Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
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Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
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Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
#2Someone at work just showed me today what a “Bash Bunny” is. I feel like everyone on Hacker News has probably known about these things for 5+ years but still scary...
Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
#3Quote from article "We need to move faster. Validation at Intel is taking much longer than it does for our competition. We need to do whatever we can to reduce those times… we can’t live forever in the shadow of the early 90’s FDIV bug, we need to move on. Our competition is moving much faster than we are".
Competition pressure could make a company's new product worse than (in this case, less stable than) their previous products, e.x. Samsung phone explosion. I still remembered the story was Samsung wanting to release their phone ahead of iPhone and I would imagine the testing went through a similar stressful time as Intel.
Of course not all cases of taking such risks would lead to disasters - just imagine Intel rushes on releasing new chips ahead of competition and 99 out of 100 times it ended up performing well. But a unique character in Intel's case is these bugs, unlike a faulty battery design, are accumulative and additive to future product development, which means a few small wins in catching up with your competitor could also lead to massive failures in some next major battle.
Now imagine Intel's competitors are going through the exact same scenario. One possible outcome is both Intel and its competitors' products become less stable and more buggy over time, and until everyone's stuff seems to be broken they probably never have time to fix them.
Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
#4Out of curiosity, if you notice a CPU bug in a computer under warranty, is there anything the vendor is usually obligated do, or are they under no obligation to do anything about a CPU bug? Is that considered a defect they have to handle?
(Edit: I'm assuming the USA, and I'm assuming bugs that were not known to the vendor at the time of the sale.)
Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
#5So I recently bought an 8700k. I was wondering if I should rather return it and get AMD instead? Not sure how much the recent bugs will impact me performance wise.
Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
#6Quote from article "We need to move faster. Validation at Intel is taking much longer than it does for our competition. We need to do whatever we can to reduce those times… we can’t live forever in the shadow of the early 90’s FDIV bug, we need to move on. Our competition is moving much faster than we are". Competition pressure could make a company's new product worse than (in this case, less stable than) their previ…
> Competition pressure could make a company's new product worse than (in this case, less stable than) their previous products
Well, that depends on the specific attributes on which there is competitive pressure. When its on time to market, yes, quality will suffer. When its on quality, products will be slower\more expensive,etc. Kind of similar to the often repeated quality triangle in Software dev
Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
#7So I recently bought an 8700k. I was wondering if I should rather return it and get AMD instead? Not sure how much the recent bugs will impact me performance wise.
It looks like you'll see a significant slowdown, PostgreSQL with pgbench sees a 7% to 16% slowdown.
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20180102222354.qikjmf7...
Of course, this depends on workload — gaming will see different results than computationally heavy tasks.
It is likely that games using Vulkan, DX12 or OoenGL's AZDO functions will see much lower performance impact (because they usually only do a handful of syscalls per frame) than games using older APIs, or even OpenGLs immediate mode (which does one syscall per emitted vertex, in worst case)
Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
#8Out of curiosity, if you notice a CPU bug in a computer under warranty, is there anything the vendor is usually obligated do, or are they under no obligation to do anything about a CPU bug? Is that considered a defect they have to handle? (Edit: I'm assuming the USA, and I'm assuming bugs that were not known to the vendor at the time of the sale.)
Under EU law (this is not legal advice), any bug that wasn't known to you at time of sale, but was present at time of sale, has to be fixed by the vendor. For 2 years after sale usually, some countries have longer (afaik, Norway for example has it set at 5 years. As EEA member, they also follow the EU laws on warranty).
Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
#9So I recently bought an 8700k. I was wondering if I should rather return it and get AMD instead? Not sure how much the recent bugs will impact me performance wise.
It looks like you'll see a significant slowdown, PostgreSQL with pgbench sees a 7% to 16% slowdown. https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20180102222354.qikjmf7... Of course, this depends on workload — gaming will see different results than computationally heavy tasks. It is likely that games using Vulkan, DX12 or OoenGL's AZDO functions will see much lower performance impact (because they usually only do a handful o…
I am also quite annoyed because I paid premium (Intel) prices with the expectation to get premium speed. Now if I can just get the same performance cheaper with AMD, maybe I should just return the whole thing.
Re: Serious Intel CPU bugs (2016)
#10Out of curiosity, if you notice a CPU bug in a computer under warranty, is there anything the vendor is usually obligated do, or are they under no obligation to do anything about a CPU bug? Is that considered a defect they have to handle? (Edit: I'm assuming the USA, and I'm assuming bugs that were not known to the vendor at the time of the sale.)
Under EU law (this is not legal advice), any bug that wasn't known to you at time of sale, but was present at time of sale, has to be fixed by the vendor. For 2 years after sale usually, some countries have longer (afaik, Norway for example has it set at 5 years. As EEA member, they also follow the EU laws on warranty).
Ahh, I was referring to the US, and bugs that weren't known at the time of sale (I'll edit this in), but thank you, this is still useful information.