Intel's Chip Bug

[Vash The Stampede]

When's the next load of Intel chips coming out without the flaw and not needing the patch? I was gonna build a new PC soon.

Right about when Intel files for bankruptcy.

And I'm saying this and I will still probably buy an intel i5 8600k next week because it is probably still better for wow than ryzen.

Cause you need a 6 core CPU to play WoW? I would assume you have more demanding games to use on that CPU?

Keep in mind that games are "generally" not effected by this bug because games don't utilize 100% of the CPU. WoW is definitely one of those games. Now if you were streaming while playing WoW then that might give a 10% slow down. Maybe cause assuming the CPU is doing the work and not the graphics card.

On Linux there's a definite slow down when playing games through Wine because Wine puts a heavier load on the CPU due to translation of Direct 3D to OpenGL.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...pti-wine&num=1

AMD isn't affected by Meltdown, which is the one that AMD responded to with the detailing on how privilege is respected, they are however affected by Spectre. Meltdown affects all Intel CPUs for the past decade and ARM A75.

Intel is effected as far back as 1995 when they introduced the Pentium Pro, which is the first CPU to use Out-of-order execution and speculative execution. How long has Intel been using this design without anyone recreating it or checking it for security flaws?

- - - Updated - - -

AMD (though im totally willing to believe that the Dev in question was just being a cheeky asshole and wasnt directed to place the comments to the code by his bosses) basically stepped in it hard because of that statemrnt. They (or the Dev) tried to use this to tar Intel, only to have it backfire spectacularly.

Right now AMD looks good. The bugs have minimal effects on them, while Intel chips are taking a pounding. If you're looking to replace Intel, then you're looking at AMD. You're not going to buy another Intel. And why give Intel time to release new products without the bug just to mitigate how screwed their consumers are?

Intel is getting shit and they deserve it. I expect to find Xeon chips on Ebay for cheap soon.

"I think somebody inside of Intel needs to really take a long hard look at their CPUs, and actually admit that they have issues instead of writing PR blurbs that say that everything works as designed."

"Or is Intel basically saying 'we are committed to selling you shit forever and ever, and never fixing anything'?" he asked. "Because if that's the case, maybe we should start looking towards the ARM64 people more."

https://www.itwire.com/security/8132...with-cpus.html

[Magnosh]

Right about when Intel files for bankruptcy.


Cause you need a 6 core CPU to play WoW? I would assume you have more demanding games to use on that CPU?

Keep in mind that games are "generally" not effected by this bug because games don't utilize 100% of the CPU. WoW is definitely one of those games. Now if you were streaming while playing WoW then that might give a 10% slow down. Maybe cause assuming the CPU is doing the work and not the graphics card.

On Linux there's a definite slow down when playing games through Wine because Wine puts a heavier load on the CPU due to translation of Direct 3D to OpenGL.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...pti-wine&num=1



Intel is effected as far back as 1995 when they introduced the Pentium Pro, which is the first CPU to use Out-of-order execution and speculative execution. How long has Intel been using this design without anyone recreating it or checking it for security flaws?

- - - Updated - - -



Right now AMD looks good. The bugs have minimal effects on them, while Intel chips are taking a pounding. If you're looking to replace Intel, then you're looking at AMD. You're not going to buy another Intel. And why give Intel time to release new products without the bug just to mitigate how screwed their consumers are?

Intel is getting shit and they deserve it. I expect to find Xeon chips on Ebay for cheap soon.

"I think somebody inside of Intel needs to really take a long hard look at their CPUs, and actually admit that they have issues instead of writing PR blurbs that say that everything works as designed."

"Or is Intel basically saying 'we are committed to selling you shit forever and ever, and never fixing anything'?" he asked. "Because if that's the case, maybe we should start looking towards the ARM64 people more."

https://www.itwire.com/security/8132...with-cpus.html

I mainly play WoW but I also stream some times hence, going with the i5 8600k, the i7 7700k is much more expensive here and the Ryzen 1600/1600x doesn't perform much better than my old i5 4460 in Raids when comparing the upgrade cost.

[Barnabas]

Right about when Intel files for bankruptcy.


Cause you need a 6 core CPU to play WoW? I would assume you have more demanding games to use on that CPU?

Keep in mind that games are "generally" not effected by this bug because games don't utilize 100% of the CPU. WoW is definitely one of those games. Now if you were streaming while playing WoW then that might give a 10% slow down. Maybe cause assuming the CPU is doing the work and not the graphics card.

On Linux there's a definite slow down when playing games through Wine because Wine puts a heavier load on the CPU due to translation of Direct 3D to OpenGL.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...pti-wine&num=1



Intel is effected as far back as 1995 when they introduced the Pentium Pro, which is the first CPU to use Out-of-order execution and speculative execution. How long has Intel been using this design without anyone recreating it or checking it for security flaws?

- - - Updated - - -



Right now AMD looks good. The bugs have minimal effects on them, while Intel chips are taking a pounding. If you're looking to replace Intel, then you're looking at AMD. You're not going to buy another Intel. And why give Intel time to release new products without the bug just to mitigate how screwed their consumers are?

Intel is getting shit and they deserve it. I expect to find Xeon chips on Ebay for cheap soon.

"I think somebody inside of Intel needs to really take a long hard look at their CPUs, and actually admit that they have issues instead of writing PR blurbs that say that everything works as designed."

"Or is Intel basically saying 'we are committed to selling you shit forever and ever, and never fixing anything'?" he asked. "Because if that's the case, maybe we should start looking towards the ARM64 people more."

https://www.itwire.com/security/8132...with-cpus.html

I don't think for the average user any of these patches will matter that much. Only specific tasks will take a noticeable hit.

[Gray_Matter]

The whole thing broke (before the embargo) because an AMD dev pushed a patch to the Linux kernel with tags on it claiming AMD processors were immune. Thats how this whole thing “broke” to the public. Users noticed the flag and comments in the code repository and it broke to the internets.

AMD essentially broke the embargo date through hubris and stupidity on the part of one of their devs. As i said, i expect it to go nowhere, because it simply isnt that big of a deal.

The counter argument is that the Intel dev checked in the initial code that included AMD CPU's in the patch so the AMD CPU's would have had the same performance knock, even though they shouldn't have. On the comment side, it was very unfortunate but I don't think it was done on purpose. Probably just some idiot making sure they comment all changes without actually thinking of the implications of doing so.

That patch was for Meltdown, BTW, not Spectre.

- - - Updated - - -

AMD (though im totally willing to believe that the Dev in question was just being a cheeky asshole and wasnt directed to place the comments to the code by his bosses) basically stepped in it hard because of that statemrnt. They (or the Dev) tried to use this to tar Intel, only to have it backfire spectacularly.

Hanlon's Razor - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

[Vash The Stampede]

I mainly play WoW but I also stream some times hence, going with the i5 8600k, the i7 7700k is much more expensive here and the Ryzen 1600/1600x doesn't perform much better than my old i5 4460 in Raids when comparing the upgrade cost.

I doubt playing WoW is effected by this but that's because WoW is badly optimized for modern computer hardware. One core is used to play WoW, and everything else is basically idle. But games that would tax the CPU would probably notice a difference.

I don't think for the average user any of these patches will matter that much. Only specific tasks will take a noticeable hit.

We've yet to hear what is effected by this. There's more patches coming on the 9th, so who knows what could change from now. Meanwhile, more people losing performance over patch. I like how this all started from a Linux patch.

https://twitter.com/chanian/status/9...57156071288833

https://twitter.com/ApsOps/status/94...51143363899392

[lockblock]

Oddly enough - for me I'm desperately trying to determine the affect on ATOM and Celeron processors running POSReady OSs.
The tills my software runs on cannot afford a 10% hit, let alone a 30% hit.

I'd imagine that kind of machine shouldn't be running untrusted software or be connected to the internet meaning you wouldn't have to worry about installing the patch/update. Feel free disregard if Posready doesn't use a backend machine.

[Gray_Matter]

We've yet to hear what is effected by this. There's more patches coming on the 9th, so who knows what could change from now. Meanwhile, more people losing performance over patch. I like how this all started from a Linux patch.

https://twitter.com/chanian/status/9...57156071288833

https://twitter.com/ApsOps/status/94...51143363899392

Wow, those are brutal.

- - - Updated - - -

I mainly play WoW but I also stream some times hence, going with the i5 8600k, the i7 7700k is much more expensive here and the Ryzen 1600/1600x doesn't perform much better than my old i5 4460 in Raids when comparing the upgrade cost.

I would probably wait for benchmarks on the streaming side of things but for straight WOW or even gaming in general, the Intel CPU's aren't going to see much of a knock.

[Barnabas]

I doubt playing WoW is effected by this but that's because WoW is badly optimized for modern computer hardware. One core is used to play WoW, and everything else is basically idle. But games that would tax the CPU would probably notice a difference.


We've yet to hear what is effected by this. There's more patches coming on the 9th, so who knows what could change from now. Meanwhile, more people losing performance over patch. I like how this all started from a Linux patch.

https://twitter.com/chanian/status/9...57156071288833

https://twitter.com/ApsOps/status/94...51143363899392

Server and datacenter workloads which the average user never deals with on their machine.

[Vash The Stampede]

Server and datacenter workloads which the average user never deals with on their machine.

Been doing a bit more digging and this is what I understand. Firstly, there's three kinds of Spectre exploits.

Variant #1 - Basically everyone is effected and there's no real solution for any CPU without an entirely new redesigned CPU. The only real protection against this is to have a secure OS. Yea...

Variant #2 - Effects Intel and select ARM chips but not AMD. But this is mainly used for virtualization software which is not something gamers are going to worry about.

Variant #3 AKA Meltdown - Only effects Intel. This can be done through javascript to extract information from memory. It's very bad.

Intels solution for Meltdown is to disable Branch Prediction through PTI patch. This is a performance feature that modern CPUs use for a speed up. For a while people thought this would also disable AMD's branch prediction but that was a mistake and it will be just Intel. How much the average user will be effected by this is yet to be seen, but it's not good.

Keep in mind that pre-2013 Atom chips also didn't have this feature, so it isn't effected by this. Then again, a Core series CPU is becoming more like an Atom chip. That's really not good.

[schwarzkopf]

I'd imagine that kind of machine shouldn't be running untrusted software or be connected to the internet meaning you wouldn't have to worry about installing the patch/update. Feel free disregard if Posready doesn't use a backend machine.

They are connected to the internet, and it is the patch I'm concerned about - not the vulnerabilities themselves.

The are connected to the internet because the EFTPOS and other financial gateways (loyalty systems etc) require internet connection.

[Kagthul]

Oh waa they patched things the best they could for now and will mitigate further if needed.

Admission of your error by ad-hominem attack duly noted.

I didn't say a damn thing about wether they patched it or not. I said AMD broke the street date on the embargo, which is a plain old fact.

You were the one being "AMD was just tell da troof man!" and i pointed out that ... yeah, they were not, in fact, telling the truth.

Literally every CPU under the sun is vulnerable to SPECTRE.

ARM, Intel, AMD, IBM (POWER, formerly PowerPC, which has about a 60-70% market share in big iron), you name it. Everything.

The ONLY saving grace about SPECTRE is that the parts that cant be patched around require physical access to the machine to implement. Otherwise itd be a total shit-show (for -everyone-) from start to finish.

- - - Updated - - -

Right about when Intel files for bankruptcy.


Cause you need a 6 core CPU to play WoW? I would assume you have more demanding games to use on that CPU?

Keep in mind that games are "generally" not effected by this bug because games don't utilize 100% of the CPU. WoW is definitely one of those games. Now if you were streaming while playing WoW then that might give a 10% slow down. Maybe cause assuming the CPU is doing the work and not the graphics card.

This goes to show why i both generally keep you on ignore (unfortunately, other people quoted you... bleh) and how a little knowledge makes dumb people dumber.

It has NOTHING to do with wether a game is "CPU heavy" or not. NOTHING. It has to do with what type of memory operations the software uses. Full stop. If it doesn't do a lot of memory swaps into the affected areas, it wont be affected at all. Not one bit. If you DO make a lot of operations like that, itll affect you a lot. Virtualization and server tasks make these swaps A LOT, so those areas (may) be heavily hit. I think Epic showed that their back-end server took a pretty severe hit after the patch.

On Linux there's a definite slow down when playing games through Wine because Wine puts a heavier load on the CPU due to translation of Direct 3D to OpenGL.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...pti-wine&num=1

Due entirely to the fact that WINE is virtualization. That simple. Nothing to do with "CPU intensity".

Intel is effected as far back as 1995 when they introduced the Pentium Pro, which is the first CPU to use Out-of-order execution and speculative execution. How long has Intel been using this design without anyone recreating it or checking it for security flaws?

- - - Updated - - -

About as long as AMD did, as well. They aren't un-guilty here. Their CPUs of the same era use the same technology. The only reason that later architectures aren't vulnerable to MELTDOWN is because of the janky way they cobbled together their CPUs by stitching together multiple CPU dies. Same with Ryzen; the Infinity Fabric is what makes them not vulnerable, because of the way they had to staple multiple full-up CPU dies together to create the core counts they wanted on Ryzen. That's not a dig - with FX-series chips it was a failure but with Ryzen they got it working right. But it wasn't some intentional way of making their CPU not vulnerable to this since they had no clue this kind of vulnerability was even possible when they started to design Ryzen. Its basically a happy accident.

Right now AMD looks good.

Uh.. K. Even if my CPU -DID- take a flat 30% performance hit.... it'd still be as fast or faster than a Ryzen chip. Since i definitely haven't taken anything near a 30% performance hit (or any perceptable performance hit at all; i dont have an pre-patch benches to compare to, unfortunately), im still doing better using Intel than AMD.

The bugs have minimal effects on them, while Intel chips are taking a pounding.

If you consider "fully vulnerable to the more dangerous of the two exploits" to be "minimal effects", sure. SPECTRE is far more dangerous than MELTDOWN. MELTDOWN can only read protected memory; SPECTRE can actually inject code.

If you're looking to replace Intel, then you're looking at AMD. You're not going to buy another Intel. And why give Intel time to release new products without the bug just to mitigate how screwed their consumers are?

How screwed am I? I'm not. Most people aren't. They aren't affected at all. This may affect their server division (heavy virtualization and server loads take the only significant hit)... but i hate to break it to you, most people wont turn to AMD to fix that problem. Theyll turn to POWER. A huge (majority) portion of the server infrastructure world-wide is already using POWER and has been for a looooonnnnggg time. POWER isn't vulnerable to Meltdown that i'm aware of, but it is fully vulnerable to SPECTRE. If they dont need a high-power server solution, theyll turn to ARM instead.

Intel is getting shit and they deserve it.

For.... what? Producing a product that is vulnerable to something that was so hard to find it took over 10 years to find it? Its not like theyve known all this time; they just found out last summer.

I expect to find Xeon chips on Ebay for cheap soon.
"I think somebody inside of Intel needs to really take a long hard look at their CPUs, and actually admit that they have issues instead of writing PR blurbs that say that everything works as designed."

It does work as designed. Just like every CPU with branch prediction. Its why even some ARM chips (only a few lines) are also vulnerable to MELTDOWN. NO ONE in the CPU world thought this kind of thing was possible. Not Intel, not ARM, not AMD, not IBM. AMD's chips are immune to Meltdown by a happy accident, not deliberate design. The guy who designed Ryzen for AMD was pretty shocked when he found out. (Hes also done work for Intel and is responsible for a lot of their chip designs or large parts of them). So this guy who designs these cutting edge chips, had no idea this kind of thing would be possible.

"Or is Intel basically saying 'we are committed to selling you shit forever and ever, and never fixing anything'?" he asked. "Because if that's the case, maybe we should start looking towards the ARM64 people more."

https://www.itwire.com/security/8132...with-cpus.html

... and that shows how out of fucking touch Linus is. The two major ARM64 lines used for servers? Yeah, vulnerable to MELTDOWN. And SPECTRE, like every other CPU in the world. Though the newer revisions of the ARM64 lines coming out mid-late this year should be immune to MELTDOWN.

And in what world is an Intel CPU "shit"?

Even if they took a flat 30% hit, most of the server CPUs Intel sells would still outperform their Ryzen-based EPYC counterparts because of basic IPC gains and higher clocks.

So, absolutely the worst-case scenario.... total worst case.... its still just as good as the competition.

Huh. Now, you'd have a point about buying EPYC chips because they're cheaper for the same performance at that point, but again....

They wont be looking to switch to EPYC if they leave Intel. Itll be to a real big-boy chip series like POWER if they need big-iron muscle or (if they dont need that kind of heavyweight) theyll be looking to ARMs newer server chips. Which are quite a bit cheaper, and less power consuming, and working in large clusters can perform just as well.

[Gray_Matter]

The only reason that later architectures aren't vulnerable to MELTDOWN is because of the janky way they cobbled together their CPUs by stitching together multiple CPU dies. Same with Ryzen; the Infinity Fabric is what makes them not vulnerable, because of the way they had to staple multiple full-up CPU dies together to create the core counts they wanted on Ryzen. That's not a dig - with FX-series chips it was a failure but with Ryzen they got it working right. But it wasn't some intentional way of making their CPU not vulnerable to this since they had no clue this kind of vulnerability was even possible when they started to design Ryzen. Its basically a happy accident.

Have you got a reference for this. The only reason I have seen for AMD to be immune from Meltdown is the actual commit message from the AMD engineer which said:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/27/2

AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel page table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault.

The highlighted part is important here because that implies that it's a security restriction.

They wont be looking to switch to EPYC if they leave Intel. Itll be to a real big-boy chip series like POWER if they need big-iron muscle or (if they dont need that kind of heavyweight) theyll be looking to ARMs newer server chips. Which are quite a bit cheaper, and less power consuming, and working in large clusters can perform just as well.

This makes no sense. We are going to have a lot of issues because of the Meltdown performance knocks but the last thing we would do is rewrite all of our code on ARM or POWER. The ARM solution is even less tested than EPYC and has a lot more cores at a lower IPC. There are certainly a lot of options but switching architectures is probably the most expensive. If anything, we will end up buying another X64 server (probably Intel) to make up the drop in processing. We are doing interim testing with a Ryzen box to see what our performance is like there, so anything is possible.

- - - Updated - - -

Bruce Schneier has an interesting article on Spectre and Meltdown from an abstract point of view. He recons that there will be a lot more of these flaws discovered:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archiv...and_mel_1.html

All in all, as bad as Spectre and Meltdown are, I think we got lucky.

But more are coming, and they'll be worse. 2018 will be the year of microprocessor vulnerabilities, and it's going to be a wild ride.

For some perspective. He is a security guru and the guy who designed blowfish and twofish which are widely used cryptographic algorithms.

Also Bleeping Computer has a list of who has patched what:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...s-and-updates/

[xenogear3]

Seems it cannot be fixed with software/firmware.

I own 4 i5.
When do I get free fixed chips from Intel?
I am willing to pay the shipping to ship my faulted CPU back.

According to Blizzard, if you find an exploit, you can be sued.
How much money can I get from Google?

[SoulForge]

Seems it cannot be fixed with software/firmware.

I own 4 i5.
When do I get free fixed chips from Intel?
I am willing to pay the shipping to ship my faulted CPU back.

According to Blizzard, if you find an exploit, you can be sued.
How much money can I get from Google?

You won't be getting a replacement CPU. Especially if its an older model they don't make anymore.

[Vash The Stampede]

This goes to show why i both generally keep you on ignore (unfortunately, other people quoted you... bleh) and how a little knowledge makes dumb people dumber.

Just stfu please.

It has NOTHING to do with wether a game is "CPU heavy" or not. NOTHING. It has to do with what type of memory operations the software uses. Full stop. If it doesn't do a lot of memory swaps into the affected areas, it wont be affected at all. Not one bit. If you DO make a lot of operations like that, itll affect you a lot. Virtualization and server tasks make these swaps A LOT, so those areas (may) be heavily hit. I think Epic showed that their back-end server took a pretty severe hit after the patch.

Due entirely to the fact that WINE is virtualization. That simple. Nothing to do with "CPU intensity".

Keep in mind the performance hit is due to Intel disabling branch prediction. Though the biggest complaint people have is that we're not totally aware of what Intel is doing to mitigate this exactly. But we do know from Linux that branch prediction is disabled. In Wine's case it uses "Local Descriptor Table" which cause's the performance hit due to how it uses memory.

It's not virtualization but how an API calls into the kernel. Which virtual machines do a lot, but so does anything networking related that sends out small amounts of data very often. About 99% of the stuff end users do don't call to the kernel often. BUT, that doesn't mean we can't be or won't be effected by it. A single player game? Probably not. Add streaming? Host a multiplayer game on your end? Not all CPU loads are the same but generally the harder you hit the CPU with kernel calls, that's when you notice the slow down. Which Wine does, but Call of Duty in Windows won't.

About as long as AMD did, as well. They aren't un-guilty here. Their CPUs of the same era use the same technology. The only reason that later architectures aren't vulnerable to MELTDOWN is because of the janky way they cobbled together their CPUs by stitching together multiple CPU dies. Same with Ryzen; the Infinity Fabric is what makes them not vulnerable, because of the way they had to staple multiple full-up CPU dies together to create the core counts they wanted on Ryzen. That's not a dig - with FX-series chips it was a failure but with Ryzen they got it working right. But it wasn't some intentional way of making their CPU not vulnerable to this since they had no clue this kind of vulnerability was even possible when they started to design Ryzen. Its basically a happy accident.

You're making a lot of assumptions here. As far as I can tell the AMD FX-series is only effected by Variant 1 of Spectre, like all CPU's. Variant 2 is Intel and some ARM chips, and Variant 3 is Intel exclusive. Variant 3 is Meltdown. As far as I know the FX-series is just like Ryzen in terms of how it's effected by Spectre.

Uh.. K. Even if my CPU -DID- take a flat 30% performance hit.... it'd still be as fast or faster than a Ryzen chip. Since i definitely haven't taken anything near a 30% performance hit (or any perceptable performance hit at all; i dont have an pre-patch benches to compare to, unfortunately), im still doing better using Intel than AMD.

YOU maybe, but those servers that are taking a ~20% hit from this are going to replace their machines with AMD Threadrippers. Which means very soon there's going to be a lot of Intel Xeons for sale on Ebay.

Keep in mind that AMD is faster than Intel when it comes to productivity, and now it's 20% faster than Intel. But since Intel is the ONLY one who's effected by all 3 variants of Spectre, I would think twice about going Intel just for security reasons.

If you consider "fully vulnerable to the more dangerous of the two exploits" to be "minimal effects", sure. SPECTRE is far more dangerous than MELTDOWN. MELTDOWN can only read protected memory; SPECTRE can actually inject code.

Meltdown is Spectre Variant #3. It ONLY effects Intel, and is the only variant that needs Intel to disable branch prediction. Spectre #1, which I'm sure is the one you're refereeing to, is effected by EVERY CPU. Every CPU needs to be redesigned to fix this.

How screwed am I? I'm not. Most people aren't. They aren't affected at all. This may affect their server division (heavy virtualization and server loads take the only significant hit)... but i hate to break it to you, most people wont turn to AMD to fix that problem. Theyll turn to POWER. A huge (majority) portion of the server infrastructure world-wide is already using POWER and has been for a looooonnnnggg time. POWER isn't vulnerable to Meltdown that i'm aware of, but it is fully vulnerable to SPECTRE. If they dont need a high-power server solution, theyll turn to ARM instead.

POWER and ARM are totally different CPU architectures compared to x86. Why would people turn to those over AMD's Threadripper? Especially since Threadripper is faster than what Intel has even before Meltdown. Also we're not sure how this effects us end users until more testing is done.

For.... what? Producing a product that is vulnerable to something that was so hard to find it took over 10 years to find it? Its not like theyve known all this time; they just found out last summer.

Yea, right about when Intel released their paper launch Coffee lake CPU's. They released Coffee Lake knowing very well they were effected by Spectre and Meltdown. They sold you broken shit.

https://www.techpowerup.com/240283/i...e-and-meltdown

... and that shows how out of fucking touch Linus is. The two major ARM64 lines used for servers? Yeah, vulnerable to MELTDOWN. And SPECTRE, like every other CPU in the world. Though the newer revisions of the ARM64 lines coming out mid-late this year should be immune to MELTDOWN.

Where you read that ARM64 is effected by Meltdown? I think you're losing it.

- - - Updated - - -

Seems it cannot be fixed with software/firmware.

I own 4 i5.
When do I get free fixed chips from Intel?
I am willing to pay the shipping to ship my faulted CPU back.

According to Blizzard, if you find an exploit, you can be sued.
How much money can I get from Google?

Watch the many class action lawsuits against Intel, and wait 5-10 years later to get a $20-$30 check in the mail for every CPU you bought. Otherwise, enjoy upgrading your CPU's. Problem is, every CPU is effected by Spectre, except for the Raspberry Pi's. But only because they're too old in design to be effected by this.

[Kagthul]

Grey, im not talking about the kind of scale youre dealing with. POWER is almost exclusively “big iron”; like... computer facilities the size of small towns big. Im also not sure youd have to recompile much if you were actually in that position, as most facilities using POWER are using Linux or Unix and virtualize very well. Amazons Cloud services, other than some forward-facing X86 clusters, is almost entirely POWER, but you can run Windows VMs and Windows-based virtual servers on it with very little performance hit.

A lot of people (even me until i started researching it a year or three back) had sorta forgotten IBM existed and gotten it in their heads that Intel (and AMD) were the only names in high-end hardware for servers and the like, but the two companies combined dont even get ~35% of that market. When IBM sold off a lot of their “public facing” business assets (like X86 development, laptops, etc), most people,thought the company was dying. Turns out, they were just pivoting to the real momey and were nesrly prescient about how big the cloud would get. After they cut PowerPC development loose (to Motorolla) from the core POWER tech and stopped trying to shoehorn the tech into desktops and laptops, it really came into its own.

[I Push Buttons]

Hopefully my gaming performance doesn't drop too much while I wait for my $0.26 check from the class action lawsuit.

:'(

[Kagthul]

Hopefully my gaming performance doesn't drop too much while I wait for my $0.26 check from the class action lawsuit.

:'(

The lawsuits womt go forward. And there are already a dozen reputable sites that have post patch and post-firmware updates for gaming.

Verdict is...

Within the margin of error. Much ado about nothing. Same with production tasks, daily driver tasks, and... yep, everything other than datacenter and virtualiztion (which most of these places dont have the hardware to test).

Edit: there were also some throughput issues with NVMe SSDs, as well, but since they are all on ASUS boards (as they are the only manufacturer with full SPECTRE BIOS patches so far) the thought is that maybe ASUS pocked something up, but theyll know more when other manufacturers catch up.

[Magnosh]

The lawsuits womt go forward. And there are already a dozen reputable sites that have post patch and post-firmware updates for gaming.

Verdict is...

Within the margin of error. Much ado about nothing. Same with production tasks, daily driver tasks, and... yep, everything other than datacenter and virtualiztion (which most of these places dont have the hardware to test).

Edit: there were also some throughput issues with NVMe SSDs, as well, but since they are all on ASUS boards (as they are the only manufacturer with full SPECTRE BIOS patches so far) the thought is that maybe ASUS pocked something up, but theyll know more when other manufacturers catch up.

You guys are not understanding that these benchmarks are not the final thing. Intel is still to release the microcode update that might be the most impactful thing on performance.

[mrgreenthump]

Hopefully my gaming performance doesn't drop too much while I wait for my $0.26 check from the class action lawsuit.

:'(

Remains to be seen when we finally get microcode updates to Intel processors, but I doubt daily tasks will get hit by anything bigger than 5% this round, if they find new exploits, then we may see bigger changes.

What you may see is increased latency and decreased stability of game servers, though we sort of got lucky with the timing, as no big game is truly trending like crazy atm. So Blizzard for example just was able to scale up, as WoW for example is far from peak times. Worst I've seen was Epic Games, their servers were unstable quite a while.