Intel gives up on patching Spectre variant 2

[AncientNerd]

2 hours ago, leadeater said:

I was meaning if you were to put those hundreds of millions of cars back through safety certification so they could be sold, as new, they would fail. If you were to present a brand new 1991 Honda Civic now for safety certification it would not be allowed to be sold, it's too unsafe.

 

Cars are assessed only from when they were manufactured so if they were deemed safe then, design and engineering wise, it's safe forever. You still have to keep the car up to warrant of fitness standard but that isn't a vehicle safety certification, that never changes.

 

Safety requirements over time get stricter and we find flaws in the design and engineering of cars but it's impossible to retrospectively fix them on existing cars, like these old CPUs, the only way to get a safer car is to buy a newer safer car.

Ah yes that's true, however there is a (as I recall, but it has been a few years since I was in the right industry to pay attention) 10-15 year window where a manufacturer (in the US and Canada at least) can be forced to recall a vehicle for design/safety issues and repair them for low/no cost to the customer. For Heavy vehicles the required window is shorter but most of the manufacturers actually self regulate and offer free repairs for longer due to the fact that each vehicle has such a high cost and margin to the manufacturer they want to keep the end customer happy and coming back to buy the same brand of $1.5+Million vehicle every time they need one. 

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, AncientNerd said:

Ah yes that's true, however there is a (as I recall, but it has been a few years since I was in the right industry to pay attention) 10-15 year window where a manufacturer (in the US and Canada at least) can be forced to recall a vehicle for design/safety issues and repair them for low/no cost to the customer.

These usually fit in to the faulty airbag area rather than fundamental structural stuff and advanced electronic car management like improvements to chassis design, engine mounts, crumple zones, roll over avoidance (ESC/ASC), common frontal chassis impact point height etc. Basically things you can't change after manufacturing the car.

 

That's why I used the 1991 Civic as an example, no matter what you do to that car (in reason) it's impact safety is just horrible.

[Maticks]

I think all the community expects is 2600k or newer. That's a good 6 years old, anything older upgrade to Sandy bridge for $20.. 

[AncientNerd]

1 hour ago, leadeater said:

These usually fit in to the faulty airbag area rather than fundamental structural stuff and advanced electronic car management like improvements to chassis design, engine mounts, crumple zones, roll over avoidance (ESC/ASC), common frontal chassis impact point height etc. Basically things you can't change after manufacturing the car.

 

That's why I used the 1991 Civic as an example, no matter what you do to that car (in reason) it's impact safety is just horrible.

Ah except that I have experience with two cases for sure where a heavy vehicle manufacturer and a motor cycle manufacturer (separate jobs ;for different companies) recalled vehicles for engine mount (heavy vehicle) or strut (motorcycle) design flaws in the 10-15 year old range. These were fundamental structural flaws that were discovered after the fact, and I know from personal experience that they made the call to fix it back to 10 years in the motorcycle case and 15 in the heavy vehicle case but NOT in earlier models that had the same design flaw. But just send notices to the impacted owners that they could find. It was then up to the owners to decide if they wanted to keep driving with the flaw or get rid of the vehicle. I still see some of the heavy vehicles on the road that are of the right age to have this flaw and I wonder if they found a third party to fix it or if parts are due to start falling off that vehicle soon...I try to avoid driving behind those vehicles...

[Zodiark1593]

3 hours ago, Maticks said:

I think all the community expects is 2600k or newer. That's a good 6 years old, anything older upgrade to Sandy bridge for $20.. 

Why? I've a Core 2 system at home with SSD that performs plenty fine with internet browsing.

[jefire411]

On 4/4/2018 at 3:48 PM, WereCatf said:

Kind of a shame as I've got a i7 950 (Nehalem) -- the 950 is still a reasonably beefy CPU and I've used it to run long-running compilation-jobs, for example. Oh well, I didn't expect it to be receiving any sort of support anymore anyways, so I'm not exactly caught with my panties down here.

I'm over here with a Core 2 Quad 6700 lol. I just won't put anything important in the pc except for files I need at the time and playable games.

[mr moose]

 

7 hours ago, AncientNerd said:

You completely miss the actual point, automotive tech hasn't changed in the last 50 years, there are millions if not hundreds of millions of people driving cars from the 1950's and '60s now, today. That have what would right now today be considered horrible design flaws, they kill their drivers/passengers at 10-50x the rate of current cars...do the auto companies have to fix this design flaw? I can tell you that these flaws were known in the mid-1960's because I was there when my father did some of the studies that proved these flaws and published them. So...same kind of reaction they offered fixes to the next gen cars and have been slowly fixing the flaws over the next 50 years.

 

And yes there have been dramatic changes to the underlying tech of the processors in the last 10 years, not the top level where most people see but at the lowest level the 2017/2018 processors are very different from the 2007/2008 processors. The 2007 processor aren't obsolete for day to day use, but neither is a 1968 pickup truck, it's just slower and harder to be productive with than a 2018 version. Probably the top end performance 1968 vehicle is closer to the performance of  a 2018 vehicle than a 2008 processor is to the top end performance of a 2018 processor.

 

And frankly the "it goes obsolete in a year" meme was never really true, take the 80386 released in 1985 I installed the last system running one of these in 1994 controlling a conveyor system in a factory. 

 

 

 

Um no I didn't, I think you might have though because you haven't really addressed what I said except that you seem to agree and disagree at the same time.

 

 

 

[TopHatProductions115]

There are MacBooks that are affected by this too (running Core2's from the CPU generations you mentioned) running High Sierra...

[Ithanul]

On 4/4/2018 at 3:13 PM, AshleyAshes said:

I think a lot of people on this forum get clouded by the CONSUMER electronic upgrade cycles and forget that in industrial and commercial applications, a lot of technology is turn-key.  You can install it and outside of maintenance, it'll perform it's job just fine for 20 years and that's not a 'failure to upgrade' it's 'it still does it's task perfectly'.

Yep, where I work, we still using Core 2 Duos for servers and client setup.  Why?  It does it one job very well and that job hardly changes.  Plus, it don't hook to the regular Internet and it does not require to stream or browse or any regular consumer tasks.  It does one job, and still does that job very well.

 

Of course, the major reason refreshes are long in between is the long process to do a tech refresh.  The distro has to be built specifically to any new hardware, software has to be updated, and then the validation process and paperwork for the hardware to hook into the specific network.  Even our OS patches require a week long validation process during which at any time can be rolled back if issues occur that cause to many bugs.

 

Probably other similar setups that do process like this as well.

[AresKrieger]

I mean I really don't care about either bug tbh, they can't modify data only view it and the method of attack required to get said info will be difficult with browser update changes, and in my personal case extremely difficult since most attack vector scripts are blocked by default on my PC (Ublock origin is so very useful)

 

The truly vulnerable computers to this issues are servers that handle things like credit card transactions, though the idea that these were safe from attack disregarding spectre or meltdown is laughable to me given the trove of information available for purchase on illicit sites.

[AncientNerd]

On 4/6/2018 at 5:04 PM, mr moose said:

 

 

 

 

Um no I didn't, I think you might have though because you haven't really addressed what I said except that you seem to agree and disagree at the same time.

 

 

 

No what I am trying to say - and maybe I am saying it poorly - is that the last 10 years or so of CPU progress have been similar in scope to the last 50 years of Automotive progress. In both cases there is very little external difference between the products, users can if they are familiar with one they can sit down and use the other. So in my opinion, Intel is going above and beyond by offering fixes back 10 years. Since in the auto manufacturing space they offer 10-15 year recall/replacement for design defects, which would be the functional equivalent of Intel offering 2-3 years of fixes.

 

Did I explain it better this time?

[mr moose]

On 4/9/2018 at 6:59 AM, AncientNerd said:

No what I am trying to say - and maybe I am saying it poorly - is that the last 10 years or so of CPU progress have been similar in scope to the last 50 years of Automotive progress. In both cases there is very little external difference between the products, users can if they are familiar with one they can sit down and use the other. So in my opinion, Intel is going above and beyond by offering fixes back 10 years. Since in the auto manufacturing space they offer 10-15 year recall/replacement for design defects, which would be the functional equivalent of Intel offering 2-3 years of fixes.

 

Did I explain it better this time?

Yes, I still don't agree with the underlying premise,  but I understand.