Intel Plans To Have Spectre & Meltdown-Proof CPUs This Year

I'm sure it'll require a new motherboard to go along with the new processor. I'll live with my 7700k a while longer.
 
Invest in intel. This is going to be the start of a huge CPU cycle. The increase in cores was already starting it as its finally started to get to the point where a CPU is actually better than an OC 2600k now I think a lot of people will hold off but once those new CPUs with the fix release as long as the performance is nearly as good there will be a huge amount of buying. I think the shortages will be a pain too. But intel is going to make bank. For me its bitter sweet I was going to see a large upgrade cycle in the computers I own 4 of them. Now I will have to hold off till intel finished this, benchmarks are released and shortages are filled.
 
nilepez said:
Isn't AMD (and plenty of other CPUs) affected by at least one of these bugs? For me, this will delay a possible new laptop until they've fixed the bug, but I'm not going to avoid Intel because of this. Lower performance increases sucks, but it's not like AMD is pushing them...and frankly most s/w is not CPU bound.
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Spectre affects all CPUs that do speculative prediction, which includes ARM and AMD. Unlike Meltdown, Spectre is much more difficult to exploit, and patches have minimal performance impact.

Paladin21 said:
I would think the reasonable thing to do is offer replacements for CPUs that were in-warranty when they were notified of the issue, regardless of current warranty status. For *DAMN* sure, they should refund/replace everyone who bought an 7000/8000-series CPU that they KNEW was borked and would have significant performance issues when they sold it. It's outright fraud to put out a new product and advertise it with benchmarks that you know damn well are completely invalid due to your own legacy issues.
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That's hyperbole. Gaming performance wasn't impacted. Most software wasn't impacted. The programs that were impacted are programs that request a large amount of information from the hard drives/SSDs. The higher performance the storage solution, the greater the impact. The typical home user won't see any impact, but data centers will see huge impacts. Most people running SATA3 SSDs or slower will see little performance impact.

In any case, the people most impacted by Meltdown are also Intel's most valuable customers. You can be certain there will be some sort of arrangement to keep the relationship as is. As for consumers... Intel can just say the performance is still there for 95% of consumers and screw the remaining 5%. Not saying it's good or ethical, but it does seem to be the most likely course of action given their recent behavior.
 
I still dont see AMD plowing into the server market. And i dont see data centers "replacing" all hardware. At best there might be a uptick of adding 10-20% more servers to the rack space. Else its going to be an ebay refurbished free for all.
 
DigitalGriffin said:
For people who need to be upgrade now that is quite a bit of a loss for Intel. Their next quarter minus one time asset sales will tell the real story.
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Because nothing will happen with their CEO dumping shit-tons of stock before the announcement went public, (under rather dubious circumstances) how many thousands of employees will get thrown under the bus and laid off?

Shareholders won't like stock going down, and the CEO strikes me as being arrogant enough that he most CERTAINLY WON'T lose his bonus.
 
i bought an 8700k based rig on black friday. my next one will absolutely be 1800x based. and not because the bug existed, as accidents happen, but because of the total shit show response from intel.

ive always said a person's character is revealed in failure, not in success. intel lost this and showed a pretty poor character.
 
Tsumi said:
Gaming performance wasn't impacted.
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That's not true, it depends on the game. Some see no drop. Witcher 3 sees about a 10% performance drop. Fortnite servers have a 20% higher load. While that's server-end, anyone hosting their own private server in another game could be affected. There are thousands of games out there and the most I've seen is testing of half a dozen games or so. Granted, most are looking good, but considering how another poster had a massive drop in Shogun 2, saying it's not impacted isn't accurate. It seems more hit or miss than anything else.
 
This crap is ridiculous.....their last quarter sales are great their first quarter sales of this year are going to SUCK.......they deserve it. Now they have to fix the mess. They will feel the pain that's for sure.
 
sounds like sales boost for ryzen 2 when it comes along
 
I just built a 7600K system over Christmas......jesus......

I haven't owned AMD since some sort of FX model in the single core generations.

What the hell, Ryzen may get a [H]ard look this time.

I don't care if Intel found the fix, they have been less than sorry about it.
If you don't want my money, no problem.
 
I've no need to 'upgrade' yet. I'll try to have some faith in the A/V vendors updating as needed(I'm aware that's not full option) and keep practicing sensible security procedures until it's time. When it is time, I'm going AMD next. I was already leaning that way before this fiasco but this just pretty much helped me make up my mind.
 
I trashed AMD pretty heavily these last few years (you can check my post history hah), but after seeing how Intel is handling these security flaws I am done with them. Instead of transparency they try to muddle the waters and their CEO sells a record number of shares.
Intel is joinining Microshit on my list of companies which have completely lost my trust (and my dollar).
 
has this stuff been blown way out of proportion or was it really a huge threat?
 
Bigbacon said:
has this stuff been blown way out of proportion or was it really a huge threat?
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The nature of the problem is that it is indeed a huge threat but not one that would be easily leverage without other big threats that could do just as much or more damage.
 
schoolslave said:
I trashed AMD pretty heavily these last few years (you can check my post history hah), but after seeing how Intel is handling these security flaws I am done with them. Instead of transparency they try to muddle the waters and their CEO sells a record number of shares.
Intel is joinining Microshit on my list of companies which have completely lost my trust (and my dollar).
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I'll give credit to Microsoft for canning the CEO after the shitshow which was Win8/8.1, because almost zero enterprise customers adopted it due to the radical GUI changes. At least Microsoft listened and learned from that, and brought out an successor that was a breeze to get users to easily transition to from Win7.
 
I am still using a 2500k paired with a 980ti. I was thinking of building a new rig at the end of this year or early next year. I will wait for the benchmarks for AMD, Intel, and Nvidia at the time I am planning my system. As always, I will go with what will give me the best performance in my price range.
 
Bigbacon said:
has this stuff been blown way out of proportion or was it really a huge threat?
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Not a huge threat, but a semi undetectable one. Its the "fix" that is causing the issue, since it drops cpu power by up to 10%, and high end ssd random reads/writes drop up to 40%.
 
Bigbacon said:
has this stuff been blown way out of proportion or was it really a huge threat?
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I think it was more of an eye opener. A "oops" moment with a real world application that "could" affect our majority Intel world today.

Just let me know where to send my chips to have them swapped :)
 
Just let me know where to send my chips to have them swapped
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It will be years before Intel, AMD and other CPU manufacturers totally fix Spectre.

Meltdown should be fixed before the end of 2019. However Intel is not going to swap out chips for end users on this one.
 
mbelue said:
I thought it took many many months and sometimes years to design CPU architectures.
If they're going to have CPUs that close this security hole this year, how long have they known about this vulnerability?
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Exactly, recent press statements from AMD with regards to Zen+ and Zen2 support this. Zen+ due out in the next couple of months (ie already in production) and Zen2 design is complete (not due for 2years). If intel have a silicon fix they knew about this for a lot longer than the report would indicate

Having worked with the ASIC flow in the past critical bugs 1st need to be validated then understood then options presented and accepted before even committing to the design review and verification flow. FINALLY released to manufacture...
 
heatlesssun said:
The nature of the problem is that it is indeed a huge threat but not one that would be easily leverage without other big threats that could do just as much or more damage.
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If there's a possibility of running unsecure code on a server, (ala Cloud Services) then yes it's a pretty big threat. I think all of them are also exploitable with JavaScript.
 
I won't go as far as saying I am done with Intel. However if AMD's offerings are on par with Intel's when these CPUs launch I will be going AMD.

If Intel's CPUs are better, then I guess I'll let them keep mistreating me. I'm not going to buy slower equipment just to protest.
 
Kardonxt said:
I won't go as far as saying I am done with Intel. However if AMD's offerings are on par with Intel's when these CPUs launch I will be going AMD.

If Intel's CPUs are better, then I guess I'll let them keep mistreating me. I'm not going to buy slower equipment just to protest.
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Now that's a very interesting perspective: "You won't buy slower equipment."

So I'm assuming you want top of the line hardware including video cards so you can push frame rates and resolutions to their limits?

Do you know what the difference is in terms of frame rate when it comes to games at high-res between the two? MINIMAL ~5% or so. It's because at the highest resolutions, you are GPU limited.

And Zen+ should up the ante a little because it will yield higher clocks. That's due out this year. I don't have clock speeds, but 4.3 GHz stable wouldn't be an unreasonable guess. That's a ~10% jump from 3.9GHz

Intel was kneecapped at ~4.5GHz for years. It was only recently you could hit 5GHz. I don't see them getting that much faster any time soon and the IPC hasn't improved that much either.

Now if you are compressing, streaming, decoding, compiling etc...AMD has Intel beat hands down without a doubt because they just have more cores.

Kyle wrote a great article about it here. But it's all a moot point if we can't get our hands on high end video cards.

As with all engineered items, there's always pros and cons to each approach. You need to pick the item based on your needs.
 
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rgMekanic said:
I'm honestly done with Intel in general. The constant socket changes were annoying. The miniscule performance upgrades were agitating. This was just the nail in the coffin.

I've gotten to play with a Ryzen for a bit, our Cooler Test Rig uses a 1700 OCd to 3.9. While I have not used it for much other than beating the holy hell out of it with Prime+Furmark (it's not even connected to my network to prevent it from getting updates which may screw up test results), I'm impressed as hell with it.

I'll keep saving my pennies for a used TR rig and be done with blue for the foreseeable future.
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I have never thought Intel was for the bleeding edge enthusiast, for the reasons you mentioned. I usually go about 5 years between computer upgrades because I know I am going to have to replace everything, due to socket changes, RAM changes, bus changes, and so on.

However, I am now stuck with this old system, at home (Intel 3770K based) for multiple reasons. No support for Windows 7 leads the field. Next would be the stupid price of system RAM and video cards.

I really do not care about the whole mess with Meltdown and Spectre on my home system. Not worth the performance hit to fix it. If I get nailed, I get nailed. Meh.
 
I just want the best value for whatever amount of money I'm going to spend. I don't really care if there is only a 5% difference. That still makes one better than the other depending on price.

Everyone is assuming that AMD wouldn't be handling this problem exactly the same way Intel is if their places were swapped. I think that is a pretty big leap of faith.
 
BSmith said:
I have never thought Intel was for the bleeding edge enthusiast, for the reasons you mentioned. I usually go about 5 years between computer upgrades because I know I am going to have to replace everything, due to socket changes, RAM changes, bus changes, and so on.

However, I am now stuck with this old system, at home (Intel 3770K based) for multiple reasons. No support for Windows 7 leads the field. Next would be the stupid price of system RAM and video cards.

I really do not care about the whole mess with Meltdown and Spectre on my home system. Not worth the performance hit to fix it. If I get nailed, I get nailed. Meh.
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I hope you have offline backups or offline storage and no bank account info or tax returns on your computer
 
I don't love the socket changes as well but I don't see why AMD gets so much credit here.

It's easy to keep a socket around forever when in 6 years you only released bulldozer and piledriver. That's not really any better than haswell to devils canyon. Both lasted 1 refresh. AMD just released a lot fewer CPUs....
 
Kardonxt said:
I just want the best value for whatever amount of money I'm going to spend. I don't really care if there is only a 5% difference. That still makes one better than the other depending on price.

Everyone is assuming that AMD wouldn't be handling this problem exactly the same way Intel is if their places were swapped. I think that is a pretty big leap of faith.
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They probably would, if they were, but they're not, so they aren't.
 
mbelue said:
I thought it took many many months and sometimes years to design CPU architectures.
If they're going to have CPUs that close this security hole this year, how long have they known about this vulnerability?
Click to expand...
rgMekanic said:
Google’s engineering teams began working to protect our customers from these vulnerabilities upon our learning of them in June 2017
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If you put your black hat on first...Intel has always known of this 'feature' they installed for the NSA. When discovered by the public they install the fix along with the new back door for the NSA into the CPU.
Of all the different symptoms/effects of flaws in a CPU design, why were these flaws allowing reading of passwords/cryptic keys?
 
panhead said:
If you put your black hat on first...Intel has always known of this 'feature' they installed for the NSA. When discovered by the public they install the fix along with the new back door for the NSA into the CPU.
Of all the different symptoms/effects of flaws in a CPU design, why were these flaws allowing reading of passwords/cryptic keys?
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It's any information in memory, just passwords / keys are the most obvious target.
 
rudy said:
Invest in intel. This is going to be the start of a huge CPU cycle. The increase in cores was already starting it as its finally started to get to the point where a CPU is actually better than an OC 2600k now I think a lot of people will hold off but once those new CPUs with the fix release as long as the performance is nearly as good there will be a huge amount of buying. I think the shortages will be a pain too. But intel is going to make bank. For me its bitter sweet I was going to see a large upgrade cycle in the computers I own 4 of them. Now I will have to hold off till intel finished this, benchmarks are released and shortages are filled.
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If people RUN to buy buy buy new CPU's because of this it will be individuals not corproations buying dozens or hundreds of CPU's worth of systems at once. And those corporations it will require a shift in corporate policy to flow down to go with a new CPU vendor. Something I am sure Intel is working on to make sure that they don't.

In truth the people that Intel has to worry about selling to are the resellers. And I don't mean Newegg. I'm talking about Dell/HP/Cisco and so on. If they change platforms and offer good deals and great performance not to mention good support on the Epyc line of CPU's Intel is in for some real hurt.

And yes DELL does have EPYC cpu servers. I've received quotes.
 
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