A Massive Intel Hardware Bug May Be on the Horizon

I see that the AMD Ryzen was tested for Spectre/Meltdown, were there any tests of AMD's older Bulldozer/Excavator/Phenom CPUs?

I'm curious if Ryzen was deliberately designed to avoid Meltdown or is it more a function of AMD design philosophies in general.
 
Meeho said:
That we know. I wouldn't at all be surprised certain agencies knew about this long before the public did.
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I wouldn't be surprised either, but remember, those agencies are made up of people too.

Gideon said:
Nowhere did I say they knew it was a risk but they did choose a less secure path. I have no doubt building a chip is complicated, but any engineer knows certain things are riskier then others and this issue has been a non issue for many years. AMD chose a different path and perhaps they were more cautious or they just got lucky to avoid this mess. But their reaction by pointing the finger at everyone else tells me a few things and the fact that their performance on certain tasks takes a bit of a hit. I think they tried a little too hard to get performance out of their chips, but it very well could have been a innocent error, sadly we will never know for sure which it was.
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The corporate and design teams of today are completely different from 20 years ago. However, their current reaction does speak a lot about their current corporate culture, and it's not a good one.
 
The original paper itself tested a Bulldozer chip of some sort. If one Bulldozer chip was susceptible to Meltdown than they probably all were. Not sure about the Specter attack though but going from what the researchers have said some version of Specter should at least sorta work to some degree.

Meltdown doesn't work on Ryzen because its not as aggressive at trying to pull speculative memory accesses into the CPU cache.
 
https://www.techpowerup.com/240283/...ing-it-was-vulnerable-to-spectre-and-meltdown

Interesting take on this at TPU.

By the time Intel launched its 8th generation Core "Coffee Lake" desktop processor family (September 25, 2017, with October 5 availability), the company was fully aware that the product it is releasing was vulnerable to the three vulnerabilities plaguing its processors today, the two more publicized of which, are "Spectre" and "Meltdown." Google Project Zero teams published their findings on three key vulnerabilities, Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715); and Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) in mid-2017, shared with hardware manufacturers under embargo; well before Intel launched "Coffee Lake." Their findings were made public on January 3, 2018.
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Everything back to the original Pentium is effected on Intel's side of things. And even the Pentium may still be effected by the Specter attacks to some degree since they effect any CPU that has OoOE.
 
So my 8700k will become 2500k after I apply new Windows patch? :D

On a side note I noticed 1-2% CPU usage increase on AWS EC2 instances urgently restarted by Amazon 2 days ago. I guess it is a result of Meltdown patch? Any news from Amazon about it?

cpu.png
 
juanrga said:
IBM affected as well., both Power and Z-series
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There stock has gained significantly since the report. Not sure if it was related to this (people thinking it was Intel only) however.
 
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So, today was supposed to be the day I pull the trigger on a completely new build for myself. Was set on the i7-8700K.

Fellow [H] members, what do I do? Just purchased new TVs and I needed a new rig to push them.

Switch to Ryzen or just go with the 8700K and patch it?
 
XvMMvX said:
So, today was supposed to be the day I pull the trigger on a completely new build for myself. Was set on the i7-8700K.

Fellow [H] members, what do I do? Just purchased new TVs and I needed a new rig to push them.

Switch to Ryzen or just go with the 8700K and patch it?
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There might be a security point to make but hardly a performance one. Go with what you feel safest using. Personally, I don't really see a reason not to buy Ryzen at this time.
 
XvMMvX said:
So, today was supposed to be the day I pull the trigger on a completely new build for myself. Was set on the i7-8700K.

Fellow [H] members, what do I do? Just purchased new TVs and I needed a new rig to push them.

Switch to Ryzen or just go with the 8700K and patch it?
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Ryzen all the way. I play at 4k and my old 290x GPU holds me back more than anything.

I'd be more forgiving of Intel if they weren't out trolling every major tech news comment and forum page with FUD about Ryzen and now this bug.

I'm sure Intel's CEO has a perfectly good reason for selling all but his required shares of the company while customers, investors, and the SEC were not yet aware of these bugs and he was. When he's done explaining that he should own the problem and offer refunds for all 8th generation processors.
 
AMD's stance that Spectre only works on
kac77 said:
There might be a security point to make but hardly a performance one. Go with what you feel safest using. Personally, I don't really see a reason not to buy Ryzen at this time.
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Wait till march Ryzen2 is out, i might upgrade my ryzen1 if they come back and say they have a hw fix
 
DeathFromBelow said:
Did the CEO's of any of those companies cash out almost all of their company stock like Intel's did?
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Uh? Did I write anything about the Intel CEO in this thread or in some other part?

My post was simply an update to the list of vendors that are affected. Besides ARM, Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD, we have now confirmation that IBM CPUs are vulnerable as well.
 
XvMMvX said:
So, today was supposed to be the day I pull the trigger on a completely new build for myself. Was set on the i7-8700K.

Fellow [H] members, what do I do? Just purchased new TVs and I needed a new rig to push them.


Switch to Ryzen or just go with the 8700K and patch it?
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Im in the same boat. Going to wait it out before i buy anything.
 
XvMMvX said:
So, today was supposed to be the day I pull the trigger on a completely new build for myself. Was set on the i7-8700K.

Fellow [H] members, what do I do? Just purchased new TVs and I needed a new rig to push them.

Switch to Ryzen or just go with the 8700K and patch it?
Click to expand...
You should wait for Ryzen +. Keep an eye out for more info at CES for a possible February/March release.
 
ltron said:
You should wait for Ryzen +. Keep an eye out for more info at CES for a possible February/March release.
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I generally don't play the waiting game, otherwise I would never get anything. Besides if I remember correctly AMD is committed to this socket for a while so I could always swap the CPU out and keep everything else.

Or I may just get the 8700K... Every report seems to reflect that there is not much of a hit to what I use my computer for.
 
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OrangeKhrush said:
AMD use a different memory and I/O system to intel, AMD were also well aware of these breaches when Ryzen was just paper. This is why little has been made of AMD because the results are not that bad, spectre type 1 is almost impossible to defend against but from the finding AMD mitigates it better, near zero is the number mentioned. As for Meltdown AMD has 0% vulnerability while Intel hit a perfect 100% vulnerability dating to 1996, good job.

Integrity is at stake here and if investors or major intel clients discover how they have been left vulnerable to this seeming lack of care then well whatever your perceived opinion is on marketing is null and void because slides don't cause losses. I will actually say AMD's x86 marketing was pretty much seeing is what you get, better than what Intel did with Kaby and following releases, using little footnotes barely readable stating that the 7700K is 15% faster than a 6600 using sysmark....yay cool. But we digress.

Intel has a lot of enemies that are sharpening daggers at this, but ironically I don't think AMD wants Intel to be weakened, they are making a lot of money of intel now, gotta milk that cash cow, not everyday you get to see AMD licences all over Intel parts and you got to know that such is not free.
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What I don't like about AMD marketing is that they make me read though complex data sheets to see how they compare to Intel Products or anything else instead of just showing product specs in a table, like Intel does.
 
XvMMvX said:
I generally don't play the waiting game, otherwise I would never get anything. Besides if I remember correctly AMD is committed to this socket for a while so I could always swap the CPU out and keep everything else.

Or I may just get the 8700K... Every report seems to reflect that there is not much of a hit to what I use my computer for.
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You're going to be GPU bound and aiming for 60 fps at 4k either way. I think long term you'd benefit more from the additional threads on a 1700x vs the clockspeed advantage of the 8700k. That or go with the 1600x and save ~$160 for nearly the same performance.

ltron said:
You should wait for Ryzen +. Keep an eye out for more info at CES for a possible February/March release.
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Good point, though when you upgrade to Ryzen+ or Ryzen 2 later you could always pair the old Ryzen CPU with some ECC RAM for a fast, cheap FreeNAS box or whatever homebrew server you want. Can't do that with the Intel chips.
 
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XvMMvX said:
I generally don't play the waiting game, otherwise I would never get anything. Besides if I remember correctly AMD is committed to this socket for a while so I could always swap the CPU out and keep everything else.

Or I may just get the 8700K... Every report seems to reflect that there is not much of a hit to what I use my computer for.
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It sure has not caused any measurable difference in my workloads. I have an 8700k and Ryzen 1700 running both windows 10 and linux, and everything is running within error margins of pre-patches. Linux is running faster, but that's going to be due to the fact I had put off kernel upgrades for a while, so I think there was more speedup than slowdown for this mitigation overall.

On both systems, both OSes, my very large C++ compiles are completing in the same times.
Gaming on the Win10 8700k is unchanged. I don't game on the other box, or under linux.

YMMV of course, but this is looking to be a non-factor for desktop use.
 
scharfshutze009 said:
What I don't like about AMD marketing is that they make me read though complex data sheets to see how they compare to Intel Products or anything else instead of just showing product specs in a table, like Intel does.
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I would never trust or hold value in marketing information from any vendor - let alone Intel/AMD.
 
XvMMvX said:
So, today was supposed to be the day I pull the trigger on a completely new build for myself. Was set on the i7-8700K.

Fellow [H] members, what do I do? Just purchased new TVs and I needed a new rig to push them.

Switch to Ryzen or just go with the 8700K and patch it?
Click to expand...

Keep in mind if you buy Intel this security issue is not going away and you will be relying on software to keep you protected. Id go with Ryzen just due to that, as hackers will now be taking a whack at this flaw. At 4K you would not notice any difference between a Ryzen or 8700K and you will be able to upgrade the chip later on with the Ryzen system.
 
Arstechnica has a summary of the latest in regards to the responses and actions by vendors including Apple, ARM, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, etc. In particular, the author notes AMD hasn't offered much in the matter of technical info yet, differing from ARM and Intel.
 
Microsoft and Google claim little negligible performance impact on the server side:

The majority of Azure customers should not see a noticeable performance impact with this update. We’ve worked to optimize the CPU and disk I/O path and are not seeing noticeable performance impact after the fix has been applied. A small set of customers may experience some networking performance impact. This can be addressed by turning on Azure Accelerated Networking (Windows, Linux), which is a free capability available to all Azure customers. We will continue to monitor performance closely and address customer feedback.
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There has been speculation that the deployment of KPTI causes significant performance slowdowns. Performance can vary, as the impact of the KPTI mitigations depends on the rate of system calls made by an application. On most of our workloads, including our cloud infrastructure, we see negligible impact on performance.
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https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/more-details-about-mitigations-for-cpu_4.html
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/securing-azure-customers-from-cpu-vulnerability/
 
XvMMvX said:
I generally don't play the waiting game, otherwise I would never get anything. Besides if I remember correctly AMD is committed to this socket for a while so I could always swap the CPU out and keep everything else.

Or I may just get the 8700K... Every report seems to reflect that there is not much of a hit to what I use my computer for.
Click to expand...

In this case waiting a week for all the information to get out and the confusion to be cleared up will be beneficial. Just too many unknowns and bad information being thrown around by all sides at the moment.
 
Intel said exactly this:

"Intel said it was commenting in advance because of what it called “current inaccurate media reports,” though nothing in its statement denied those reports."

in according to this source in this link:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/324...ors/intel-responds-to-the-cpu-kernel-bug.html

and this in regards to AMD as well as other processors:

"Intel maintained that the vulnerability is tied to other architectures beyond its own, naming AMD—which denied that its chips are affected—as well as ARM Holdings, the architecture at the heart of most smartphone processors—as additional companies whose products are “susceptible” to these exploits, along with several operating system vendors."

and this:

“Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data.”
 
scharfshutze009 said:
and this:

“Intel believes these exploits do not have the potential to corrupt, modify or delete data.”
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with most things, what isnt stated is of importance.

COPIED, they don't deny the data can be accessed so it the usual smoke & mirrors from Intel... They did the same with FDIV and f00f flaws. I read somewhere Intel's marketing budget is larger than AMD's research budger
 
Guru3D did a piece, it appears gaming and most general computing tasks are not affected all that much (certainly not the 30% number that was being tossed around).
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/windows-vulnerability-cpu-meltdown-patch-benchmarked,1.html

However, I'd still recommend Ryzen over a new Intel chip right now, if you're buying. My Ryzen machine is running great. Cheaper than Intel, generally faster (maybe not in gaming, but most everything else), and after the ME vulnerability and now Meltdown, I have no faith in Intel's security.
 
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