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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

#421

Post by baq »

coldtea wrote: post #404
nutjob2 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Bell Labs invented Google, Facebook, etc? Wow, did not know that. Compared to what they invented, Google and Facebook are insignificant in comparison. We could go back to Altavista and no-Facebook and we'd be more or less fine. Giving back the Bell Labs technlogy would be a much harder hit...

No-Facebook would arguably be a better world the older I get...

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

#422

Post by Aloha »

wlesieutre wrote: post #324
nutjob2 wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They didn't invent Google and Facebook, but they're responsible for transistors, lasers, Unix, C and C++, CCD digital image sensors, long distance microwave radio relays, the first transatlantic phone cable, MOSFETs, communication satellites, and cell networks. Not modern internet services no, but all of the infrastructure it's built on is grounded on theirs.

All of which they were required to license on FRAND terms - Consider that the basic research done by bell labs was paid for by a royalty paid to it by western electric and the various bell operating companies - it was blanket royalty, not a per product one too.

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

#425

Post by tunap »

cma wrote: post #388
mywittyname wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

I think it is also that with a huge monopoly in an area, you can capture most of the benefits from basic research. With lots of competitors basic research gains go to all the competitors too and at some level you don't capture enough of the benefit to justify it.

Add to that, in return for their monopoly status, they released much of their IP to the public domaian. Imagine if they had held/sold their IP how electronic innovation would have been stifled.

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

#426

Post by Aloha »

xoa wrote: post #225

I'm mildly surprised to do a quick search on this HN thread and not see the word "adhesion" appear. These microcode patches are for a significant design defect in a product that Intel already sold under both explicit and implicit promises and expectations of general functionality. The microcode patches aren't some luxury fully optional deal to make pretty patterns with case LEDs or something, they're a matter of crit…

I'm not at yet convinced this was not simply user error in the legal department, or in the department that deployed the microcode to the website. The longer Intel is silent on the issue, the more likely this was their intent.

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

#427

Post by ptero »

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…

> shareholders should be asking serious questions about why they've nothing significant to show for all that time and money spent when they were raking it in without a serious competitor.

This might be the answer. No competition and a good cash flow is a comfortable position. You defend this model with ads, policy, etc. and technical innovation can languish. I am not saying this is necessarily the case, but it is possible that Intel just got comfortable, slow and fat. Having a scrappy, smart competitor can be a good thing.

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

#428

Post by Dylan16807 »

likeclockwork wrote: post #394
repolfx wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They aren't. Spectre works fine on AMD. They avoided Meltdown only because their cores are less optimised. Meltdown isn't Intel specific - Apple cores were also affected. It's clear that AMD weren't doing anything special w.r.t. side channel attacks. They were just further behind in the optimisation race and as a consequence, were less hit.

Can you really call "fast but wrong/insecure" optimized?

It doesn't calculate anything wrong, so sure.

For this particular optimization, it looks better not to have it.

But in general, knowing how something is flawed lets you mitigate the flaws. We use floating point despite it being mathematically wrong, because it's fast and we can mitigate the wrongness. I could imagine a chip where speculation could be toggled between different modes, if there was enough demand.

I will say that "just further behind" is probably wrong. AMD has a lot of optimizations in their chips. They have safer ones, which might be luck or might be engineering talent, but it's not a mere artifact of being behind the curve.

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

#429

Post by alehul »

wolfgke wrote: post #343
alehul wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Completely agree with that.

I just threw you into that category for the purpose of my comment as I believed it was a perceived defense of Wikileaks that you were being downvoted for, rather than something else regarding the content of your comment.

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

#430

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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