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Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

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101–110 of 110 posts

Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

#101
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I can. https://www.amazon.fr/Economics-Software-Quality-Capers-Jone... Not all good content is offered for free on the Internet.

Your terse and borderline patronizing answers aren’t helping to advance the conversation, though you do link to an important book. Capers Jones’ work does not “disprove” the triangle, and doesn’t even mention it. If anything, he implies that quality is a more complicated subject than the simple triangle implies, in that lower quality will have non-linear negative impacts on the project cost, time, and scope. This is…

But there is no one single such triangle.

Many people have in mind this version of the "quality triangle" which we were discussing (not a Project Management triangle which I agree is more on point).

You get that a lot if search for "quality triangle": https://www.google.fr/search?tbm=isch&q=quality+triangle

Why is it commonly assumed that quality and cost and time are opposed to each other?

The Capers Jones books have one idea throughout, that is backed by data: for Software, quality is positively correlated with reduced time-to-market, low defects, and reduced costs.

> The practices that help to ensure quality that are outside the triangle’s intent as a guideline

There is a chapter about that in EoSQ, where each and every practice are measured and classified by efficiency, like TDD and code reviews. It's very interesting.

> The result is that he tends towards promoting older practices that help quality but don’t have much impact on whether you’re building the right thing in the first place.

Yes. I find he puts way too much faith in "off the shelf" software as the last bullet we may have.

tl;dr Capers Jones disprove the "quality triangle" big time, which is a product of intuitive reasoning without any basis, which doesn't apply to software. Just look at Intel at this very moment.

Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

#102
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not quite true regarding the focus - you aren't building a $50B+ company when you don't have focus, it's just that their core compentency isn't fashionable right now. they can't grow in the markets they're in because they either own them completely or were driven out, so they're trying different ones (pivoting, if that's applicable to mature companies).

They had a presence on the currently faster growing market (mobile), but they decided to sell it a while ago because it wasn't trendy and margins were smaller. Now they are pivoting everywhere, but theirs is the only market with sufficient margins. And the perspective is that their margins will shrink because of competition and software emulation (that they are keeping into control by patent trolling).

Intel also liquidated all ram fabs in the eighties, very costly process. Almost less than a year after last fab closed ram prices skyrocketed letting Japanese manufacturers grow strong.

Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

#103
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamers like to use PS/2 peripherals because they're interrupt based and thus more responsive than USB peripherals. Does this mean they could take a hit due to this bug?

Interrupts from ps/2 are pretty insignificant in comparison to all other interrupt traffic on any PC. Edit: also "interrupt-based" in this case has nothing to do with interrupts seen by the CPU. Difference is that in ps/2 the device can send data to the controller (which then generates interrupt) at any time, while for usb the controller periodically polls devices for data (and possibly generates interrupt if there a…

Thanks, that's really useful information. I wasn't aware that USB 2.0 switched to hardware based polling.

Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

#104
post #13

As a former Intel employee this aligns closely with my experience. I didn't work in validation (actually joined as part of Altera) but velocity is an absolute buzzword and the senior management's approach to complex challenges is sheer panic. Slips in schedules are not tolerated at all - so problems in validation are an existential threat, your project can easily just be canned. Also, because of the size of the compa…

[deleted]

Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

#106
post #82
post #39

Can we put [2016] in the title? Thanks!

At least part of the article (the 'More updates' section) had to have been written in 2017 because it references Ryzen chips which were released in March 2017. It's not entirely clear when the original article was posted but it seems like it could have been either late 2015 or early 2016.

Last update is _today_. It links to a comment on this thread.

Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

#107
post #104
post #13

As a former Intel employee this aligns closely with my experience. I didn't work in validation (actually joined as part of Altera) but velocity is an absolute buzzword and the senior management's approach to complex challenges is sheer panic. Slips in schedules are not tolerated at all - so problems in validation are an existential threat, your project can easily just be canned. Also, because of the size of the compa…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

#108
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>if one wants to run untrusted code, it cannot be native one so any bug can be fixed without replacing hardware It's a bit hard to parse that sentence, could you rephrase? Are you saying that untrusted code should only be run on systems which do not use hardware virtualization, because there's a risk of hardware bugs that require hardware replacement? The problem is that there is no single-system equivalent, users wo…

My point is that to run untrusted code it should be delivered in some form of bytecode, not the native code for CPU. This way one can always workaround CPU issues by changing the compiler or the interpreter even for catastrophic bugs in any part of CPU. Moreover, as hardware VM can execute much more instructions than unprivileged user processes, the probability that something unfixable will happen to them is higher t…

I suggest reading this discussion about reinventing the AS/400: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16053518

Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

#109
post #83

All the CPUs in my house are 4th and 5th generation Intel CPUs except for one PC laptop that has a Skylake processor. I guess I'm glad now that Apple put a 2 year old CPU in the early 2015 Macbook Pro! Besides my 2012 Mac Pro, that is the most expensive machine in the house!

The latest big bug evidently affects all intel x64 processors back to 2007 or so.

I thought it was 1995?

Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. I guess I'll stick to my 8700k then.

Just curious, what do you do that requires a fast single core? I always find it strange when people value that, as most computers nowadays generally run more than 1 process at a time.

Ruby on Rails.
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