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Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed

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

#121

Post by snaky »

headmelted wrote: post #50

Before Zen, we all kind of assumed they were so far ahead that AMD were more likely to be out of business before they would ever be a credible threat again. I actually thought Intel must have had some tricks up their sleeves in terms of performance gains that we hadn't seen yet, simply because there was no market need to roll them out and they had so many years of coasting on marginal gains. Seeing them taking this s…

> Clearly, they don't have an answer to AMD at all

They still have a huge opportunity for CPU+FPGA, they bought Altera for the purpose.

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

#122

Post by a3_nm »

Amusingly, I don't think the summary in the article or article title correctly summarizes the legalese. What is forbidden seems to be to "publish or provide" benchmark results. So let's I boot my machine with the new microcode, run a benchmark, then reboot it with the old microcode and upload the results to my website (hosted on a machine that doesn't run the new microcode). I don't see how this violates the terms of the license.

In general, these terms doesn't seem to be very carefully phrased. Point (i), and independently point (iii), apparently prevent you from running the software altogether.

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

#123

Post by alkonaut »

jve wrote: post #95

> Since some similar exploits have been discovered for AMD and ARM CPUs, the answer is probably “no”. But certainly customers are upset. Whats to be upset? Don't update if you are upset. Choose between perf/security. What are the options, anyway? You can be upset that the things are the way they are, however you can't blame Intel/AMD/ARM, etc. You should have been upset if these vulerabilities were known and not fixe…

I expect them to fix the security issues, and I expect them to allow me to both know and publish the performance effect of the fix. If the security issues are not fixed, I'm upset. If they are fixed but I'm not allowed to talk about the effects, then I'm more upset.

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

#125

Post by iforgotpassword »

radialbrain wrote: post #65
squarefoot wrote: post #42

Sorry if I stress this even one more time, but we badly need 100% open iron, I mean something beefier than SiFive. If there is any effort in this direction, then, say for a year, most donations should be diverted over there. Closed hardware is becoming the unavoidable medium used to push closed firmware into everyone's system, that's a lot more important than benchmarks.

Have you seen https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/ ? Typing this on my own right now.

Fails the 'reasonable pricing' check. Who's gonna pay 6x of what you pay for a comparable intel system? This is only for the super-enthusiast.

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

#127

Post by shakna »

cyphar wrote: post #83
ddtaylor wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like it would be a big deal considering this whole thing is related to servers and I have to imagine some server operators are running Debian? Maybe at the bare metal level their all running RHEL, which I presume doesn't care about the license restrictions.

From the article linked in TFA[1], Debian appears to be the only distribution that is refusing to release it. Gentoo has made it so that you have to agree to the new license when upgrading your intel-ucode package, while other distribution vendors (Arch, Red Hat, and SUSE) all appear to be shipping it without issue. The argument from Intel is that the new changes don't actually affect distributions, as distributions…

> Gentoo has made it so that you have to agree to the new license when upgrading your intel-ucode package

As well as not redistributing it to mirrors, as they are unable to ask mirrors to accept a new license. [0]

[0] https://bugs.gentoo.org/664134#c2

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

#128

Post by gambiting »

throwaway77384 wrote: post #116
TheRealPomax wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works for Oracle (it is famously illegal to publish benchmarks of DB2 vs other engines), I'm sure intel can make it work for them thanks to Oracle's court case(s).

So is the below technically illegal? http://phpdao.com/mysql_postgres_oracle_mssql/

I think OP is using the wrong term - breaching terms of contract is not illegal in itself. It just means Oracle will not do any more business with you.

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

#129

Post by dvfjsdhgfv »

throwaway77384 wrote: post #116
TheRealPomax wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It works for Oracle (it is famously illegal to publish benchmarks of DB2 vs other engines), I'm sure intel can make it work for them thanks to Oracle's court case(s).

So is the below technically illegal? http://phpdao.com/mysql_postgres_oracle_mssql/

Technically yes, but Oracle won't sue as the results are favorable for them in this case.

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

#130

Post by yrro »

throwaway77384 wrote: post #115
Jach wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle and MS SQL Server have had no benchmark disclosures in their licenses for a long time, so Intel probably thinks so.

So this is illegal? http://phpdao.com/mysql_postgres_oracle_mssql/

I don't think it's illegal for the author to violate the terms of the license that they agreed to in order to be able to run Oracle RDBMS legally.
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