Not to ruin your Friday, but it seems we have a sequel. Spectre Next Generation refers to eight new vulnerabilities Intel CPUs posses, some of which Heise suggests could be even worse than the previously revealed flaws. Intel's official response can be read at The Inquirer, AMD have stated they are investigating to see if there is any possible way their chips and vulnerable while ARM decided not to comment at all. One of the more disturbing vulnerabilities can cross between or out of VMs, rendering your sandbox unsafe. It is still early yet so we cannot say exactly what product lines are vulnerable, nor do we have specifics on the the eight flaws but you can expect to hear a lot more in the coming days.
"The flaws, first reported by German tech site Heise which said it has been given full technical details on the vulnerabilities and said Intrl had reserved Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) numbers for them."
Here is some more Tech News from around the web:
- Activision shows PC some love, plans “significant” resources for Call of Duty @ Ars Technica
- Vulnerabilities Affecting Over One Million Dasan GPON Routers Are Now Under Attack @ Slashdot
- Free To Play, Expensive To Love: 'Fortnite' Changes Video Game Business @ Slashdot
- May the 4th be with you: Best Star Wars gifts and gadgets @ The Inquirer
- It's World (Terrible) Password (Advice) Day! @ The Register
- nerdytec Couchmaster Cycon Ergonomic tech seating @ MissingRemote
Intel’s got bugs and Nvidia
Intel’s got bugs and Nvidia ends GPP! AMD’s doing better every day now if these new bugs do not affect their offerings. It’s just another day in CPU/GPU land!
“NVIDIA Ends GeForce Partner Program”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmoorhead/2018/05/04/nvidia-ends-geforce-partner-program/#675a256b6553
P.S. Patrick Moorhead is a
P.S. Patrick Moorhead is a big CaCa head Nvidia apologist but it’s still news that GPP is over is good! It’s because Nvidia wanted monopolistic conntrol over the long established Third party OEM/AIB branding instead of creating some new Nvidia only branding of its own. Trying to exclude AMD’s GPUs from under that third party long established OEM/AIB branding that AMD’s products had a history of being branded under is how Nvidia made the GPP legally questionable in the first place.
Will the board makers
Will the board makers actually go back to one gaming brand though? When intel comes out with a gaming GPU, will it be under their existing gaming brand name or a new one? Nvidia may have already accomplished what they wanted to do, so there may be no reason to continue it.
Nvidia may still be in legal
Nvidia may still be in legal trouble for what it did, and no GPP cancellation can stop any fines if there where even a single illegal act comitted. Nvidia’s actions are what will be judged not what Nvidia says. So no matter what Nvidia announces it does not really matter as far as the law is concerned!
The same laws apply to any AIBs/OEMs regarding this matter including being called to testify under under oath. The entire x86 ISA based and discrete GPU based market system is corrupt and that includes any “Free” review samples and other relationships that take objectivity out behind the shed and kill it.
Intel, currently, is not part of the discrete mobile AIB/OEM GPU market and that’s some ways off. So for now there are only 2 main discrete GPU makers and a third would be welcome also. The OEM PC/laptop market is too dependent on the major CPU/GPU parts suppliers and the Government Regulators need to stop the CPU/GPU makers from incentivizing the Third Party PC/Laptop OEM’s end produtcs as that’s bad for competition that drives innovation in the CPU and GPU markets. CPU and GPU parts suppliers need to only be allowed to sell their processor products to the Third Party OEM’s with no other strings and conditions attatched and that includes incentived methods designed to uncompetitively restrict the PC/Laptop OEMs to only some makers’ products.
You do realise Patrick
You do realise Patrick Moorhead was an AMD CVP?
It is going to be difficult
It is going to be difficult to design these systems such that they don’t leak information due to changes to state outside of the architectural state which is always rolled back. There isn’t going to be simple solutions to speculative loads and such without performance penalties. Intel’s design has had more optimization work on single thread performance. There has probably been a huge amount of work to get that last few percent performance. Most of those things are probably speculative memory operations that are more likely to leak information. AMD may still be vulnerable to some exploits, but it is probably less likely.
I really don’t see any reason that buy Intel for anything at the moment. Their consumer CPUs are more expensive for less cores. Anything that needs more performance is more likely to get multi-threaded, so intel seems to have the lead in things that are irrelevant but is outperformmed for the things that actually matter. They are also outperformed by a large margin is some if those things, because of the smaller number of cores. In most applications a few hundred extra MHz isn’t going to make up for having less cores. I have also seen several reviews talking about intel performing better in 1080p gaming, but the frame rates were all over 120 anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. Any higher settings would be GPU limited. The 2xxx series Ryzens seem to fix that a bit anyway with the improved cache latencies.
It is even more ridiculous in the workstation / server market. Intel’s prices are still ridiculously high. You can get a huge number of cores from AMD for a much lower cost. Intel just isn’t competitive at all given the IO and memory bandwidth of Epyc. Intel is current competing on name / reputation alone. You have a bunch of people who will not switch even with massive intel price gauging. There is always some risk with a new architecture, so for customer systems, I don’t blame them. It is bad to support the monopoly though. We suddenly have very reasonably priced 8 core processors in the mainstream consumer market. We could have had those several years ago. I may push for my work to buy some AMD systems for testing in house.
I am stuck with a 4 core Xeon at 3 GHz as my desktop at work when 8 core Ryzen 7 1700 is now $250 on Newegg. For compiling code and most of the other things I do, the Ryzen would beat the Xeon by a massive margin. I have been looking for Ryzen Pro for sale, but it seems to be OEM only. I would like ECC memory. The regular Ryzen is supposed to support it, but it isn’t validated for that.
It’s not good knowing that an
It’s not good knowing that an Intel CPU you buy today may or may not be able to have serious flaws in it fixed, especially if you have servers run a datacentre or are a security manager or any kind of IT person really.
My expectation is that AMD Ryzen will be unaffected or perhaps minimally affected with patches available.