Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#11

Post by eksemplar » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:40 AM UTC

Aside from my vic20 and c64 I’ve only ever owned intel CPUs, and those two may have been intel as well, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never made a decision to chose Intel based on benchmark, I’ve bought them because they’ve always been great for me.

So it’ll be ironic when I buy an AMD processor when I upgrade for cyberpunk 2077, because of benchmarks. Not because AMD is faster, they may be but I wouldn’t know, no, it’ll be because intel are douches.

I didn’t like how they handled their vulnerabilities, or how they still released chips with the errors long after it was discovered because they had production planned, and now they are pulling stuff like this?

Heh.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#12

Post by eight_ender » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:40 AM UTC

Has Intel just outlawed any review website (gaming, enthusiast, etc) from ever posting benchmarks of their CPUs again? I feel like they didn't think this through.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#13

Post by amluto » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:43 AM UTC

I can think of two theories:

1. It's a mistake. Someone in legal got carried away.

2. The performance of the L1TF mitigation is so awful that someone at Intel thought it would be a good idea to try to keep the performance secret.

(Which leads to option 2b. The performance of the L1TF mitigation is so awful that somemone at Intel is afraid that Intel could be sued as a result, and they want to mitigate that risk.)

I would guess it's #1.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#14

Post by beefhash » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:45 AM UTC

As a side note: Some of the license changes also block Debian from updating their intel-microcode package[1].

[1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=906158#14

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#15

Post by p1necone » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:45 AM UTC

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #4

muppetman wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it's just designed to scare the big media websites from publishing numbers.

This is censorship, plain and simple. They cannot command everyone to abridge their speech, even if their license terms say so. It is unenforceable and illegal.

I mean, they can probably say whatever they want, but this is not a legal thing - all they can do is refuse to sell you more hardware for violating their contract.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#16

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:48 AM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#17

Post by molyss » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:50 AM UTC

This is beyond idiotic. Any company that's about to release this in their production server will want to benchmark the effect of the fix. And some of them will have to provide the results to their customers.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#18

Post by ulfw » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:53 AM UTC

Oh intel. What has happened to you? Do they really think this could even remotely be enforceable?

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#19

Post by phyller » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:54 AM UTC

p1necone wrote: post #15

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is censorship, plain and simple. They cannot command everyone to abridge their speech, even if their license terms say so. It is unenforceable and illegal.

I mean, they can probably say whatever they want, but this is not a legal thing - all they can do is refuse to sell you more hardware for violating their contract.

NDA's are legal right? This is like a permanent NDA. I wonder if people can refuse to download the microcode because of the license, and then sue Intel for the vulnerability. I'm thinking probably not.

Might want to get your next chips from AMD.

Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

#20

Post by paulie_a » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 4:59 AM UTC

eight_ender wrote: post #12

Has Intel just outlawed any review website (gaming, enthusiast, etc) from ever posting benchmarks of their CPUs again? I feel like they didn't think this through.

And even if they did think it through. It should be aggressively ignored.