381–390 of 499 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
The article says "Many computer users" not "Many customers". Furthermore when the article mentions "customers" elsewhere we can probably assume it means "Intel customers" which is a much greater subset than the group you're talking about, and which would be probably less than 1% as numerous as the "Many computer users" that run javascript. lol, javascript
So? Many does not mean most. There's a choice to be made, apply the security patch and accept the performance loss, or don't. Some people may not need to to remain close to as safe as they were previously based on their configuration for some of their systems, and I would guess the number of systems easily numbers in the millions. This is a benefit for those people, and worth mentioning, even if it's not nearly a large a number as the total number of CPUs or customers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honest question: is AMD any better? Do they somehow manage to avoid Spectre / Meltdown without a slowdown?
Yes. Their arch is just different, they where not affected by meltdown and the chances of a spektre exploit actually working are very small. I don't know why that is the case but basically amd is 99% free from this story.
It's clear that AMD weren't doing anything special w.r.t. side channel attacks. They were just further behind in the optimisation race and as a consequence, were less hit.
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wasn't bell labs part of a very big corporation when they invented basically everything about the modern world?
AT&T's early dominance was the direct result of the invention of the transistor that came from their own labs. From then on, the company was committed to spending massive amounts of money into developing new technology. Even if AT&T didn't directly invent a new technology, they were still one of the few companies in the world that could actually afford to buy new toys and put them into the hands of researchers who wo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
https://www.cs.vu.nl/~herbertb/download/papers/anc_ndss17.pd...
At least, that's all I can think you are trying to imply, because you didn't actually say anything, you just dropped a link. It's hard to have a useful conversation when that happens.
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• Updates are not served to me at regular, known intervals. Perhaps it's due to a progressive rollout policy of some kind. • Certain days come up that I, the paying user, do not want to patch on. Microsoft wins this disagreement and I lose. This occurs in a glib fashion with a message like "Hey, just a heads up, we are going to restart your computer" (whether I like it or not). It is my computer, there is no "we!" It…
Microsoft's stance on the issue: Win10 is free* (so it does this) - Professionals who need to override these settings should get Win10 Pro.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
• Updates are not served to me at regular, known intervals. Perhaps it's due to a progressive rollout policy of some kind. • Certain days come up that I, the paying user, do not want to patch on. Microsoft wins this disagreement and I lose. This occurs in a glib fashion with a message like "Hey, just a heads up, we are going to restart your computer" (whether I like it or not). It is my computer, there is no "we!" It…
Microsoft's stance on the issue: Win10 is free* (so it does this) - Professionals who need to override these settings should get Win10 Pro.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
wasn't bell labs part of a very big corporation when they invented basically everything about the modern world?
AT&T's early dominance was the direct result of the invention of the transistor that came from their own labs. From then on, the company was committed to spending massive amounts of money into developing new technology. Even if AT&T didn't directly invent a new technology, they were still one of the few companies in the world that could actually afford to buy new toys and put them into the hands of researchers who wo…
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…
>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.
If you're selling a subscription to a best-in-market service, there's not a lot of motive to innovate, agreed. Maybe you'd try a new product or a premium variant, but there's no reason to sink effort into advances that won't let you expand userbase or raise prices.
But for Intel? Before AMD got going, Intel's biggest competition was itself 9/18 months previously. Innovation wasn't just for new devices and new buyers, it was how they sold updated processors for machines that were already Intel Inside. They're not waiting on processors to die, they're actively pushing for them to be replaced for performance reasons.
That might create an incentive to release 'good enough' updates and dole out big improvements gradually, but in practice any of that which happened was already ending. Intel appears to be up against the wall regarding 10nm even with a competitor, and has been attempting major innovations to handle 7nm and below for years. With a revenue stream that relies on annual improvements to their product, they seem to have been learning hard into innovation and struggling, rather than waiting for a competitor.
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…
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.