Rumour: Spectre-NG, 8 Critical Vulnerabilities Detected in Intel CPUs

ltron · 3 May 2018 at 17:18

Heise.de https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Exc...U-flaws-revealed-several-serious-4040648.html is reporting that researchers have discovered 8 new critical Spectre-like vulnerabilities, some worse than the original, in Intel CPUs. AMD and ARM are not presently known to be affected, but further testing needs to be done to determine whether they are.

This is pretty scary stuff if true, but take it with a bucket of salt at this point. We'll know if this is true on May the 7th as that is when the grace period runs out. As if we didn't have enough problems though and manufacturers are extremely slow to fix things if they can even be bothered.

dragonslayer · 3 May 2018 at 18:07

If this is true then intel are seriously having a bad time this year first spectra then they discontinued x299 and now this

zola25 · 3 May 2018 at 19:16

It's highly likely any fixes will further nerf speculative execution and impact performance. The drop in performance from the Spectre microcode is already noticeable on I/O bound workloads

@dragonslayer - I don't believe X299 has been discontinued, just KabyLake-X which was arguably pointless anyway. Skylake-X for X299 is still being produced as far as I know.

Mark1989 · 3 May 2018 at 19:31

I have the 7600k wasn't that effected by there last bug? I have noticed zero drops in performance am I missing something? Does it only effect certain scenarios?

Journey · 3 May 2018 at 19:36

dragonslayer said:
If this is true then intel are seriously having a bad time this year first spectra then they discontinued x299 and now this

Change Notification #: 116226 - 00
Change Title: Intel® Core™ i7-7740X X-series Processor Intel® Core™ i5-7640X X-series Processor Boxed Intel® Core™ i7-7740X X-series Processors Boxed Intel® Core™ i5-7640X X-series Processors,
PCN 116226-00, Product Discontinuance, End of Life for Boxed and Tray
Date of Publication: April 30, 2018

As you can see from the PCN provided by Intel the only items discontinued are the 7740X and the 7640X (Retail and OEM) of which both should have never existed in the first place.

ltron · 3 May 2018 at 19:39

Mark1989 said:
I have the 7600k wasn't that effected by there last bug? I have noticed zero drops in performance am I missing something? Does it only effect certain scenarios?

Have you updated your BIOS against Spectre? It affects pre-Skylake CPUs more, but the impact on newer CPUs is still significant.

On my Haswell-E I7 5820K and GTX 1080 system, Meltdown had virtually no impact on performance.
However, Spectre (which needs to be patched either through a BIOS update or manually installing a Windows update) resulted in a performance hit of 3% in all 3D Mark CPU/Physics tests and a 25% hit in the Aida64 FPU VP8 benchmark. I also have drops to the mid to low 40s in FPS in the main city in Kingdom Come Deliverance whereas before it would not go below 50.

pete910 · 3 May 2018 at 19:48

Mark1989 said:
I have the 7600k wasn't that effected by there last bug? I have noticed zero drops in performance am I missing something? Does it only effect certain scenarios?

It's mainly server side thats effected like heavy IO/database stuff and what not.

Average joe at home wont notice any real difference.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 3 May 2018 at 19:52

Well thats me screwed for my modded FO4 playthough - the existing fixes were bad enough!

Mark1989 · 3 May 2018 at 19:55

pete910 said:
It's mainly server side thats effected like heavy IO/database stuff and what not.

Average joe at home wont notice any real difference.

Ah well that's what I thought, I was wondering is it as bad as the press make out

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 3 May 2018 at 20:03

Mark1989 said:
Ah well that's what I thought, I was wondering is it as bad as the press make out

It is for me - most of the press don't care about older CPUs,or even bother to test enough games. DF,tested a bunch of games,and only The Witcher 3 which is an open world game,dropped in performance and by nearly 10% in performance:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-cpu-security-flaws-impact-gaming-performance

Now remember this is with the newer Intel CPUs and I have an older generation IB Core i7.

Certain open world games stream assets off the install drive,and the hit to I/O can cause more issues than normal FPS games,etc. I play Fallout 4 which tends to continuously stream assets off the drive,and is a game where an SSD is actually quite useful over an HDD,especially in user built settlements,and some parts of the map.Basically you need good single core performance due to NPCs,plus good drive performance as assets need to be loaded.

If you mod the game,it pushes I/O even more,to the extent during late game areas using an HDD can cause noticeably stutters in the game and an SSD makes a huge difference. Now I notice more stutters using an SSD and its the same game version and drivers as before,and the only difference is the patches.

I was hoping to hold out for Ryzen 3 and Cannonlake next year,but seriously I might need to upgrade sooner. The problem is the game just runs better on Intel CPUs,but AMD is less affected on the I/O side,so not sure what to do.

Mark1989 · 3 May 2018 at 21:03

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
It is for me - most of the press don't care about older CPUs,or even bother to test enough games. DF,tested a bunch of games,and only The Witcher 3 which is an open world game,dropped in performance and by nearly 10% in performance:

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...-cpu-security-flaws-impact-gaming-performance

Now remember this is with the newer Intel CPUs and I have an older generation IB Core i7.

Certain open world games stream assets off the install drive,and the hit to I/O can cause more issues than normal FPS games,etc. I play Fallout 4 which tends to continuously stream assets off the drive,and is a game where an SSD is actually quite useful over an HDD,especially in user built settlements,and some parts of the map.Basically you need good single core performance due to NPCs,plus good drive performance as assets need to be loaded.

If you mod the game,it pushes I/O even more,to the extent during late game areas using an HDD can cause noticeably stutters in the game and an SSD makes a huge difference. Now I notice more stutters using an SSD and its the same game version and drivers as before,and the only difference is the patches.

I was hoping to hold out for Ryzen 3 and Cannonlake next year,but seriously I might need to upgrade sooner. The problem is the game just runs better on Intel CPUs,but AMD is less affected on the I/O side,so not sure what to do.

That does suck but why now? Why would it not be an issue at launch if its the architecture of the cpu itself, this is what baffles me the most, the chips effected been out for years

ltron · 3 May 2018 at 21:06

Mark1989 said:
That does suck but why now? Why would it not be an issue at launch if its the architecture of the cpu itself, this is what baffles me the most, the chips effected been out for years

Because only now do people know about it.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 3 May 2018 at 22:03

Mark1989 said:
That does suck but why now? Why would it not be an issue at launch if its the architecture of the cpu itself, this is what baffles me the most, the chips effected been out for years

ltron said:
Because only now do people know about it.

As Itron said its only been known about more recently and only last year was Intel made aware of it. Luckily other games I play seem OKish so far,but its still rather annoying.

nashathedog · 4 May 2018 at 08:48

nashathedog · 4 May 2018 at 09:12

Having read the linked articles in this thread & the presumption of the cpu architecture needing to be rebuilt from the ground up without the flaws I wonder if Intel employed Jim Keller for this reason?

Intel article:
https://newsroom.intel.com/articles/addressing-questions-regarding-additional-security-issues/

humbug · 5 May 2018 at 02:21

Intel just can't catch a break right now.

Dirk Diggler · 5 May 2018 at 05:30

Having been torn between a 2700x and 8700k for weeks now, I'm thinking of buying neither and just sticking with the current setup that I intended to replace (6700k).

nashathedog · 5 May 2018 at 11:06

String said:
Having been torn between a 2700x and 8700k for weeks now, I'm thinking of buying neither and just sticking with the current setup that I intended to replace (6700k).

It's not like you really need one.

InSpectre say's my 2700x is vulnerable to neither Spectre or Meltdown, It'll be interesting to see how it holds up against these new vulnerabilities.

I notice that Videocardz deleted their Intel woes article on this topic,

I wonder why?

Dirk Diggler · 5 May 2018 at 11:14

nashathedog said:
It's not like you really need one

Absolutely agree, but I'm a hardware nut and I'm looking to buy some new shiny. I'm really just making the point that it's not the best of times to be buying CPUs.

David Bisset · 5 May 2018 at 11:34

One of the best times in years I would say, the 8xxx gen from Intel and the Zen chips were both notable improvements on predecessors, unlike the previous releases since the 2xxx gen stepped clocks up from initial nehalem significantly.