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Boffins find if you torture AMD Zen+, Zen 2 CPUs enough, they are vulnerable to Meltdown-like attack

Caporegime
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26 Dec 2003
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25,666
Time to move to Zen3 boss.

Are they immune though? the paper talks about "Zen family" and lists only Zen+/Zen2 models as having being tested. Their conclusion sounds pretty generic but that it was only verified by them on Zen+/Zen2.
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
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18,200
Are they immune though? the paper talks about "Zen family" and lists only Zen+/Zen2 models as having being tested. Their conclusion sounds pretty generic but that it was only verified by them on Zen+/Zen2.

Zen 1 double jabbed
Zen 2 double jabbed and tested positive for antibodies.
Zen 3 double jabbed and tested positive for antibodies+Tcells
 
Caporegime
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Natural immunity is better so the question is did AMD find and fix the flaw before Zen3 launched? It just sounds like they didn't test any Zen3 CPU so didn't mention it.
 
Man of Honour
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https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/30/amd_meltdown_zen/

I lost interest when it became apparent that it's not as straight forward as exploiting intel...

Eventually give it long enough these kind of attacks and other clever exploits will be found on just about any hardware if there is a reason for people to keep trying - not to say Intel could or couldn't have done more to prevent them in the first place but Intel's problem was just dragging out iterations of hardware for over a decade.

Second paragraph of that article is pertinent:

Exploiting this weakness is an academic exercise, it seems; there are more practical and easier ways for malware and malicious users to interfere with systems. If anything, it reminds us that modern CPU architectures have all kinds of side-channels, with some probably still left to find.

At least for desktop users most of these kind of attacks are a long way behind other forms of malware in terms of threat - though that can be a different story in server/multi-user (i.e. VM/VPS) environments.
 
Caporegime
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You shouldn't read too much in to how idiots write headlines, if they tested Zen and Zen 2 they will have tested Zen 3.

I read the paper it lists what CPU's were tested and there is no mention of a Zen3 processor, just the models in the article. If they had tested Zen3 it would be listed/mentioned along with the result of the test otherwise what would be the point in testing it.

They didn't test an original Zen (1st gen) CPU either but you'd assume given that later models are affected by it then so will they be.
 
Last edited:
Caporegime
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I read the paper it lists what CPU's were tested and there is no mention of a Zen3 processor, just the models in the article. If they had tested Zen3 it would be listed/mentioned along with the result of the test otherwise what would be the point in testing it.

They didn't test an original Zen (1st gen) CPU either but you'd assume given that later models are affected by it then so will they be.

Strange that they didn't.
 

V F

V F

Soldato
Joined
13 Aug 2003
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21,184
Location
UK
Intel went the natural route and developed long COVID.

I was just thinking while funny and not so funny, this Spectre/Meltdown thing feels like Covid variants for processors. It never goes away and keeps coming back to haunt them.
 
Soldato
Joined
28 May 2007
Posts
18,200
Pretty sure other companies pay people to find bugs in AMD products…

But lol, Intel’s payment is for silence! to keep the issues out of the public domain. How many flaws have Intel managed to hide so far?
 
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