Intel are the experts in their own products. If they don’t have confidence in them, why should we?
Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
141–150 of 499 posts
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#142As 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
As discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17801474 .
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#143Before 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.
at SC and CUG this year the main focus was that in less than 10 years IPC improvement is going to go away (I am not sure where IPC improvement was in the last three years). Anyway, the next step is to make CPUs as much heterogeneous as possible like a SOC. Both Intel and AMD are going there but we need to sit and see which direction is going get the momentom like what nVidia has done.
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#144Isn't the the license used for OEM that prevents Debian to upload the update? https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=906158
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#145Here is one thing we can do about it: make public service announcement to our users that we no longer recommend Intel CPUs because of security holes, censorship and crippled performance. I am going to do that today. While we only have several thousand users they do CPU intensive work, buy a lot of new CPUs and rent a lot of servers. My small contribution will likely amount to low-mid 6 figures out of Intel pocket in…
This amounts to little more than making a statement at the expense of your users. It would've carried that much more weight if it were _your_ low-mid 6 figures that were redirected away from Intel.
It's Intel's policy and silliness that is at the expense of this person's users. Making those users aware of it is absolutely defensible on the grounds of it being the right thing to do. Intel are relying on customers ignorance, in fact they're trying to contractually ensure it! The Streisand effect is exactly what they deserve.
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#146Before 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.
It's remarkable how little we've seen from that acquisition. It's perfectly possible that Intel has butchered the acquisition the same way they have with many others.
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#147My thougt based on the HN headline "Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed" (after having read the article, of course):
Doesn't this show that it is time for someone to set up some kind of "ScienceLeaks" website, where scientists can upload research (results, papers, ...) anonymously which they are are not allowed to do legally because of various such "research-restricting" laws.
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UPDATE: Before people ask the potential question how the researchers are supposed to get their proper credit - my consideration is the following: Each of the researchers signs the paper with their own "public" key of a public-private key pair. This signature is uploaded as part of the paper upload. The "public" key is nevertheless kept secret by the researchers.
When the legal risk is over and the researchers want to disclose their contribution, they simply make their "public" key really public. This way, anyboy can change that the signature that was uploaded from beginning on, indeed belong to this public key and thus to the respective researcher.
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#148Aside 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…
Similar to my story. Apart from an Athlon 650 around 2000-era we've always been an Intel household. I recently upgraded my gaming PC and went with the Ryzen 7 2700X, partly due to the way Intel have been treating their customers like idiots lately. I'm seriously considering AMD for the graphics card too (currently running a GTX 970) as I may well be moving my main gaming PC over to Linux in the near future.
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the license specifically says you will not permit a third party to either. I don't really speak legalese, but does permit include having to then make all of your own users agree not to to avoid a penalty? As mentioned in the other comment thread though, I imagine the reality of this clause is to prevent media outlets (such as Phoronix who would traditionally do exactly this kind of benchmarking) from downloading…
> I don't really speak legalese, but does permit include having to then make all of your own users agree not to to avoid a penalty? As a service provider, you will need to inform your existing users about this restriction and put the restriction in your user agreement for new users. After that you can relax, if any of your users publish benchmarks, you'll have to warn the user and then take the benchmarks out. You do…
5) Publish the benchmarks, dare Intel to sue. Make fun of them for publicity. May be a reasonable and cheap way to get some publicity for a startup. Obviously requires a deeper assessment due anyone looking into it...
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#150> Another issue is whether the customer should install the fix at all. Many computer users don’t allow outside or unprivileged users to run on their CPUs the way a cloud or hosting company does. For them, these side-channel and timing attacks are mostly irrelevant, and the slowdown incurred by installing the fix is unnecessary. lol, javascript
"Many customers" meaning people and orgs running server software on direct hardware. Does your caching or database server run user provided code? Is it accessible to the outside in any way? If not, then maybe it doesn't need the patch.