Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 567 posts

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

#241

Post by macintux »

cornholio wrote: post #178
golfer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone can sue anyone else at any time. If you think Intel isn't going to be sued for this, you're wrong.

It depends on how they handle user compensation. Going by the FDIV precedent, they should typically replace all defective products for free, and they will be in the clear. What I meant was that the presence of the bug itself is not a valid cause, for example you can't claim that due to the error you lost 1 trillion dollars via a software hack - even if it's true. If Intel can prove they acted ethically when disclosin…

I read that this bug goes back several years; "replacing all defective products for free" could be a massive expense, and assuming it includes current chips, there's also some lag time and engineering effort to get to the point where they could start doing so.

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

#242

Post by amaranth »

johnjones4 wrote: post #203

So is this sort of issue more likely to occur on a non-RISC chip because of added complexity? I know extremely little about microprocessor design beyond the 101 knowledge from college so forgive my ignorance.

I think this could occur on any CPU that doesn't have a separate TLB for kernel mode and has speculative execution. So far it looks like it only occurs on Intel's CPUs but I don't think that has anything to do with RISC vs CISC. I believe Linux was at least looking at applying this change to arm64 as well and this is likely going to lead to a design change in RISC-V to avoid having issues like this so it can happen to RISC designs as well.

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

#244

Post by panarky »

mtanski wrote: post #145
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superficially, it seems like the performance hit mostly scales with IOPS or transactions per second, which might have some pretty serious implications for performance/dollar in the kinds of intensive back-end applications where Intel currently dominates and AMD is trying to make inroads with EPYC.

As I mentioned in the other thread yesterday database and database like applications are going to be hit particular hard. Even more so on fast flash storage. Double whammy compared to apps just doing network IO. And while databases try to minimize the number of syscalls they still end up doing a lot of them for read, writeout, flush.

How would you trade this knowledge?

Intel has already dropped and AMD is up. Maybe there's more to move, but first-order effects are at least partially priced in already.

But what about second-order effects? Seems like virtualization should be vulnerable (VMWare and Citrix), but maybe they actually benefit as customers add more capacity.

Software-defined networking and cloud databases should also suffer though it's unclear how to trade these.

AWS, Google Cloud and Azure might benefit as customers add capacity but there's no way to trade the business units. So what about cloud customers where compute costs are already a large percentage of total revenue?

Netflix should be OK but Snap and Twilio could get squeezed hard. Akamai and Cloudflare might have higher costs they can't pass through to customers.

And where's the upside? Who benefits? If the performance hit causes companies to add capacity, maybe semiconductor and DRAM suppliers like Micron would benefit.

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

#245

Post by newtanjoy »

dsign wrote: post #19

This is a clusterf /big deal. Beyond the security implications, it means that all companies paying for computing resources will have to pay roughly 30% more overnight on cloud expenses for the same amount of CPU, assuming that they can just scale up their infrastructure. I know that bugs happen and that there was nothing intentional on this one, but at times like this is hard to held at bay the temptation of claiming…

I request all my friends. Search my web site at NFL. I will be of great benefit to you for a search. Kindly you search once. You will not have any problem. There are site security. https://livesporthdtv.com

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

#246

Post by microcolonel »

This is not a PR nightmare, it's a technical competitive nightmare. For many workloads, last-gen AMD server chips are now competitive with current-gen Intel server chips; and the current generation already had a lot in its favour. There's no amount of PR fluff that can save Intel from this, they can only release a new design with this fixed and hope they don't lose too much ground in the mean time.

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

#247

Post by betterunix2 »

swarnie_ wrote: post #7
Havoc wrote: post #2

As a shareholder that's great. Concerned that this is a very fragile win though. I don't think there will be much real world fall out.

How you hold this stock is a mystery to me. With it bouncing between $10 and $15 constantly last year it just seems far to volatile. I'd be panic buying / selling every day to adjust which seems stressful... Maybe why its a favorite of /r/wallstreetbets

"I'd be panic buying / selling every day to adjust which seems stressful..."

Wrong way to invest. Don't buy an individual company's stock unless you are ready to (1) hold for the long-term and (2) ignore (short-term) unrealized losses. Especially in the first year after investing in an individual stock it is typical to see an unrealized loss, because gains require time to accumulate.

The stock market is not a slot machine. Investing requires patience and discipline.

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

#248

Post by vidoc »

cortesoft wrote: post #236
prudhvis wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As i understand the problem, this isn't about clockspeed reduction, now it is the software's responsibility to check if the page is a kernel page/user page. So, the impact is significant. So, every time either pages are touched/accessed this check needs to be triggered, which causes it to be much slower.

Right, but how often that happens is workload dependent. Basically, how often is your code making syscalls.

> how often is your code making syscalls.

And how often the kernel services interrupts.

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

#249

Post by kakarot »

hinkley wrote: post #237
chx wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be sure there's a young hotshot with sparkling eyes at SEC who is already typing a letter to Mr. Krzanich politely asking about the circumstances of that sell. At the same time, noone is doing eight figures transactions which require reporting to the SEC without talking to a lawyer. Right? Right? They really dislike insider trading, it's one of the few things where even rich people can get imprisoned -- and t…

It's a good thing.

What is a good thing...?

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

#250

Post by cheeze »

ComodoHacker wrote: post #233
dsign wrote: post #19

This is a clusterf /big deal. Beyond the security implications, it means that all companies paying for computing resources will have to pay roughly 30% more overnight on cloud expenses for the same amount of CPU, assuming that they can just scale up their infrastructure. I know that bugs happen and that there was nothing intentional on this one, but at times like this is hard to held at bay the temptation of claiming…

Forgive me my ignorance, but I fail to see how this is such a big deal. Even 50% performance hit/cost increase would be... bearable, computations are rather cheap today. ML and other intensive calculations aren't done on CPU anyway. It's not like technical progress of our civilization is slowed down by 30% or something... On the other hand, shrinking Intel's market share due to bad PR and thus adding some competition…

I think you're vastly underestimating the potential impact to cloud providers. Azure/AWS/GCP all definitely have extra capacity, but they have forecasting down to a science. Requiring even 10% more capacity is quite a large undertaking alone.
Post reply on HN