Intel's fuckup - 5-30% performance drops incoming

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Ambrose Burnside
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Intel's fuckup - 5-30% performance drops incoming

Post by Ambrose Burnside »

The affected Intel processors will not just face a security vulnerability, but a huge performance drop of between 5-30% once the OS has been fixed. Intel processors have a bug that can't be fixed with a microcode update, meaning Microsoft has to issue a fix at a Windows level, or you'll be forced into the arms of an AMD processor, which aren't affected. How bad is the security issue? Well, an affected processor could have the contents of its kernel memory accessed, which is where super-secure things like passwords, log-ins, and more can be found. The Register, who first reported on the story, explains: "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". With a huge 5-30% decrease in performance, AMD is going to have a massive win here - buy Ryzen CPUs and receive a CPU that will perform better than an equally priced Intel CPU, post-OS patch. This will send shock waves through the industry, and completely change benchmarking for things like me - as once I patch my OS, a 5-30% performance drop affects absolutely everything I do.

Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60357/ma ... index.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
Oh shit! :shock:
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Re: Intel's fuckup - 5-30% performance drops incoming

Post by t0mby »

Isolated incident.
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Re: Intel's fuckup - 5-30% performance drops incoming

Post by flipswitch »

AMD here I come!
Edit:
Had a quick look at benchmarks between AMD vs Intel and Intel still is performing better.

http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/In ... 3937vs3916" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

So, I’m back to waiting it out.

It also affects AMD.

http://www.smh.com.au/technology/innova ... 103-p4yy8g" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
The second flaw, Spectre, affects chips from Intel, AMD and ARM and lets hackers potentially trick otherwise error-free applications into giving up secret information. It will be much harder to patch than Meltdown and impact a broader range of machines, the researchers say, but it will also be much harder for attackers to use.
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Re: Intel's fuckup - 5-30% performance drops incoming

Post by lestat »

Spectre only allows a hacker to dump the contents of the current running process. So this something VM or scripting based apps need to protect against. Google will role out site isolation in chrome to protect against this kind of attack.

So far the meltdown fix doesn't look to impact gaming all that much, I guess most games avoid going to kernel as much as possible for performance in the first place. On windows AMD still suffers the split kernel page tables.
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Ambrose Burnside
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Re: Intel's fuckup - 5-30% performance drops incoming

Post by Ambrose Burnside »

From what I can tell the big cloud services will be most badly affected. The fallout will be interesting :shock:
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Ambrose Burnside
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Re: Intel's fuckup - 5-30% performance drops incoming

Post by Ambrose Burnside »

Currently playing: Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition (PC), Far Cry 6 (PC), FIFA 21 (Series X), TimeSplitters 2 (Series X BC)
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