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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

#481

Post by tlb »

mywittyname wrote: post #466
tlb wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not accurate. AT&T dominated telecommunications for decades before the transistor. Many of Bell Labs great scientific inventions predate the transistor, such as information theory.

Sure, but the transistor ushered in the long-distance era and helped AT&T establish their monopoly (and their eventual breakup). Regional telephone services were already beginning to drive down costs in local markets.

Maybe you're thinking of the triode, which AT&T did have a monopoly on around 1915, when they deployed the first transcontinental long-distance service using vacuum tubes to boost the signal. They bought deForest's patents and filed many more of their own on amplification circuits.

They had direct-dial long-distance by 1951, using relays and tubes.

The transistor started making a difference in telephony with the release of the 1ESS switch in 1965. But transistors were a commodity by then.

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

#482

Post by infinity0 »

kbenson wrote: post #382
infinity0 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> which would be probably less than 1% as numerous as the "Many computer users" that run 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…

In this case, many does mean most.

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

#483

Post by angry_octet »

maxerickson wrote: post #354
angry_octet wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol I don't know who bought that. Anyone who wanted 3D was buying Voodoo, RIVA TNT or ATI RAGE. Everyone else was happily 2D and running Word 95. But, to clarify, I was speaking of consumer/mobile. The original iPhone was quite revolutionary for having a decent PowerVR graphics chip. High end symbian phones just had a CPU. See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_6110_Navigator or https://en.wikipedia.org/…

I didn't highlight it as a desirable 3d processor, I pointed it out because 3d was essentially becoming default at that point. And the first iPhone shipping with a powerful graphics chip is a counter to your argument that the future of mobile wasn't clear. The people with the ideas wanted a graphics processor.

The fact that the entire industry apart from Apple (a computer company, not a phone/device company) were completely ignoring 3D exactly shows that it was NOT obvious or clear. After Apple demonstrated the potential it became clear.

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

#485

Post by KozmoNau7 »

crunchlibrarian wrote: post #459
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel are still ahead in low power mobile (laptop) CPU race, and the clear leader in the laptop market. Who knows for how long, though?

Not at all, they bungled low power bigly with the atom trainwreck and are so far behind ARM now that they have given up competing.

I don't see very many competitive AMD- or ARM-based laptops around, though.

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

#486

Post by wolfgke »

agwa wrote: post #442
wolfgke wrote: post #147

My 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. ---…

> 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 wan…

After chmod775's comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17825777), I already suspected something into that direction. Thanks for the independent confirmation.

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

#487

Post by kashyapc »

So, as expected, a colleague of mine pointed out—Imad Sousou from Intel's Open Source Technology Center clarified:

We have simplified the Intel license to make it easier to distribute CPU microcode updates and posted the new version here: http://bit.ly/2w9RjtM . As an active member of the open source community, we continue to welcome all feedback and thank the community

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

#488

Post by repolfx »

kllrnohj wrote: post #464
repolfx wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't. Spectre works fine on AMD. They avoided Meltdown only because their cores are less optimised. Meltdown isn't Intel specific - Apple cores were also affected. 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.

That is a horrifically biased & wrong summary. AMD enforce privilege checks at access time rather than at retirement time. Whether or not this is due to "lack of optimization" or "good security engineering" nobody knows. But your claims that this was purely the result of "less optimised [sic]" cores is nonsense. You have zero evidence whatsoever that that was the case vs. AMD just having superior engineering on this…

The summary is correct and optimised is the correct spelling where I'm from.

If AMD were making conscious efforts to avoid side channel attacks they'd already have had various features to show for it like IBRS. But AMD's chips say nothing about side channel attacks. Their manuals do not discuss Spectre attacks. And there is no evidence anywhere that they knew about Meltdown type attacks and chose to avoid them.

I get that suddenly hating on Intel is cool and popular, but the facts remain. There is no reason to believe AMD has any advantage here.

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

#489

Post by onli »

newman314 wrote: post #474
onli wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The right answer to this is to look into benchmarks. It now works again to compare Intel and AMD clocks, but only of the current generation, and then there is core count and motherboard prices to consider, so on. A project of mine is a hardware recommender, it also includes a meta-benchmark. I collect published benchmarks and build a globally sorted order of processors out of it. https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/ga…

Can you add the ability to sort based on price/perf? Also, the existing bar graph is unclear to me. What does 10/10 mean?

10 is just the fastest. Because it is a meta-benchmark, this rating is not necessarily relative performance, it is based on the position in the ordering. The achieved average FPS is just a factor in that, used to make the distance bigger to indicate performance jumps.

Example, fictional values: The 8700K is the fastest, because it was most often seen as the benchmark leader. It gets a 10. The 8600K has almost the same FPS, but it was always a bit slower, it gets a 9.9. The i5-8500 comes next, but its average FPS scaled to the 0-10 scale is lower, it gets a 8.7. Then the i5-8400, always seen as slower than the 8500 in benchmarks, would at most be able to get a 8.6, no matter what the average FPS says (with enough benchmarks average FPS become an almost meaningless metric, it's the position in the benchmark that counts).

That's why it is not possible to calculate price/performance with this. I could only highlight good deals, processors that have a high position despite being cheaper than the processors below. Which is of course already baked into the logic of the recommender.

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

#490

Post by kashyapc »

kashyapc wrote: post #232
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…

Yeah, my guess would be it's #1 too; I can't believe that Intel can be so naive that no one on the internet will benchmark the performance—given how all these nasty CVEs are raising such a stink. Serious customers will demand performance numbers; you can't simply answer them with "blocked due to legal".

So, Intel indeed redacted the "no benchmarks" thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17833777
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