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Intel bug incoming? Meltdown and Spectre exploits

DragonQ said:
Testing without any potential microcode update is perfectly valid. There are millions of chips out there that will never get such a microcode update. Kaby Lake and Skylake-X onwards probably will, Skylake onwards might depending on if your Z170 motherboard actually still gets BIOS updates. Broadwell and older are almost certainly stuffed.
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Sometimes it feels like a dodgy way of planned obsolesce.
 
DragonQ said:
Testing without any potential microcode update is perfectly valid. There are millions of chips out there that will never get such a microcode update. Kaby Lake and Skylake-X onwards probably will, Skylake onwards might depending on if your Z170 motherboard actually still gets BIOS updates. Broadwell and older are almost certainly stuffed.
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Can you explain how it's valid if the issue still isn't rectified?
 
Not long had my Windows 10 PC on, KB4056892 has downloaded and installed as much as it can before a restart is needed https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4056892/windows-10-update-kb4056892

Is this including the hotfix for this vulnerability?

Not going to restart just yet, might run a game or two and then compare after reboot, but I'm struggling to think of a game I've got that that really challenges my stock Haswell 5820k.
 
Gonna be a bit of a nightmare patches wise as I have all kind of hardware running different setups and I generally try to avoid any updates that include telemetry, etc.
 
DavidS14 said:
I've read that the Intel CEO now only owns the absolute minimum of Intel stock he contractually has to own and sold the rest off last year (looks like Google found the issue in June 17) ?

I would think that Google would let the affected parties know pretty quickly after discovering the issue.
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  • Intel CEO Brian Krzanich sold off $24 million worth of stock and options in the company in late November.
  • The stock sale came after Intel was informed by Google of a significant vulnerability in its chips - a flaw that only became public this week.
  • Intel says the stock sale was unrelated to the vulnerability, but came as part of a planned divestiture program. But Krzanich put that stock sale plan in place in October - several months after Intel was informed of the vulnerability.
....That means Intel was aware of the problem before Krzanich sold off a big chunk of his holdings. Intel's CEO saw a $24 million windfall November 29 through a combination of selling shares he owned outright and exercising stock options.

The stock sale raised eyebrows when it was disclosed, primarily because it left Krzanich with just 250,000 shares of Intel stock - the bare minimum the company requires him to hold under his employment agreement....
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http://nordic.businessinsider.com/i...fter-company-was-informed-of-chip-flaw-2018-1
 
SiDeards73 said:
As he said, its a real world scenario test indicating how much gimping will happen to machines that will never ever get the update due to owners not bothering etc.
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Well not really, as the update needn't be deployed anyway if you're not going to fix it properly, so it's not difficult to roll back lol. Come on! He's even said in the comments he's going to have to readdress the issue now.
 
What is ironic in all of this is Intel apparently is going to focus more on the Data Center / Enterprise / Cloud computing as a company and was less focused on Desktops. This whole fiasco has lost them a lot of trust already in that area, coupled with AMD's emergence as a serious competitor, alongside ARM etc, i can see even more market share moving from Intel to others, especially if there is a serious performance penalty on some workloads on Intel CPU's.

Not saying its the end for Intel, you'd be stupid to even think that, but as yesterdays share price kicking showed, they arent the untouchable giant they believe they are, wouldn't be surprised to see further share dips today from them either.

If AMD can prove they are not as vulnerable as Intel, that alone will give them more strength entering into those markets, performance is not far off and TCO is good for AMD hardware.
 
SiDeards73 said:
What is ironic in all of this is Intel apparently is going to focus more on the Data Center / Enterprise / Cloud computing as a company and was less focused on Desktops. This whole fiasco has lost them a lot of trust already in that area, coupled with AMD's emergence as a serious competitor, alongside ARM etc, i can see even more market share moving from Intel to others, especially if there is a serious performance penalty on some workloads on Intel CPU's.

Not saying its the end for Intel, you'd be stupid to even think that, but as yesterdays share price kicking showed, they arent the untouchable giant they believe they are, wouldn't be surprised to see further share dips today from them either.

If AMD can prove they are not as vulnerable as Intel, that alone will give them more strength entering into those markets, performance is not far off and TCO is good for AMD hardware.
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Intel are going to have to up their game - this isn't the only serious and long standing hardware vulnerability that has come to light lately with their hardware - there have been at least 2 AMT disclosures in the last 6 months - and people seem to have quickly forgotten about stuff like https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/05/01/intel_amt_me_vulnerability/

Not a fan of AMD's position though - they seem to just deny any problem before there has even been any testing and/or make a big deal about "close to zero" when it isn't zero and seems based on only preliminary testing - I'm not sure I trust them any more than Intel when it comes to security and they have less resources to get on top of patching issues like this if they do arise.
 
Just patched Windows 10 with the latest patch and ran the Heaven 4 benchmark and my results at 1080p were almost exactly the same as my results prior to installing the patch.

I did upgrade my Samsung 840 Pro SSD to the latest firmware in between though but I doubt that made much of a difference.
 
UTmaniac said:
Not long had my Windows 10 PC on, KB4056892 has downloaded and installed as much as it can before a restart is needed https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4056892/windows-10-update-kb4056892

Is this including the hotfix for this vulnerability?

Not going to restart just yet, might run a game or two and then compare after reboot, but I'm struggling to think of a game I've got that that really challenges my stock Haswell 5820k.
Click to expand...

KiNgPiN83 said:
Is this the Windows 10 patch? https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4056892 Someone just sent it to me at work but i cant see anything in it referencing this issue...
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Yep that's it, I got it this morning too, not had chance to test it yet though.
 
Skiddley said:
Do we know if patches are going to be made available for older releases of RHEL?
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I guess that depends on whether the version of RHEL is still under support. Details of Red Hat's support cycle are here:

https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata

Going by that page then if it's less than 10 years old then I think it would get patched. If it's over 10 years then it probably won't get patched. But I would imagine that someone will have instructions on how patch it yourself (if you're brave).
 
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