Anybody successfully exchanged their Intel laptop for an AMD one because of reduced performance?

[AlTech]

Just now, Arika S said:

Ooh right. The older U series are dual cores with HT, and the newer ones are mostly 4c/8t welp

I think the only Intel laptop CPUs without HT are a couple of Celeron or Pentium CPUs from a while back.

 

Pretty much every recent Intel laptop CPU has HT minus a few weird atom based ones and a few others.

4 minutes ago, porina said:

 What you would be limited to doing is suing whoever sold you the Intel product or containing product,

You could argue Intel themselves knowingly sold these CPUs with defects to OEMs because they tried to fix MDS in hardware in the 9th gen products including Whiskey Lake which came out back in September 2018.

4 minutes ago, porina said:

at best on some grounds that what you have now is not what was sold.

Well yes, what you have now is not what was sold for someone with a CPU that shipped with HT enabled.

 

People who own Intel powered ChromeBooks might have a stronger argument for this because HT has been forcibly disabled by Google but I think this argument still holds some water.

 

And of course I'm not an attorney and this is not legal advice.

4 minutes ago, porina said:

Mobile i5s may have HT.

Pretty much every mobile i5 has HT.

[RejZoR]

Some European countries have a law for defects that are discovered on a product and are assumed to be present from the beginning. It's called "out of the box defect" (roughly translated from my language where it's called "stvarna napaka") where consumer can return the product within 6 months since purchase with a written statement they want to apply for a return based on this law and it's automatically assumed the defect was present. After 6 months, the consumer has to prove it on their own. I just don't know if such vulnerabilities and drop of performance later on falls under this or not. It has to then be resolved or appealed by the supplier in 8 days otherwise consumer automatically gets the right to get whatever they stated in the written document (which can be repair of the product, new product or cashback of the purchase). Not sure how is with this across Europe but since we're in EU I think we share this stuff...

 

I think vulnerability itself wouldn't apply, but drop in performance from pathces for it just might because the performance is not the same as when you were buying it which means you were mislead about its performance capabilities.

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

https://www.techpowerup.com/255563/intel-tried-to-bribe-dutch-university-to-suppress-knowledge-of-mds-vulnerability 

 

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2019/05/14/hackers-mikken-op-het-intel-hart-a3960208

Oh come on... I know it's cool to hate on Intel these days but that's not bribery. It's standard procedure.

What happened was that these researchers found an issue.

Intel offered them a reward through the Intel Bug Bounty Program.

One of the clauses of the bug bounty program is that you do not publicly disclose the vulnerability however you want. You need to give Intel time to fix it before making it public, which is standard practice because it minimizes the damage to users.

Another clause of the agreement is that you use the NVD CVSSv3 or FIRST CVSSv3 calculators (industry standards) when evaluating the appropriate CVSS score

 

Basically what happened was this:
Intel: Hey, nice finding there. If you promise to use industry standard methods to evaluate the threat, and give us some time to fix this before going public with it you can have some money.

Researchers: Baww Intel is trying to bribe us! What assholes!

 

 

Edit: I am not blaming you AluminiumTech. I am blaming the ones who wrote those articles for being so sensationalistic. Seems like a pretty clear attempt to just get clicks rather than accurately report the story.

[porina]

10 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Pretty much every mobile i5 has HT.

My i5-7300HQ doesn't. 4c4t. Very popular in budget gaming laptops at least.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/97456/intel-core-i5-7300hq-processor-6m-cache-up-to-3-50-ghz.html

 

[AlTech]

8 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

Some European countries have a law for defects that are discovered on a product and are assumed to be present from the beginning. It's called "out of the box defect" (roughly translated from my language where it's called "stvarna napaka") where consumer can return the product within 6 months since purchase with a written statement they want to apply for a return based on this law and it's automatically assumed the defect was present. After 6 months, the consumer has to prove it on their own. I just don't know if such vulnerabilities and drop of performance later on falls under this or not. It has to then be resolved or appealed by the supplier in 8 days otherwise consumer automatically gets the right to get whatever they stated in the written document (which can be repair of the product, new product or cashback of the purchase). Not sure how is with this across Europe but since we're in EU I think we share this stuff...

  

I think vulnerability itself wouldn't apply, but drop in performance from pathces for it just might because the performance is not the same as when you were buying it which means you were mislead about its performance capabilities. 

What would you advise for the rest of us?

[RejZoR]

I don't know, do you have any such law in UK? It might be called something else but the law is usually pretty similar. The thing is, this law is not widely known in my country either. I had a lot of work with retail and consumers and it took me years to get hold of it after digging through the law papers and really purposely learning about it. It's there but hardly anyone knows about it or how to even apply for it. So, it's quite a possibility UK has it too, you just don't know about it. Because most people only know standard warranty law, but not this one. If you guys have like a "consumer protection" wing of government, maybe try asking them if UK has such a thing and if not, what could you try pursuing for this purpose.

[AlTech]

5 minutes ago, RejZoR said:

I don't know, do you have any such law in UK? It might be called something else but the law is usually pretty similar. The thing is, this law is not widely known in my country either. I had a lot of work with retail and consumers and it took me years to get hold of it after digging through the law papers and really purposely learning about it. It's there but hardly anyone knows about it or how to even apply for it. So, it's quite a possibility UK has it too, you just don't know about it. Because most people only know standard warranty law, but not this one. If you guys have like a "consumer protection" wing of government, maybe try asking them if UK has such a thing and if not, what could you try pursuing for this purpose.

I can't seem to find much unless you consider the performance loss to mean the product is faulty or something like that.

 

Otherwise it doesn't seem like there's much that can be done in the UK.

[AlTech]

@RejZoR Actually now i've done some digging it does look like something in the UK exists but you have to exercise it within 6 months of buying the product.

 

Edit: I'll also throw in this for anybody who has an Intel CPU with HT.

https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/how-to-reject-a-faulty-product-and-get-your-money-back

[RejZoR]

Looks similar thing, yes. Basically, the idea behind these laws is that item you've bought doesn't operate as advertised. Meaning, technically, Intel CPU's, when you were buying, you bought it because of performance numbers most likely. But after vulnerability fixes, performance degraded and doesn't match what you bought it for anymore.

 

Vulnerabilities alone do not warrant return (because any product can have them and are usually addressed by vendors), but patches for vulnerabilities that degrade performance do since they affect how product works and at what efficiency. But be careful, there are a lot of hooks and specifics in my law, so pay attention so you won't screw it up (for example, the written form for return in my version of law, if you don't specify what kind of solution you want exactly, makes it invalid and you need to explicitly specify it).

[AlTech]

Usual disclaimers of I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

 

This is something you could roughly follow if you're affected and in the UK.

 

This was generated by Which?'s tools on their website with information I added relating to the vulnerabilties. You may want to double check that it all makes sense and is good before filling out the blanks for yourself.

 

Quote

[Date]

 

Dear Sir or Madam,

 

REFERENCE: [Your Last Name]/[Retailer]-[Laptop Manufacturer and Model]

 

I purchased the [Laptop Manufacturer and Model] from [Retailer]. At the point of purchase I paid £[How much you paid].

 

The [Laptop Manufacturer and Model] is not as described. The Intel processor in the laptop which came with Hyper Threading technology has been revealed to suffer from recent Micro-architectural Data Sampling security vulnerabilities where the only effective remedy is to disable Hyper Threading and apply mitigations provided by the OS manufacturer. The processor with Hyper Threading disabled and other mitigations for the vulnerabilities results in substantially reduced processor performance.

 

The Consumer Rights Act 2015 makes it an implied term of the contract I have with [Retailer] that goods be as described, fit for purpose and of satisfactory quality.

 

As you are in breach of contract and I've owned the product for less than 6 years I am within my statutory rights to ask for it to be replaced with an equivalent product that contains a processor not affected by the Micro-architectural Data Sampling vulnerabilities at no further cost to me.

 

I await confirmation that you will provide the remedy set out above within 14 days of the date of this letter.

 

Yours faithfully,

 

[Your Name]

 

Edit: If you bought an affected device for over £100 with a Credit Card and below £30,000 you could instead use your Section 75 Credit Card protection for a refund.

[LAwLz]

I don't think there is any precedent for this type of return, but I kind of doubt it will go through.

I mean, installing the patches are kind of optional, and they are not even distributed by Intel.

 

It's kind of like if you bought a VW car, then it was discovered that the breaks functions worse in really cold climates. So as a "fix" Volkswagen makes the car go slower in cold climates. Now people are pissed that their cars are slower, so they turn to the manufacturer of the breaks and complain and demand money.

Personally, I think the one distributing the updates (Volkswagen in my analogy) would be the ones communicating and dealing with customers, and then VW would act as a proxy to the break manufacturer.

In this case it would be either Microsoft (distributor of the updates), the laptop manufacturer or the store handling the customer directly, not Intel.

 

Not only that, the patches affects AMD processors too. So anything that would happen to Intel would be applicable to AMD too in terms of laws and lawsuits. I want people to keep that in mind when talking about how they want to sue Intel. Remember, Intel and AMD are sitting in the same boat right now. Both have had patches which reduces performance but fixes vulnerabilities applied to them.

 

 

On top of that, patches for products reduce performance all the time. I think it would open up a very, very big can of worms if any patch which reduces performance all of a sudden started counting as false advertising retroactively. Pretty much all hardware and software which gets security patches will fluctuate in performance to some degree.

[AlTech]

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I don't think there is any precedent for this type of return, but I kind of doubt it will go through.

If you're talking about what I posted above, the people to send those kind of letters to are retailers and not laptop manufacturers or even Intel because according to the law the retailer is responsible and not Intel or the laptop manufacturer.

 

In my case the manufacturer and retailer happen to be basically the same.

 

Again not a lawyer and not legal advice.