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Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: jr2 on May 14, 2019, 03:02:59 pm

Title: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: jr2 on May 14, 2019, 03:02:59 pm
Was gonna upgrade my Intel z170 before going AMD. Not anymore. Yikes!

https://www.techpowerup.com/255508/yet-another-speculative-malfunction-intel-reveals-new-side-channel-attack-advises-disabling-hyper-threading-below-8th-9th-gen-cpus

https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/14/zombieload-flaw-intel-processors
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: Phantom Hoover on May 14, 2019, 03:50:32 pm
thanks jr2 it's always good to have you regurgitate a barely digested mulch of the latest tech news all over us
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: JSRNerdo on May 14, 2019, 03:59:19 pm
Quote
Processors from other vendors (AMD and ARM) do not appear to be affected. Official statements from these vendors can be found in the RIDL and Fallout papers.

*laughs in Ryzen*
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: jr2 on May 14, 2019, 07:34:03 pm
thanks jr2 it's always good to have you regurgitate a barely digested mulch of the latest tech news all over us
Anything for you, Phantom :pimp:
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: Grizzly on May 18, 2019, 10:25:36 am
*laughs in Ryzen*

For now.

I mean I have a Ryzen but Intel can't be the only company making bad decisions can it?
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: The E on May 18, 2019, 10:29:31 am
*laughs in Ryzen*

For now.

I mean I have a Ryzen but Intel can't be the only company making bad decisions can it?

The potential for microarchitecture flaws that can be exploited is always present.

However, when you're Intel and you choose to disregard the advice of security researchers in the pursuit of all the speed, you kinda only have yourself to blame.
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: TechnoD11 on May 18, 2019, 10:54:37 am

The potential for microarchitecture flaws that can be exploited is always present.

However, when you're Intel and you choose to disregard the advice of security researchers in the pursuit of all the speed, you kinda only have yourself to blame.

This.
One of my friends is a very talented security computer scientist. We had a discussion of these developments and he reiterated what the E said.
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: Grizzly on May 18, 2019, 12:05:41 pm
*laughs in Ryzen*

For now.

I mean I have a Ryzen but Intel can't be the only company making bad decisions can it?

The potential for microarchitecture flaws that can be exploited is always present.

However, when you're Intel and you choose to disregard the advice of security researchers in the pursuit of all the speed, you kinda only have yourself to blame.

I get that, but who says AMD hasn't been doing just that too? They've had to play catchup for so long.
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: The E on May 18, 2019, 12:14:48 pm
The fact that they haven't been hit by these particular exploits as hard as Intel has. It seems that AMD has put a bit more work into securing and verifying their microarchitectures.
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: Mito [PL] on May 18, 2019, 09:43:59 pm
Or it's possible that Intel just decided to skip certain parts of hardware security systems in order to squeeze some more per-cycle performance, hoping that nobody would notice these holes. Well, someone did notice, and this will bite them at some point (if it hadn't done so already, look at how much of the market AMD took back recently).

I'm also kinda wondering about the performance hits of these software fixes. One after another, these holes will get found out and this will grind down performance of their chips - even if every of these fixes will bring marginal decrease, it will be very noticeable when these pile up.

Also, I've heard - I think from one of recent Gamer Meld videos - that Macs will have to disable hyperthreading to ensure safety, and we already know what does it do with performance.
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: jr2 on May 19, 2019, 09:02:24 pm
Performance hit expected to be 3% (most users / gamers) to 7% (workstation / certain workloads).  Macs total hit 40% but I believe that's both the patch and disabling HT (if you decide to).  Good news is that Windows is finally getting Google's patch for ... Meltdown? Or was it Spectre? which has less of a performance hit (negligible vs current patch, which really slows down older CPUs supposedly).  Anyways that's off the top of my head, I'd have to go searching but I did read that ^ all in various places.
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: Mikes on June 06, 2019, 03:05:16 am
Or it's possible that Intel just decided to skip certain parts of hardware security systems in order to squeeze some more per-cycle performance, hoping that nobody would notice these holes. Well, someone did notice, and this will bite them at some point

Planned obscolescence.

"Go buy our new and improved chips that are so much faster now than the old!"
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: The E on June 06, 2019, 06:30:18 am
Or it's possible that Intel just decided to skip certain parts of hardware security systems in order to squeeze some more per-cycle performance, hoping that nobody would notice these holes. Well, someone did notice, and this will bite them at some point

Planned obscolescence.

"Go buy our new and improved chips that are so much faster now than the old!"




....that's .... really not what planned obsolescence is.
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: Mito [PL] on June 06, 2019, 03:22:34 pm
Planned obsolescence means that your product that you own is designed to experience degradation and fail after some time. I'm not saying this doesn't happen in the computer market, but CPUs aren't the case.

What I was saying is that Intel probably decided to deliberately (or not, I don't know which is worse) forgo some of the hardware security systems so they could get more performance and continue to massively beat AMD on the market. So I guess it's the cheap solution you don't want people to find out about.
Title: Re: Worse than Spectre & Meltdown? Intel recommends disabling HT pre-8th gen.
Post by: Nightmare on June 06, 2019, 05:50:37 pm
The way Mito speculated about Intels motives it was more like manipulation a la Volkswagen, meaning you didn't bought something that was supposed to die early, but to be **** from day 1.