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Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

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Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#101

Post by mtgx »

Abishek_Muthian wrote: post #79

I'm worried about the performance impact on low end intel chips like Atom/Celeron found in Chromebooks.30% hit will make computing on those platforms miserable. Talking about chromeOS, is there any speculation about the impact of bug? Does it's hardened sand-boxing techniques put it in a better position even if KASLR is compromised?

Honestly, that serves Google right. I've been saying it for years how stupid Google is for encouraging 99% of Chromebooks to be powered by Intel chips (even more than Windows machines), when the Chrome OS itself is architecture-agnostic (for the most part).

It was just stupid through and through. Even today we see ARM coming to full versions of Windows, but Google is still kicking it with Intel CPUs.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#102

Post by dnautics »

emn13 wrote: post #80
dnautics wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's pretty clear in this case. Plenty of people here in hn-land were talking about Intel/AMD short/long positions starting in the afternoon yesterday and word has gotten around.

Talk is cheap; investing perhaps less so. The asserted "soaring" stock price simply hasn't happened. The 7% rise they name as "soaring" is not a soar for a stock this volatile: https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/AMD:US - just look at the graph over the past year; value changes in excess of 50% happened several times. To be clear; I'm not saying this increase won't stick, just that bloomberg is pretending they're reading…

ok. I was more thinking about the "INTC decline" than the "AMD rise". you make a good point with previous volatility.

I didn't have options activated till this morning, because i hadn't gotten around to it. Had I been able to activate them yesterday afternoon, I'd be in on INTC and AMD, both sides. Anyways, I have options in play on the intel side but not the amd side, so while "Talk is cheap" - I'm in.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#103

Post by douglasfshearer »

sooheon wrote: post #48
mindcrime wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems debatable. From what I recall, at least some news about this issue was already public before he sold his shares. And what would be illegal would be trading based on information that isn't public. OTOH, since details are still dribbling out, you could possibly argue that the Intel CEO had more complete information than the public. The sell could also have been scheduled in advance, which would - AFAIK - not viol…

Unless the advance scheduling is completely binding, I don't see why that should sidestep insider trading. What's to stop these guys from always having a cascading series of sells and buys 6 mo. in advance, and just cancelling them?

SEC rules also cover cancellation of orders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEC_Rule_10b5-1#A_possible_loo...

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#104

Post by haltingthoughts »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #90

> AMD shares surged as much as 7.2 percent to $11.77 Wednesday. Intel fell as much as 3.8 percent, the most since April, to $45.05. An Intel spokesman declined to comment. I have no real context for this, but is 7.2% considered a "soar"? And a 3.8% decrease seems like kind of not a lot, considering what's fucking happening here.

The stock price is the present value of the future profits. Since this shouldn't have a huge effect beyond 4 years, that's saying profits for Intel in the short term would be down by 20 percent.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#105

Post by ashelmire »

sooheon wrote: post #48
mindcrime wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems debatable. From what I recall, at least some news about this issue was already public before he sold his shares. And what would be illegal would be trading based on information that isn't public. OTOH, since details are still dribbling out, you could possibly argue that the Intel CEO had more complete information than the public. The sell could also have been scheduled in advance, which would - AFAIK - not viol…

Unless the advance scheduling is completely binding, I don't see why that should sidestep insider trading. What's to stop these guys from always having a cascading series of sells and buys 6 mo. in advance, and just cancelling them?

What, they are never allowed to sell shares then? There are constantly bugs being found in major software and hardware.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#106

Post by FollowSteph3 »

nomercy400 wrote: post #91
littlestymaar wrote: post #13

Interestingly enough, Intel and AMD market values are affected by this but the cloud provider aren't, which I find surprising.

Do you pay for computing cycles or for a computing instance? If your cloud provider lowers its performance/efficiency by 30%, isn't it up to its customers to switch? But where to switch too? There's no choice among the big cloud providers. They all use Intel and AMD in varying amounts. As a cloud user you are stuck with Intel or AMD chips. Demand doesn't change, supply is lowered. Looking at it like this, it is more…

My guess is that it will help cloud providers. In most cases they don’t guarantee x operations per second but rather the type of cpu you get. If that type now gets 30% less performance you’re most likely going to have to pay 30% more. Again the guarantee is not on operations per second but either exact processor, class of processor, or processor units.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#107

Post by Ajedi32 »

eropple wrote: post #75
sooheon wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the advance scheduling is completely binding, I don't see why that should sidestep insider trading. What's to stop these guys from always having a cascading series of sells and buys 6 mo. in advance, and just cancelling them?

What is to "stop these guys" is the legal parties and officials involved have brains that they can use. The engineer idea of "mwa ha ha, I found a bug , I can walk" is rarely true in practice (n.b.: having quite a lot of money is a different kind of exception).

Basically this: https://xkcd.com/1494/

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#108

Post by api »

vardump wrote: post #89
ashelmire wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, this slowdown only affects syscalls, which, since they aren't usually a huge percentage of processing in the first place, should not have such an effect. You're more likely looking at a few percent at most, which is not going to be enough to make AMD outperform Intel. Let's stop the fear mongering and wait for actual metrics.

> From what I've read, this slowdown only affects syscalls Incorrect. It also affects interrupts and (page) faults. Any usermode to kernel and back transition.

So this is evil for virtualization hosting, which is the major enterprise application for Intel chips.

Hosting on bare metal will become more attractive. Too bad you can't long OVH and Hetzner.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#109

Post by rayiner »

DannyB2 wrote: post #72
rayiner wrote: post #52

Can someone help me understand why this is such a big deal? This doesn’t seem to be a flaw in the sense of the Pentium FDIV bug where the processor returned incorrect data. It doesn’t even seem to be a bug at all, but a side channel attack that would be almost expected in a processor with speculative execution unless special measures were taken to prevent it. And it doesn’t seem like it can be used for privilege esca…

There is this thing called "return oriented programming". You write your program as a series of addresses that are smashed onto the stack through some other type of vulnerability. When the current function returns, it returns to an address of your choosing. That address points to the tail end of some known existing function, such as in the C library and other libraries. When the tail end of that function returns, it…

Thanks for the explanation. But I don't understand this part:

> If you could know all of the addresses of important kernel routines, you could potentially execute a "return oriented programming" attack against the kernel with kernel privileges. Without modifying or injecting any kernel level code.

The user kernel transition is mediated (on x86-64) with the SYSCALL instruction, which jumps to a location specified by a non-user writable MSR. How does return-oriented programming work in that case?

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#110

Post by BoorishBears »

Choco31415 wrote: post #38
cjbprime wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it do, then? That is approximately what the mitigation patch does, according to early averages of perf changes.

Performance is chopped 5-30%, with newer CPU's with PCID being affected less significantly. [0] BoorishBears is possibly pointing out that 30% is a worst case. [0]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-41...

This combined with what the other comment mentions, it's a range from 5%-30% with 30% being a worst case the average user does not encounter.

This is an issue, but laypeople are overblowing the effect on their everyday computing.

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