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L1 Terminal Fault

Makes me more concerned about the built in management engine - if anyone finds a way to remote exploit it is pretty much game over.
 
Most recent Windows 10 update already has mitigation for L1TF. Should have 0 performance impact unless you're running lots of VMs.
 
Anyone think this is about Intel having to cut corners to keep the performance coming? Could be a sign they're struggling more than we realise to produce faster chips every year. They've had issues with 10nm, maybe this is all part of the same problem?

That or they have just been lazy and thought they could get cheap performance increases by cutting corners?
 
Troezar said:
Anyone think this is about Intel having to cut corners to keep the performance coming? Could be a sign they're struggling more than we realise to produce faster chips every year. They've had issues with 10nm, maybe this is all part of the same problem?

That or they have just been lazy and thought they could get cheap performance increases by cutting corners?
Click to expand...
I don't know if it was cutting corners per se but there's been such a big focus on performance and IPC since basically forever. Then reducing power consumption became a goal too, so chip development basically just aimed for those and I think best practise came second when trying to push the numbers forward.

Netburst architecture had a similar shortsighted failing, it was so focused towards increasing clock speed that it became inefficient when the pipeline got too long.
 
Troezar said:
Anyone think this is about Intel having to cut corners to keep the performance coming? Could be a sign they're struggling more than we realise to produce faster chips every year. They've had issues with 10nm, maybe this is all part of the same problem?

That or they have just been lazy and thought they could get cheap performance increases by cutting corners?
Click to expand...

Yes they are cutting corners, no one can be this incompetent by accident.....
 
What's not being said...... Who has been exploiting these vulnerabilities over the last 20 years or more? The NSA?

Someone's know about it long before the official announcement in Jan 2018.
 
I can understand to a degree Intel choosing to cut corners in the consumer desktop space to ramp up their overall speeds and performance numbers because a large portion of these flaws are non-issues for us normal people. Consider it a calculated risk. And then by virtue of refining/milking (choose one) the same architecture for so long, the non-issue vulnerabilities will stick around for a very long time.

But to decide that these same shortcuts will be used in enterprise-level server chips is just disgusting. I refuse to believe Intel are sufficiently incompetent to be unaware of the fundamental vulnerabilities their design choices carry.
 
humbug said:
Yes they are cutting corners, no one can be this incompetent by accident.....
Click to expand...

I suppose the Hanlon's razor variant "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice" applies. There has always been a trade-off between security and performance, and IMO they've deliberately pushed hard for performance, taking risks with seemingly clever optimisations and tricks that risked security rather more than they perhaps realised. I'm not saying performance optimisations account for all vulnerabilities to side-channel attacks though, but complexity always adds additional attack surface area.

Would be fascinating to know whether other architectures have avoided this problem by luck or by design.
 
opethdisciple said:
What's not being said...... Who has been exploiting these vulnerabilities over the last 20 years or more? The NSA?

Someone's know about it long before the official announcement in Jan 2018.
Click to expand...

I was going to post in response earlier before you posted "who benefits" heh. It is increasingly hard to imagine a lot of this is just coincidence or in pursuit of just performance.
 
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