Intel's Chip Bug

[Deleted]

So I'm without PC for a week now and trying to figure what to upgrade to, had my plans for i5 8600k and now with all this I'm thinking back to Ryzen 1600x. With these news they should be similarly performance - I know there is an embargo and there is no real life data, but what do you guys think? Ryzen+ should be announced this month, but the prices might be higher than i5 8600k right?

Don't always look at prices on CPU alone, look at the whole package, this means the cheapest relevant motherboard for the type of CPU you will get, with the K series skus you need to look at Z boards which tend to have a more expensive starting price then the boards from AMD camp that can overclock.

[mrgreenthump]

Right. I'm on a gaming forum. Most of my comments on hardware, when I'm on here, are from that perspective. If I'm looking to build a data center I'd have threadripper in my systems right now.

If permanent fix for this issue brings AMD and Intel more inline with each other for gaming purposes I may be looking at changing my gaming system at some point.

Then again, gaming should be unaffected by the issue, as I don't know any game that gained from Speculative Execution.

[mrgreenthump]

Probably a good time to invest then. You know they are gonna bounce back somehow.

Maybe, though the news/rumors of Intel's 10nm do put me off personally.

[Magnosh]

Don't always look at prices on CPU alone, look at the whole package, this means the cheapest relevant motherboard for the type of CPU you will get, with the K series skus you need to look at Z boards which tend to have a more expensive starting price then the boards from AMD camp that can overclock.

Yes, I know Here the diference is 10€ between a Z370 and a B350 for AMD. The think is I was more than willing to buy the Intel i5 so I dont get those constant 29-35 FPS in raids which my old i5 4460 suffers and that Ryzen also seems to suffer. Now with this throttle on all Intel CPUs I'm questioning myself again.

[Sorshen]

I would wait to see how the fix actually impacts performance in WoW. With any luck we should know in about a week or so.

It's a ~5% performance hit in 1080p DX12 games (DOOM, Witcher 3, Battlefront II) in the patched insider build using Core i7-3960X@3.9GHz, as per hardwareluxx.de

[Magnosh]

It's a ~5% performance hit in 1080p DX12 games (DOOM, Witcher 3, Battlefront II) in the patched insider build using Core i7-3960X@3.9GHz, as per hardwareluxx.de

But isn't DX12 some sort of taking out some cpu load and taking it to the GPU? Like exactly the issue with WoW?

It's hard to tell exactly how certain things will be impacted by this. All the tests I've seen were games not using DirectX, but they weren't showing any significant hit to frame rates. I'm still curious if DirectX will somehow take issue with this change though...

- - - Updated - - -



I would wait to see how the fix actually impacts performance in WoW. With any luck we should know in about a week or so.

Idd. Bah

[DeltrusDisc]

And since those games aren't nearly as CPU bound I stand by my statement.

I genuinely think you are overreacting to this whole thing. You're like a doomsday prepper, you're blowing this way out of proportion. I think, as has been said countless times, this will more than likely not touch games at all, seeing how a lot of it has to do with Speculative Execution, and that really isn't used by any games that I know of.

[Iannis]

I literally received this https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Zg...2Ed8Ked_4jxPrf in the mail moments after reading about this
bug and impending performance nerf..
Considering returning it all and just waiting another 6-8 months.

[DeltrusDisc]

I literally received this https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Zg...2Ed8Ked_4jxPrf in the mail moments after reading about this
bug and impending performance nerf..
Considering returning it all and just waiting another 6-8 months.

I will definitely say don't return the NVMe. That thing is a beast in its own right and will last a long time.

What do you do that you think will be affected by this? You could always keep the stuff in the boxes and wait a week or so.

If you only game, I really don't think you should bother. There's a chance this is being blown out of proportion and won't have as big an effect on gamers as on real content-creators.

[Lathais]

I genuinely think you are overreacting to this whole thing. You're like a doomsday prepper, you're blowing this way out of proportion. I think, as has been said countless times, this will more than likely not touch games at all, seeing how a lot of it has to do with Speculative Execution, and that really isn't used by any games that I know of.

While I do agree, this likely will not affect games, a lot of people like to record and/or stream nowadays too and it may impact that. I mean, the long and short of it is, we don't know. When you don't know, it's difficult to make decisions. I agree with Vegas here, at this point, best thing to do is wait until more information is available.

[Michael000]

EDIT: Scratch everything i said, apparently ASROCK updated to ME 11.8.50.3425 w/ their BIOS update from 11/30

Remember reading about this back in Nov and recalled reading that not all CPUs were affected. I ran the tool (SA00086_Windows) and it gave the response "This system is not vulnerable. It has already been patched.", CPU is an 8600K on Windows 10 pro. Last time the mobo firmware (ASROCK Extreme4) was updated was when i put the computer together in the middle of Dec., I've done nothing to patch anything since. If im understanding this correctly no Windows patch has gone live yet and wont be till possibly next Tue.

Not saying anyone is a liar or anything along those lines but how or is this performance hit going to even effect systems like mine?

Intel(R) Management Engine version is 11.8.50.3425 SVN 3, w/e that means.

[WskyDK]

Unfortunately Meltdown is only half of the problem; there's still Spectre to contend with, and virtually every CPU in the last decade is affected (Intel, AMD, and ARM)

Edit: and Since Spectre is almost 100% hardwarre related, there's no patch that's going to fix it for good.


Edit 2: more info from Google https://www.slashgear.com/google-rev...ails-03513512/

[Sorshen]

The paper on Meltdown is an interesting read. https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf

As Meltdown exploits out-of-order execution, a trivial
countermeasure would be to completely disable outof-order
execution. However, the performance impacts
would be devastating, as the parallelism of modern CPUs
could not be leveraged anymore. Thus, this is not a viable
solution.

Although KAISER provides basic protection against
Meltdown, it still has some limitations. Due to the design
of the x86 architecture, several privileged memory locations
are required to be mapped in user space. This
leaves a residual attack surface for Meltdown, i.e., these
memory locations can still be read from user space. Even
though these memory locations do not contain any secrets,
such as credentials, they might still contain pointers.
Leaking one pointer can be enough to again break
KASLR, as the randomization can be calculated from the
pointer value.

We're not out of the woods yet.

[DeltrusDisc]

EDIT: Scratch everything i said, apparently ASROCK updated to ME 11.8.50.3425 w/ their BIOS update from 11/30

Remember reading about this back in Nov and recalled reading that not all CPUs were affected. I ran the tool (SA00086_Windows) and it gave the response "This system is not vulnerable. It has already been patched.", CPU is an 8600K on Windows 10 pro. Last time the mobo firmware (ASROCK Extreme4) was updated was when i put the computer together in the middle of Dec., I've done nothing to patch anything since. If im understanding this correctly no Windows patch has gone live yet and wont be till possibly next Tue.

Not saying anyone is a liar or anything along those lines but how or is this performance hit going to even effect systems like mine?

Intel(R) Management Engine version is 11.8.50.3425 SVN 3, w/e that means.

Based on what you said I'm inclined to believe nothing will be affected in your system. I've been wrong before, but it's already been patched.. so....

[Deleted]

Not saying anyone is a liar or anything along those lines but how or is this performance hit going to even effect systems like mine?
Intel(R) Management Engine version is 11.8.50.3425 SVN 3, w/e that means.

Based on what you said I'm inclined to believe nothing will be affected in your system. I've been wrong before, but it's already been patched.. so....

Maybe I'm misreading you, but I think you're talking about the Intel ME vulnerability, which is different from this bug.

Every system with a somewhat current Intel CPU (and some others) is affected regardless of its ME status.

[DeltrusDisc]

Maybe I'm misreading you, but I think you're talking about the Intel ME vulnerability, which is different from this bug.

Every system with a somewhat current Intel CPU (and some others) is affected regardless of its ME status.

I'm talking about this bug.

Yes, that is true.

What we aren't totally sure on yet, is just what software it will affect more.

[mrgreenthump]

Unfortunately Meltdown is only half of the problem; there's still Spectre to contend with, and virtually every CPU in the last decade is affected (Intel, AMD, and ARM)

Edit: and Since Spectre is almost 100% hardwarre related, there's no patch that's going to fix it for good.


Edit 2: more info from Google https://www.slashgear.com/google-rev...ails-03513512/

Only Spectre #1 works on AMD and AMD claims they have a fix for it(though may be PR).

There also is some fix for Intel on the Spectre #2 on Linux side.

[schwarzkopf]

All the information you need on both bugs :

Summary:
1. MELTDOWN affects last 10 years of INTEL processors
2. SPECTRE affects all ARM, AMD and INTEL processors since around 1995
3. Both bugs have a similar attack vector and expected results
4. SPECTRE has been PoCed to make Javascript attacks on your computer possible.
5. MELTDOWN has been PoCed to allow data theft from one VM to another on the same cloud server hardware
6. Neither allows data to be corrupted - the attacks can only be READ attacks. Note that information gleaned by said read attacks could be used to escalate.
7. MELTODOWN work around/update in the works (or installed already on OSX)
8. SPECTRE work around/update is going to be WAY more complex.

Official site:
https://meltdownattack.com/

[Gray_Matter]

Only Spectre #1 works on AMD and AMD claims they have a fix for it(though may be PR).

There also is some fix for Intel on the Spectre #2 on Linux side.

AMD's page on the issue:

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution

Variant / AMD Response Matrix

Google Project Zero (GPZ) Research Title Details

Variant One 	Bounds Check Bypass 	  Resolved by software / OS updates to be made available by 
					  system vendors and manufacturers. Negligible performance impact expected.
Variant Two 	Branch Target Injection   Differences in AMD architecture mean there is a near zero risk of
					  exploitation of this variant. Vulnerability to Variant 2 has not been 
					  demonstrated  on AMD processors to date.
Variant Three 	Rogue Data Cache Load 	  Zero AMD vulnerability due to AMD architecture differences.

From what I understand, variant three is Meltdown and the one that will have the OS workaround with the performance impact.

If you feel like putting your technical hats on, here are the explanations from the two discovers:

https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf - All CPU's with limited impact to code around.

https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf - Intel only with potentially significant impact in virtual environments.

This is perhaps the most significant comment from the meltdown write up.

Dumping the entire physical memory. By repeating all 3 steps of Meltdown, the attacker can dump the entire memory by iterating over all different addresses. However, as the memory access to the kernel address raises an exception that terminates the program, we use one of the methods described in Section 4.1 to handle or suppress the exception. As all major operating systems also typically map the
entire physical memory into the kernel address space (cf. Section 2.2) in every user process, Meltdown is not only limited to reading kernel memory but it is capable of reading the entire physical memory of the target machine.

Also, it would appear that Intel knew about it back in June 2017.

[Tommi]

Yeah, I see no difference even in drive speeds or gaming after the update. This is mostly going to affect people who use VMs, not us gamers.

Here's a screenshot of my SSD speeds, which are actually HIGHER than before O.o