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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

#451

Post by bunderbunder »

Houshalter wrote: post #356
rbanffy wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Their competitors are also affected. Also a 30% decrease is also equivalent to setting Moore's law back 7 months. A 5% loss is only setting it back 1 month. I know that's a bit of a naive calculation. But the point is computing power has long operated in an exponential domain. So big differences in absolute numbers aren't necessarily a big deal.

I don't think you can reliably phrase this in terms of Moore's law. Moore's law mostly concerns raw FLOPs. It's less useful for predicting hardware performance for operations that are governed by limitations like I/O and memory latency. And this slowdown, if I understand it correctly, is largely driven by memory latency.

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

#452

Post by rkeene2 »

mkagenius wrote: post #391
cdoxsey wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you run things efficiently you're eaking every ounce of performance out of this hardware. A 30% performance hit means a 30% cost increase. The bigger issue is for things that don't scale easily. That sql server that was at 90% capacity is suddenly unable to handle the load. Sure that could've happened organically, but now it happens (perhaps literally) overnight for everyone all at once. Expect a bunch of outages…

Should the individual companies hurry to patch it. There is no news of exploit as such.

There is now !

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

#453

Post by dang »

thraweigh666 wrote: post #301
qubex wrote: post #292

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…

>We need diversity and diversification in order to have reasonable amount of robustness Ironically, in human populations it produces the opposite effect.

Please don't take HN threads on ideological tangents. The point you're making has by now become well-known ideological flamebait. We ban users who derail HN threads in such directions, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: since https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16063749 makes it clear that you're using HN for that purpose, which is not allowed here, I've banned this account. Would you please not create accounts to break the site guidelines with?

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

#454

Post by dijit »

ajross wrote: post #323
devcpp wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is, most companies that need a lot of power only care about one thing - peak performance. And they tune it carefully in order to not overspend while guaranteeing minimal downtime. This means that they'll have to pretty much scale their infrastructure up by exactly 30%. That's a LOT for these big clients. Honestly, I'd just make sure the server firewalls are super tight and not take in the future patches. At l…

Very very few highly tuned "peak performance" workloads are dominated by syscall overhead like the test that produced that 30% number was. It's best to hold off on the hyperbole.

I have a power dependent workload that scales horizontally and is currently already dominated by the cost of system calls. This will effectively, directly cause me to buy 30% more compute on a huge infrastructure. (2,000~physical machines. Quite beefy dual socket machines with a lot of memory)

I know I’m not alone.

Then again. Think of microservices, Kubernetes for instance; Network requests are system calls.

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

#455

Post by paulmd »

lulmerchant wrote: post #448
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.

All the Oracle DBAs out there are in for some suffering. Forget the cost of 30% extra compute, what about the 30% increase to Oracle licensing?

"SPARC user: not affected!"

--Oracle's marketing tomorrow, probably

(to their credit, SPARC does fully isolate kernel and user memory pages, so they were ahead of the curve here... for all 10 of their users who run anything other than Oracle DB on their systems.)

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

#456

Post by RobAtticus »

Houshalter wrote: post #444
jjwiseman wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CPU speed hasn't followed Moore's law since 2003ish. (Number of transistors is still following Moore's law, but that doesn't necessarily directly help you when your program is suddenly 3-30% slower.)

A CPU from 2017 is going to run your programs a hell of a lot faster than one from 2003. Even if they technically have the same clock speed. Look at benchmarks for instance: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

The claim wasn't "CPUs in 2017 are not faster than CPUs in 2003" or even "CPUs in 2017 are not much faster than CPUs in 2003"; the claim was that they haven't followed Moore's law since 2003, so applying it to CPU speed nowadays is inaccurate. Of course CPUs are faster now than they were 14 years ago, just not as fast as the case where Moore's law still applied to CPU speed.

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

#457

Post by hinkley »

kakarot wrote: post #446
hinkley wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Martha Stewart did jail time for insider trading. Turns out the SEC isn't messing around, and they don't hand out community service, probation and fines for this stuff.

Ahhhh, solid reference. At first I thought you were saying insider trading was a good thing and I was thoroughly confused.

Martha has been off of people's radars for a while now. I may need new material.

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

#460

Post by foldr »

cookiecaper wrote: post #274
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…

> They really dislike insider trading, it's one of the few things where even rich people can get imprisoned -- and the typical jail sentence has been steadily climbing up for decades now. Insider trading, like many white-collar crimes, exists primarily for its value as a weapon. There is nothing actually illegal about the act of selling a stock; it's all about casting aspirations as to intent and who-knew-what-when.…

Intent is a key component of most crimes, isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
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