Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by gargravarr » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:08 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #296

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to my story. Apart from an Athlon 650 around 2000-era we've always been an Intel household. I recently upgraded my gaming PC and went with the Ryzen 7 2700X, partly due to the way Intel have been treating their customers like idiots lately. I'm seriously considering AMD for the graphics card too (currently running a GTX 970) as I may well be moving my main gaming PC over to Linux in the near future.

> I'm seriously considering AMD for the graphics card too (currently running a GTX 970) Me too. I was running Intel+Nvidia rigs for about ten years, up until last year, when I got a Ryzen 1800X and (this year) a Radeon 7970. Nvidia hasn't been the most ethically behaved as of late (whether it's more or less than Intel, I haven't figured out). Intel will be releasing a discrete GPU in a year or two; who knows how fast…

Same, I had bad experiences with the early Athlons and bought Intels after that, never had any stability problems. But now I'm seeing douchey behaviour from both Intel and nVidia. I've been a big fanboy because of the performance, but the business practises are becoming polarising, and AMD seems to have caught up or surpassed in performance terms. Plus, they handled the vulnerabilities disclosure much better (even a smug 'AMD processors are not affected' on more than one).

I always used to root for Intel because AMD made their entire business model off copying (later licensing) Intel's x86 designs (including the model numbers), but that's becoming a lot less relevant now.

I upgraded my desktop's Geforce 550Ti with a Radeon HD 7850, and though it's gotten off to a slightly rocky start (Windows logins are noticeably slower, seems to be a known issue), performance is great, benchmarks showing it on par with the 970m in my laptop. When the Haswell i7 needs to be upgraded, I may start looking at a Ryzen. Never thought I'd see the day.

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

#342

Post by coherentpony » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:09 PM UTC

simion314 wrote: post #337

coherentpony wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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 addr…

>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) Thank you for the detailed explanation, can't we conclude that AMD engineering is more defensive then Intel, this is what I concluded.

Based on this datapoint? I don't think so. They're vulnerable to other side-channel attacks.

Both AMD and Intel hire really smart people, but this stuff is really, really hard.

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

#343

Post by wolfgke » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

alehul wrote: post #307

wolfgke wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

> 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

I don't see myself as a defender of WikiLeaks. It is, for example, hard not to admit that the Democratic National Committee email leak and the exchange between Donald Trump Jr. and WikiLeaks (at least to me) has some kind of "smell" [2].

My argument rather is:

a) the position of WikiLeaks (if there exists one) is far more confusing and sometimes self-contradictory than it looks on the surface (in this sense, I am both somewhat sceptical of the "WikiLeaks defenders" and the "WikiLekas prosecutors").

b) do not trust any side as "authoritative". Consider multiple different sources - in particular the ones that do not agree with your personal opinion - and conceive an opinion on the whole story.

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/the-sec...

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

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Post by mywittyname » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:15 PM UTC

gameswithgo wrote: post #286

yohann305 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is certainly a myth. Everyone knows, including big companies, that as you grow in size you have a harder time innovating. The classic "lean startup" book mentions this issue and gives the example of Intuit's in-house accelerator/incubator. No way Intel doesn't know about it too. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2018/04/19/in...

wasn't bell labs part of a very big corporation when they invented basically everything about the modern world?

AT&T's early dominance was the direct result of the invention of the transistor that came from their own labs. From then on, the company was committed to spending massive amounts of money into developing new technology. Even if AT&T didn't directly invent a new technology, they were still one of the few companies in the world that could actually afford to buy new toys and put them into the hands of researchers who would find novel uses for it.

The Computerphile YouTube channel as some interviews with computer scientists that worked at Bell Labs during their heyday. It's incredibly interesting to hear about how they screwed around with early Linotype printers (which $100k+ in the 70s) and did things like reverse-engineer the font formats to create custom chess fonts.

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

#345

Post by utopcell » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:15 PM UTC

Gag benchmarkers ? That is the Oracle way.

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

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Post by dwild » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:17 PM UTC

Nition wrote: post #9

They better be wary of the Streisand Effect here. Banning benchmarking just makes it seem like the performance hit is going to be serious, which makes everyone even more curious.

Could be a "reverse" Streisand Effect.

Any slowdown would have been pretty public, the microcode update is still a big deal and the expectation weren't clear, I'm pretty sure the results were worst than the average expectation. Now though, the expectation are much higher, people expect it to be pretty high and maybe the results are now actually lower than theses expectations.

So yeah maybe more publicity but maybe now people will say "not as bad as I thought", instead of saying "much worse than I thought".

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

#347

Post by KozmoNau7 » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:17 PM UTC

snaky wrote: post #280

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel are still ahead in low power mobile (laptop) CPU race, and the clear leader in the laptop market. Who knows for how long, though?

New Snapdragon 845-based Chromebook is on the way. > It comes as Microsoft continues its work with Qualcomm to optimize Windows for devices powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon chips, including the forthcoming Snapdragon 850, which Samsung used for its first Arm-based Windows 10 laptop. So it appears there is some momentum behind the concept. https://www.zdnet.com/article/arm-on-windows-10-chromebooks-...

I think ARM could be a viable contender in the low-power laptop segment, kinda maybe possibly.

However, I used to own a Tegra K1-based Chromebook, and that thing was sl-o-o-o-o-o-o-w, and it only got worse with successive updates. I'm not really optimistic when it comes to performance, absent highly-optimized apps. The state of Firefox and Chrome doesn't really fill me with confidence.

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

#348

Post by ibeckermayer » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:17 PM UTC

nutjob2 wrote: post #295

gameswithgo wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wasn't bell labs part of a very big corporation when they invented basically everything about the modern world?

Bell Labs invented Google, Facebook, etc? Wow, did not know that. But as you say, the labs were a very small, independent part of a very big corporation, which is likely why they did interesting things. The other thing is that they were forced by the government to license transistor patents to others, who actually created almost everything else. By your theory the military invented the internet, so they invented the…

Google and Facebook are ad companies. Their “innovation” isn’t even in the same ballpark as what came out of Bell Labs

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

#349

Post by ReverseCold » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:18 PM UTC

theprotocol wrote: post #140

chrisper wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just mark every 2nd Tuesday of a month as patch day and you won't have surprises!

• Updates are not served to me at regular, known intervals. Perhaps it's due to a progressive rollout policy of some kind. • Certain days come up that I, the paying user, do not want to patch on. Microsoft wins this disagreement and I lose. This occurs in a glib fashion with a message like "Hey, just a heads up, we are going to restart your computer" (whether I like it or not). It is my computer, there is no "we!" It…

Microsoft's stance on the issue:

Win10 is free* (so it does this) - Professionals who need to override these settings should get Win10 Pro.

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

#350

Post by wolfgke » Thu, Aug 23, 2018, 2:19 PM UTC

rsync wrote: post #315

wolfgke wrote: post #147

My thougt based on the HN headline "Intel Publishes Microcode Patches, No Benchmarking or Comparison Allowed" (after having read the article, of course): Doesn't this show that it is time for someone to set up some kind of "ScienceLeaks" website, where scientists can upload research (results, papers, ...) anonymously which they are are not allowed to do legally because of various such "research-restricting" laws. ---…

"Doesn't this show that it is time for someone to set up some kind of ..." I don't think this is necessary ... I think "circumventing" this benchmarking restriction is as simple as having one person purchase an Intel CPU and just drop it on the ground somewhere ... and have another person pick it up off of the street (no purchase, no EULA, no agreement entered into) and decide to benchmark the found item against othe…

I think that one has to apply the microcode patches after startup. For this, you have to obtain the microcode patch file from somewhere. So I am not sure whether this "legal hack" will work.