• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Intel bug incoming? Meltdown and Spectre exploits

EsaT said:
Both important in servers...
If final solution can't lower performance penalty to lot lower level this is going to make Intel lot less attractive for servers.
And quite big moneys move in there.
So this might give major chance for AMD to get to position where they can keep competitive by having more money to put into R&D.
Click to expand...
They'll just fix it in Icelake and claim 50% IPC improvement in advertising.
 
So based on the info that's available now, for someone like me that just plays games and does the occasional video encode, I shouldn't notice much of a hit on my 5820k?
 
Armadillo said:
So based on the info that's available now, for someone like me that just plays games and does the occasional video encode, I shouldn't notice much of a hit on my 5820k?
Click to expand...

Shouldn't be much but we will have to wait and see the fixes and how they are applied.

A Windows kernel overhaul sounds a bit worrying.
 
I'm equally keen to see what the future looks like. I'd like to not have any performance hit, which would require:
- a new CPU design from Intel with this issue fixed
- a way for these patches to not apply to that CPU
 
The people saying it doesent affect 99% people on here, what the hell are you talking about? Performance hit may noy affect 99% of Intel users, but security flaw affects 100% of us.

At worst, the hole could be abused by programs and logged-in users to read the contents of the kernel's memory. Suffice to say, this is not great. The kernel's memory space is hidden from user processes and programs because it may contain all sorts of secrets, such as passwords, login keys, files cached from disk, and so on. Imagine a piece of JavaScript running in a browser, or malicious software running on a shared public cloud server, able to sniff sensitive kernel-protected data.
Click to expand...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/
 
Already putting an email together to send out to all of the companies that host servers for us to find out what their plans are regarding this and what impact it will have on performance...
 
Hotwired said:
Technically a performance hit on servers affects 100% of us also...
Click to expand...
Thats true, I was more on the lines talking about home users and their computers. Might not be that funny if you dropped couple hundrer million on new cloud and wake up it to loose 30% of performance :D
 
AndreiD said:
The reputable outlets will probably report on it tomorrow when the embargo is up.
Click to expand...


Perf on the desktop for what I read yesterday was not the concern it was server but more importantly the actual security hole.

I'm still wanting to know why there is an embargo on it when this was known in October ? That with the fact Intel's own CEO dumping stock toward end of November does not help the issue
 
Its going to take a while to shake out as they will go for a brute force solution to resolve the issue asap and then optimize at their leisure.

The extent of the performance degradation is going to depend on how elegantly they can obfuscate the critical memory references in an additional software layer since they cant do it in hardware. The extent of the degradation will then depend on how frequently a given piece of software needs to perform the extra step to get at a required location.

If I had to make a purely speculative guess, some pieces of current software are going to be badly affected, and others completely unaffected by the patch. New software being written going forward will be able to mitigate against the issue so shouldn't suffer any problems.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom