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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

#291

Post by eropple »

mtanski wrote: post #272
eropple wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...when running SELECT 1 over a loopback socket. The reply to that comment is accurate: that's a pathological case. Probably an order of magnitude off.

We're still learning, but it looks like pgbench is 7% to 15% off: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20180102222354.qikjmf7...

I've seen that message. It acknowledges the same problems: do-nothing problems over a local unix socket.

Real-world use cases introduce much more latency from other sources in the first place.

I'm sticking with an expectation in the 2%-5% range.

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

#292

Post by qubex »

I’m not (yet) clear on if/how this impacts aarch64 (ARM architecture) chips, the distinction between how it affects Intel vs. doesn’t affect AMD reminds us of a fundamental lesson we seem to have conveniently forgotten: monocultures of anything are bad. We need diversity and diversification in order to have reasonable amount of robustness in the face of unknowable, unpredictable risks.

I’m wondering whether ARM chips are affected if they are whether they are uniformly affected or whether it depends on vendor implementation choices.

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

#293

Post by pixl97 »

nitrogen wrote: post #166
userbinator wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When speculative execution (and caches) were invented and put into widespread use, no one thought about timing attacks, nor was the practice of running untrusted code on one's own machine common.

nor was the practice of running untrusted code on one's own machine common Doesn't multi-user timesharing and virtualization predate every modern CPU and OS though?

Old multi-user time sharing generally had agents that were 'somewhat' trusted. Most systems that had 'secret' data didn't allow time sharing with data of less privileged. Also, outside of the timeshared server users attempting to exploit this wouldn't likely have the processing capability to deduce the contents of said cache.

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

#294

Post by rocqua »

glebm wrote: post #46
rocqua wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless demand is fully inelastic, if you up the price fewer people will buy. As such, this should hit the cloud provider profits.

*fully elastic

No, if demand is slightly elastic, an increase in price will still cause a decrease in demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand

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

#295

Post by pixl97 »

throwaway613834 wrote: post #253

Will there be any way to disable or block the upcoming patches and keep the performance for those of us who really just don't have any reason to care about inter-process information leakage on our personal computers? Edit: I'm (also) wondering about Windows, in case anyone knows yet.

Just don't do this if you have PII, HIPAA, or PCI data on your computer.

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

#296

Post by rocqua »

maratd wrote: post #31
rocqua wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless demand is fully inelastic, if you up the price fewer people will buy. As such, this should hit the cloud provider profits.

> Unless demand is fully inelastic It's mostly inelastic. People don't buy resources unless they need to do work. Alternatives, such as on-prem hardware, are affected as well. The only work that would be affected would be the work that becomes unprofitable at a 10-30% hardware cost increase and this is probably marginal enough to be ignored.

I'd say most of the elasticity comes from people deciding not to migrate to the cloud at all. Rather than people deciding to stop using the cloud.

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

#297

Post by asplake »

rbanffy wrote: post #270
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…

It's a good thing CPU is fairly compressible. Unless you meter it very carefully, you'll see the performance hit and it'll not impact you that much. Very few of my physical boxes are over 70% CPU utilization on a daily average. It's, however, really bad if you sell CPU cycles for a living. You just lost between 5 and 30% of your capacity. If you have a large building, you just lost part of your parking lot to the Int…

No vendor can afford to do it at a loss for long. One way or another the customer will end up paying

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

#298

Post by elFarto »

josefx wrote: post #276
bunderbunder wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, don't worry - pretty much all the key performance bottlenecks most of us deal with at work will be getting tighter, but at least our video games will still run OK.

Right now I am just hoping that it wont add significant overhead to OpenGL. My application already has a bottleneck on changing OpenGL states and issuing render commands and I have no idea how much of that time is spend making syscalls.

OpenGL implementations shouldn't be effected by syscall overhead. Historically it's been DirectX that had a syscall per draw call, but I believe both now just write the command to GPU RAM directly.

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

#299

Post by invalidusernam3 »

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

Laughs in Bitcoin
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