Intel bug incoming? Meltdown and Spectre exploits

[DrBombcrater]

Basically for gaming I think this will have little to no effect, whereas for data centres and VM farms it will have a large effect.

It'll be interesting to see what effect the patches have on games that use VM based DRM, like VMProtect.

 

[Randomface74]

Need to see some Windows benchmarks.

 

[Cromulent]

It'll be interesting to see what effect the patches have on games that use VM based DRM, like VMProtect.

*Cough* GOG *Cough*

 

[AndreiD]

The games Phoronix tested are light on the CPU and will be GPU limited.

CSGO and Dota 2 are CPU bound, they also added a low level api game (Vulkan, DoWIII), it's safe to say gaming is unaffected, at least until we get more testing done.

 

[rubberduck]

Intel share price down a bit but hardly tanking.

 

[Randomface74]

It's not plastered over mainstream news yet.

 

[DragonQ]

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.

They'll just fix it in Icelake and claim 50% IPC improvement in advertising.

 

[AndreiD]

The reputable outlets will probably report on it tomorrow when the embargo is up.

 

[uvarvu]

This is good news for AMD at least. Will make them look better in light of security and if they have also gained a few % performance increase then it's win win over Intel in the data centre.

https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/...ter-rival-intel-said-to-reveal-processor-flaw

AMD shares are up.

 

[Armadillo]

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?

 

[jigger]

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?

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.

 

[Randomface74]

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

 

[Hotwired]

They'll just fix it in Icelake and claim 50% IPC improvement in advertising.

 

[B12B6]

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.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/

 

[AndreiD]

Some actual benches with the Windows build (Insider build 17063) that includes the kernel patch:
https://www.computerbase.de/2018-01/intel-cpu-pti-sicherheitsluecke/
and
https://www.hardwareluxx.de/index.p...er-sicherheitsluecke-im-prozessor-design.html

NVMe SSDs seem to see a slight regression, but everything else is margin of error stuff.
So what have some of the doomsayers in here have to say in reply to that testing?

 

[Hotwired]

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.

Technically a performance hit on servers affects 100% of us also...

 

[XeNoN89]

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...

 

[B12B6]

Technically a performance hit on servers affects 100% of us also...

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

 

[pete910]

The reputable outlets will probably report on it tomorrow when the embargo is up.

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

 

[Concrete]

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.