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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

#241

Post by akerro »

aneutron wrote: post #135
akerro wrote: post #124

Can I publish benchmarks of 7zip, The Witcher 3 and OpenGPG from yesterday and tomorrow (after Intel patch, which was patched coincidentally)?

This is why it just sounded stupid to me when I read the headline. The CPU IS the computer, sure I won't run Cinebench, but I'll want to run my web browser, and there are things called browser benchmarks because I want to know if Chrome is better than Firefox, coincidentally running older versions of the software on older machines. Will they sue me ?

>Will they sue me ?

Are you in US? If the answer is yes, I'm happy to publish the results for you on my blog where they won't reach me.

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

#242

Post by barkingcat »

johnchristopher wrote: post #229
ksec wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. It depends where about on the timeline. AMD's hired of Lisa Su and Jim Keller in 2012, we all thought it was too little too late. Look back at the Roadmap Intel were giving at the time, I used to joke about Tick Tock were like the sound of AMD's death clock. In…

> If you loathe Intel after all the lies they have been telling and marketing speaks, you should buy AMD. > If you love Intel still after all, you should still buy AMD, teach them a painful lesson to wake them up. But how do I choose which AMD CPU I need ? Back in my youth p4 and athlon were easy to compare (freq., IPS and a modifier because AMD) but now I can't even tell the differences between any i5/3/7 and when I…

On the AMD side, there's only 2 generations of Ryzen.

Ryzen 1 - slow, medium, fast, elite

Ryzen 2 - slow, medium, fast, elite

pick the one you need based on pricing/discounts if any. It's not that hard really.

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

#244

Post by _ph_ »

amluto wrote: post #13

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 w…

If you consider how fundamentally broken speculative execution from a security standpoint is, then a fully "fixed" processor will be significantly slower than unfixed ones. The benchmarking clause rather clearly shows this.

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

#245

Post by GrayShade »

polkadotted wrote: post #201
GrayShade wrote: post #184

Phoronix already tested this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=l1tf-ear... and https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=l1tf-for... . The performance loss isn't that bad in most cases.

These seems to be linux's own mitigations against L1TF. There's no mention about microcode being updated here, which I assume isn't the case. I assume the microcode update could be either equal o slightly worse in terms of performance, as the CPU might need to flush more frequently. Which is pretty sad, as the status of kernel+microcode updates is quite confusing already. Some mitigations can take advantage of new mi…

I assumed the tests were were ran on the new microcode version, as it was released a week before the tests, but it seems that Ubuntu didn't ship that update yet.

Their security advisory says that

> Optimized L1 data cache flushing is available via intel-microcode updates. The updated kernels implement a software fallback cache flushing mechanism for processors that have not received microcode updates.

It looks like the kernel will say "VMX: conditional cache flushes" on the new microcode so according to the Phoronix screenshots, they were running the older version.

Maybe we'll see a new set of benchmarks.

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

yohann305 wrote: post #235
carlmr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they've nothing significant to show for all that time and money spent when they were raking it in without a serious competitor. Big companies rarely innovate without competition around.

This is certainly a myth. Everyone knows, including big companies, that as you grow in size you have a harder time innovating. The classic "lean startup" book mentions this issue and gives the example of Intuit's in-house accelerator/incubator. No way Intel doesn't know about it too. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/19/in...

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by dom96 »

johnchristopher wrote: post #229
ksec wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. It depends where about on the timeline. AMD's hired of Lisa Su and Jim Keller in 2012, we all thought it was too little too late. Look back at the Roadmap Intel were giving at the time, I used to joke about Tick Tock were like the sound of AMD's death clock. In…

> If you loathe Intel after all the lies they have been telling and marketing speaks, you should buy AMD. > If you love Intel still after all, you should still buy AMD, teach them a painful lesson to wake them up. But how do I choose which AMD CPU I need ? Back in my youth p4 and athlon were easy to compare (freq., IPS and a modifier because AMD) but now I can't even tell the differences between any i5/3/7 and when I…

Compare the benchmarks for those processors?

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

#248

Post by gowld »

yohann305 wrote: post #235
carlmr wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>they've nothing significant to show for all that time and money spent when they were raking it in without a serious competitor. Big companies rarely innovate without competition around.

This is certainly a myth. Everyone knows, including big companies, that as you grow in size you have a harder time innovating. The classic "lean startup" book mentions this issue and gives the example of Intuit's in-house accelerator/incubator. No way Intel doesn't know about it too. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/19/in...

What myth?

As you say, bigger companies have a harder time innovting.

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

#249

Post by _ph_ »

A total disaster. From all I know, any thorough fix of the exploits of speculative execution will slow down the processers significantly. Unless the terms are just a terribly blunder (which would be bad enough on its own), this points to a rather big marketing nightmare to show up. First of all the bad PR for those terms, and of course, sooner or later there will be thorough benchmarks on the net. I would even guess, one of the larger hardware review sites will openly ignore the terms and run them and wait for Intel to sue them. I could not imagine such a law suit achieving anything but directing even more attention to that publication and the obtained results.

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

#250

Post by dhimes »

bluecalm wrote: post #100

Here 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…

I am in the market for a new rig- looks like I'll be going with AMD.
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