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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

#301

Post by snaky »

maxerickson wrote: post #284
angry_octet wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they were all 2D. And the idea that GPUs would be used for mobile computing was not obvious.

Maybe 25 years ago. 10 years ago they were commonplace. Intel shipped integrated 3d graphics by no later than 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_810

Okay, I should have clarify the 'niche' thing 10 years ago was not GPU per se, but of course GPGPU, the GPU as a specialized coprocessor for general purpose computation, not restricted to graphics processing and output.

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

#302

Post by wemdyjreichert »

johnklos wrote: post #2

I'm really curious how Intel could even imagine this is enforceable. For instance, if I have a server with shell access for many users, am I supposed to forbid my users from publishing benchmarks? If they do, am I liable since I "agreed" to the license? Or are they, even though they never "agreed" to the license? It just doesn't make sense.

I would guess this is designed to Target tech news orgs who report benchmarks. Can't prevent every forum post; media is a bigger than. However, someone's going to go to a benchmarks database and look at new results compared with old ones and figure it out.

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

#303

Post by phkahler »

Lunatic666 wrote: post #111
eksemplar wrote: post #11

Aside from my vic20 and c64 I’ve only ever owned intel CPUs, and those two may have been intel as well, I wouldn’t know. I’ve never made a decision to chose Intel based on benchmark, I’ve bought them because they’ve always been great for me. So it’ll be ironic when I buy an AMD processor when I upgrade for cyberpunk 2077, because of benchmarks. Not because AMD is faster, they may be but I wouldn’t know, no, it’ll be…

How can INTEL tell people what to do with their CPU, I own it so I think I can do with it what I want or not? Only because the microcode update is considered software? I wouldn't be scared to benchmark it and publish the results in the EU. I wonder if this is binding in the US.

It's kind of funny because people don't even know what the microcode does. They're demanding that we don't benchmark any software running on their processors. Well, they insisted performance was important for decades but now they don't want people to measure it. What that means should be obvious. They suck.

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

#305

Post by coherentpony »

simion314 wrote: post #221
tomp wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question: is AMD any better? Do they somehow manage to avoid Spectre / Meltdown without a slowdown?

AMD is better, they are still affected by side channel attacks but they did not skipped on security checks and are not affected by speculative execution AFAIK https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/security-updates

> ...and are not affected by speculative execution

AMD's chips definitely speculatively execute instructions. It's a common performance trick.

AMD's chips also definitely throw an exception at retirement (of course) for instructions that attempt to load a privileged address, just like Intel's chips do.

The difference is that when AMD's chips see a load instruction, the load isn't executed until it knows that the address isn't privileged. Intel's chips do execute the load (but then throw away the result when it realises the address was privileged).

The speculative part is for instructions that depend on the result of the load.

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

#306

Post by Keyframe »

headmelted wrote: post #50

Before Zen, we all kind of assumed they were so far ahead that AMD were more likely to be out of business before they would ever be a credible threat again. I actually thought Intel must have had some tricks up their sleeves in terms of performance gains that we hadn't seen yet, simply because there was no market need to roll them out and they had so many years of coasting on marginal gains. Seeing them taking this s…

They did hire Keller, no? I wonder if AMD has an answer to AMD in the coming years. Not only CPU, GPU as well. Especially GPU. They missed the boat on AI, and now Nvidia is pushing RTRT left and right. That's seemingly two areas they still don't have an answer to. It's a big battlefront, and intel is only a step or two away from possibly bringing an answer to AMD. Not to mention whole laptop domination by intel, and mobile by ARM.

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

#307

Post by alehul »

wolfgke wrote: post #269
bearjaws wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikileaks is a Russian propaganda machine. They are only interested in Anti-America leaks, not all leaks.

> Wikileaks is a Russian propaganda machine. > They are only interested in Anti-America leaks, not all leaks. Everybody should make their own judgement on the political bias of Wikileaks (which is, in my personal opinion, a very good reason why monopolies are typically bad; in other words: there is a demand on multiple independent Wikileaks-like websites), but the statement that Wikileaks is only interested in Anti-A…

Edit: Seems the parent comment has now reached net positive votes

It's a really sad thing you're being downvoted, as I made a similar comment about a year ago [1] in defense of WikiLeaks to over 30 upvotes. HN seems to be getting more and more active with their downvotes towards information that doesn't fit their current perspective.

[1] = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13816762

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

#308

Post by LeftTurnSignal »

theprotocol wrote: post #230
chrisper wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially now with Valve's Proton.

I've been watching this very closely. I think this project will finally tip the scales and make it viable for me (I've had problems with many games when I attempted to switch in the past).

You probably saw this, but this is a google doc of what games people have tried in proton.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1DcZZQ4HL_Ol969UbXJmF...

i'm pumped to try monster hunter. that game was the only reason I was going to use windows, so hope it runs well

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

#309

Post by gnulinux »

eps wrote: post #138
bluecalm wrote: post #100

Here is one thing we can do about it: make public service announcement to our users that we no longer recommend Intel CPUs because of security holes, censorship and crippled performance. I am going to do that today. While we only have several thousand users they do CPU intensive work, buy a lot of new CPUs and rent a lot of servers. My small contribution will likely amount to low-mid 6 figures out of Intel pocket in…

This amounts to little more than making a statement at the expense of your users. It would've carried that much more weight if it were _your_ low-mid 6 figures that were redirected away from Intel.

Well, AMD currently has better CPUs for high-performance computing, so OP's users would benefit from this public service announcement, if anything.

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

#310

Post by sverige »

> I'm not blaming Intel for this, I don't know if Intel could have foreseen the problem.

The potential security issues with out of order processing were noted publicly at least as far back as 2007. The problem is that, on the whole, the entire industry doesn't really give a shit about security until it's too late, which is exactly the wrong time to start.

I don't foresee this changing anytime soon. It will be interesting to see the downside of AI. Or maybe terrifying is a better word for it, since it could foreseeably include personal physical security. But before that time comes, people who think like me are still just pointy-headed paranoid security losers, I reckon.

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