Why not make it optional?
I don't care about that level of security on most of my systems, I, and I hope the rest of you, have ways to mitigate most security issues like this anyhow.
It's ridiculous.
Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
331–340 of 499 posts
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple / Google / Amazon don’t seem to struggle? Microsoft / IBM and now Intel defintely did. I think it has more to do with the leadership of the company than the size of the company.
Does Google innovate? -ss
Have you seen how many messaging apps theyve made in the last few years?
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#333Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#334Here 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.
same. i _was_ looking at getting an HP Spectre x360 with the i7 8550U. Now, I'm going to look explicitly at laptops with Ryzen chips. I think the Spectre might have a Ryzen model, but don't know.
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks but... bear with me https://www.tomshardware.fr/articles/comparatif-cpu-amd-inte... what are those ryzen 3/5/7 TR ?
13xx, 15xx, 17xx, ThreadRipper. For gen 2, that'd be: 23xx, 25xx, 27xx, ThreadRipper. I think they picked the names/numbers to show some kind of equivalence with i3/5/7, but that's not quite it.
ThreadRipper seems more like a Xeon competitor to me. Something for the server room crowd.
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has actually been perfectly viable to escape Intel and (especially) Microsoft for a very long time. Lots of people on HN have done so. Buy an AMD machine, install Ubuntu, and you're done.
>gaming PC >Ubuntu Hope he likes Mahjong and Tux Racer
Have you not heard of Valve's Proton? It's the next best thing!
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMD is better, they are still affected by side channel attacks but they did not skipped on security checks and are not affected by speculative execution AFAIK https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/security-updates
> ...and are not affected by speculative execution AMD's chips definitely speculatively execute instructions. It's a common performance trick. AMD's chips also definitely throw an exception at retirement (of course) for instructions that attempt to load a privileged address, just like Intel's chips do. The difference is that when AMD's chips see a load instruction, the load isn't executed until it knows that the addr…
>The difference is that when AMD's chips see a load instruction, the load isn't executed until it knows that the address isn't privileged. Intel's chips do execute the load (but then throw away the result when it realises the address was privileged)
Thank you for the detailed explanation, can't we conclude that AMD engineering is more defensive then Intel, this is what I concluded.
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#338Earlier 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…
Intel no longer just has i3/5/7-- celeron, pentium, i3/5/7/9 and plus variants. Within those are dozens of variants
differentiated on things like PCIe bandwidth, SMT, instruction sets, accessible RAM, and so on.
In comparison, AMD's offerings are surprisingly easy. There's a handful of SKUs differentiated on core count and frequency. Generally they all have the same PCIe lanes, RAM access, SMT, instruction sets, and so on.
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd say that it is related to L1TF, but not to keep it secret. It's additional ammunition to use in court when they get sued for performance loss. > Cloud Company: Your honor, the security flaws in the hardware and microcode provided by the defendant necessitated the installation of updates, also provided by defendant, which resulted in a 30% loss of overall performance. Since our business model is predicated on sell…
"could not possibly prove" [without violating the license]. That doesn't invalidate the Cloud Company's claim, it only offers Intel an opportunity to countersue. In that case, they can likely only sue for copyright infringement damages.
What are the teeth on an admitted-in-court EULA violation?
Looking at the license, the only thing it grants the end-user and which Intel could revoke is the license to use the software:
> Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Intel hereby grants to you a non-exclusive, non- transferable right to use the Software (for the purpose of this Agreement, to use the Software includes to download, install, and access the Software) listed in the Grant Letter solely for your own internal business operations. You are not granted rights to Updates and Upgrades unless you have purchased Support (or a service subscription granting rights to Updates and Upgrades).
So yeah, they could revoke your license to the update and leave you with a lot of insecure silicon...but that's what you had before the update (and, in all likelihood, what you still have after the update, just with a known flaw patched and the system lots slower). I don't even think they could sue you for copyright infringement, because you're not violating copyright, you're violating the EULA.
Re: Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Thanks but... bear with me https://www.tomshardware.fr/articles/comparatif-cpu-amd-inte... what are those ryzen 3/5/7 TR ?
That's exactly it
slow (3), medium (5), fast (7), elite (Threadripper)
If you don't want to spend more than USD$800 on the CPU alone, don't look at the elite/threadripper line.
What is your budget? That is the first question you need to answer instead of trying to understand the entire line of chips, look at how much you have to spend, and then find the fastest one within the budget.
It's useless to try to think about the entire line of CPU's when you will only buy 1 chip (unless you are representing Dell and need to buy thousands of chips)