: post #211
mizzack wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say he didn't know about it. I said we don't know WHEN he first knew about it, which is important in the context of insider trading.

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

#276

Post by josefx »

bunderbunder wrote: post #197
eptcyka wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In other words, don't worry - pretty much all the key performance bottlenecks most of us deal with at work will be getting tighter, but at least our video games will still run OK.

Right now I am just hoping that it wont add significant overhead to OpenGL. My application already has a bottleneck on changing OpenGL states and issuing render commands and I have no idea how much of that time is spend making syscalls.

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

#277

Post by throwaway613834 »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #261
throwaway613834 wrote: post #253

Will there be any way to disable or block the upcoming patches and keep the performance for those of us who really just don't have any reason to care about inter-process information leakage on our personal computers? Edit: I'm (also) wondering about Windows, in case anyone knows yet.

Yes, the work-around can be disabled via a boot-time argument.

Thank you! Do you know if this will be true for Windows as well, or just Linux?

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

#278

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

nitrogen wrote: post #166
userbinator wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When speculative execution (and caches) were invented and put into widespread use, no one thought about timing attacks, nor was the practice of running untrusted code on one's own machine common.

nor was the practice of running untrusted code on one's own machine common Doesn't multi-user timesharing and virtualization predate every modern CPU and OS though?

Yes, but it went out of style for a while.

At first, computers were very expensive, and so were shared between many users. Mainframes, UNIX, dumb terminals, etc.

Then computers became cheap. Users could each have their own computer, and simply communicate with a server. Each business could have their own servers co-located in a datacenter.

Then virtualization got really good, and suddenly cloud servers became viable. You didn't have to pay for a whole server all the time, and if demand rapidly increased you didn't need to buy lots of new hardware. And if demand decreased you didn't get stuck with tons of useless hardware.

The second stage (dedicated servers) was the case when speculative execution was implemented. We're currently in the third stage, but Intel haven't changed their designs.

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

#279

Post by markonen »

GuB-42 wrote: post #161

It seems like it is all thanks to this patch: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2 If I understand well, there may be a serious bug in some x86 CPUs but nothing is known publicly. Presumably, all current Intel CPUs are affected and none by AMD but we can't really be sure, it is still a secret. It is impressive how a simple, yet to be justified patch has so much influence. It opens up new ways of manipulating the market…

But it's not just a random patch posted to LKML, it has also been reviewed and merged to tip. That means it has been justified, just not to you.

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

#280

Post by pbhjpbhj »

Splines wrote: post #192
rbjorklin wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason I can’t reply to ‘chrisper’ but I think ‘api’ is referring to going long in the stock market. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/long.asp

> For some reason I can’t reply to ‘chrisper’ HN doesn't let you do this to new comments to avoid back-and-forth commenting that is typical in flamewars.

Usually you can click on the and go to a page that displays only that comment, which has a reply box even when there's no reply option on the main page.
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