AMD Q4 Earnings Report & Zen 2 Will Have Spectre Fix

[David89]

23 hours ago, LAwLz said:

You can't be serious, right? You don't actually believe this verbal diarrhea that you just posted?

 

Intel posted a fairly detailed explanation of the issue very quickly after it was announced, and ever since then they have been working hard creating patches for the issues.

They have also already announced that their upcoming chips will have implemented hardware level fixes. They announced that last week as you can see in this thread titled "Upcoming Intel CPUs to address Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities on sillicon level".

On top of that they have worked with several vendors (software and hardware partners) to make sure the updates work and gets applied.

 

Intel really has done everything in their power to make the best of the situation.

If there is one company that has "kept their mouth shut and counted their money" throughout this incident it's AMD.

I'll fire that right back: You can't be serious, right?

Intel did everything in their power to make the best of the situation - yes, that is the only thing in your post i agree with.

 

Intel knew about the Problem for at least 8 Months and they did absolutely nothing. They didn't make Microcode updates before hand, they where caught "off guard".

Intel made Microcode Updates that bricked computers.

Intel tried to sling mud against other manufactures.

Intel tried to cover things up.

And the worst of all: Intel tried to make the patches Optional. Linus Torvalds doesn't explode like that without any reason. The Kernel Patches Intel supplied where absolute pieces of impudence. Intel is probably the most childish company on this god damn planet - they can't take responsibility unless forced to as has been proven many many times over the years. IMHO it's even worse than Volkswagen, but since nearly every Computer runs with an Intel "thing" inside, nobody seems to care as Intel's PR Department is rather good in covering things up.

 

Intel does damage control, but those are no solutions to their abominable business practices. Even the google researchers said, that with a Ryzen, they couldn't replicate the attack - unless you set Kernel Parameters in Linux, which on most distributions are turned off by default. And Spectre 1 is easily fixed with a Software Update.

[mr moose]

41 minutes ago, David89 said:

I'll fire that right back: You can't be serious, right?

Intel did everything in their power to make the best of the situation - yes, that is the only thing in your post i agree with.

 

I'll bite.

 

41 minutes ago, David89 said:

 

Intel knew about the Problem for at least 8 Months and they did absolutely nothing. They didn't make Microcode updates before hand, they where caught "off guard".

We don't know that, we have no idea what they were doing between being told and the public announcement. You do know that they can't just release patches for microcode without telling anyone why.  Such an action would not only tip of the media but it would also undermine all the software patches that are also being worked on by apple, MS, et al.   It's not a case of being that they didn't release code until it was public therefore they did nothing.

 

41 minutes ago, David89 said:

Intel made Microcode Updates that bricked computers.

No one is perfect, every company releases patches and updates that have untoward effects.  Unless you are insinuating the bricking was intentional I don't see how this is as sign of anything different.

41 minutes ago, David89 said:

Intel tried to sling mud against other manufactures.

You mean they pointed out they weren't the only ones effected because everyone took aim at them and largely  ignored the others in media.

41 minutes ago, David89 said:

Intel tried to cover things up.

Proof?  citation? something that would indicate this is the case.  I don't see where they did this.

41 minutes ago, David89 said:

And the worst of all: Intel tried to make the patches Optional. Linus Torvalds doesn't explode like that without any reason. The Kernel Patches Intel supplied where absolute pieces of impudence.

They had good reason, Not that I expect many people outside of coders and hardware engineers to understand the intricacies of the situation, but there was a very good reason they made it optional.  That topic has been done to death, just read the other thread (Torvalds mad at intel yada yada yada).

 

41 minutes ago, David89 said:

 

Intel is probably the most childish company on this god damn planet - they can't take responsibility unless forced to as has been proven many many times over the years. IMHO it's even worse than Volkswagen, but since nearly every Computer runs with an Intel "thing" inside, nobody seems to care as Intel's PR Department is rather good in covering things up.

 

That's just personal hatred and blind accusations. 

 

 

41 minutes ago, David89 said:

Intel does damage control, but those are no solutions to their abominable business practices. Even the google researchers said, that with a Ryzen, they couldn't replicate the attack - unless you set Kernel Parameters in Linux, which on most distributions are turned off by default. And Spectre 1 is easily fixed with a Software Update.

 

Not sure what your point is here (it seems rather specific to Linux and ryzen so not really applicable to Intel being in "damage control"). There are plenty of genuine evidenced things Intel have done in the past that warrant such a tirade as yours without making stuff up you know?

 

 

[LAwLz]

56 minutes ago, David89 said:

Intel knew about the Problem for at least 8 Months and they did absolutely nothing. They didn't make Microcode updates before hand, they where caught "off guard".

Or maybe, they used that time to develop the updates? It's a very complicated issue. Not something you fix in a week or two and everything works flawlessly.

And the reason why they didn't release an updates until the story broke was because that's standard practices for security updates for non-disclosed vulnerabilities.

Releasing an update before the agreed time will tip people off and go looking for the exploit before all involved parties might be ready to deploy the fixes.

 

56 minutes ago, David89 said:

Intel made Microcode Updates that bricked computers.

I'm pretty sure the update that "bricked computers" was the Windows patch, not the microcode update.

There were stability issues with one of the Intel made patches (there have been 10 or so Spectre/Meltdown patches, although Microsoft might have bundled some of them together). It's not really a surprise that one of them can have stability issues. It's a very complex issue. But Intel did the right thing and pulled the update back and informed their partners when the issue was discovered.

 

56 minutes ago, David89 said:

Intel tried to sling mud against other manufactures.

Really? You mean the quick comment in their statement that Spectre and Meltdown were not Intel-specific issues and that everyone should update their computers? I think it's a stretch to call that "mud slinging". It's more like correcting misinformation the media was spreading which fooled people into a false sense of security.

 

56 minutes ago, David89 said:

And the worst of all: Intel tried to make the patches Optional. Linus Torvalds doesn't explode like that without any reason. The Kernel Patches Intel supplied where absolute pieces of impudence. Intel is probably the most childish company on this god damn planet - they can't take responsibility unless forced to as has been proven many many times over the years. IMHO it's even worse than Volkswagen, but since nearly every Computer runs with an Intel "thing" inside, nobody seems to care as Intel's PR Department is rather good in covering things up.

This is wrong, and it is clear that you have not looked into the issue more than read some headline.

Intel did not "make the patches optional". What they did was make turning on IBRS the responsibility of other developers rather than make it turned on for everyone by default.

The reason why they did this has actually been explained, and Torvalds was not fully aware of the situation when he lashed out.

Also, I don't think you're familiar with Linus Torvalds. He most certainly "explode like that without any reason". He is quite infamous for it.

 

Here is my summation of the situation (based on my limited knowledge). If you want to read the full response from the developer who implemented IBRS then you can find it here.

On 1/24/2018 at 9:53 AM, LAwLz said:

If I understand it correctly, there are several ways of fixing Spectre, each with their own performance cost and success rate.

 

Linus got mad regarding the way IBRS was implemented as well as what the code suggested would be Intel's future plans.

 

IBRS has a rather large performance hit, and it's a pretty crappy hack to work around limitations in existing hardware (AMD has implemented IBRS too, not just Intel). Since IBRS was designed, Google came up with another solution to the issue called Retpoline. Retpoline has a much smaller performance impact than IBRS and Intel actually patched this into Linux as one of the earliest patches (earlier than IBRS). However, Retpoline does not protect in all scenarios, nor on all processors. To be more precise, in some scenarios Skylake processors are not protected with Retpoline. On top of that, programs also needs to have been compiled using a retpoline aware compiler in order for it to work.

 

That's why Intel made it opt-in. Because there is a higher performing fix already turned on by default, and this particular fix is only needed in specific scenarios, with some processors.

In fact, Linus seems to think that IBRS is completely useless and should have been dropped, but as David explained that would leave some users without the choice of extra protection which might be needed on their particular hardware and software combination.

[cj09beira]

5 hours ago, VegetableStu said:

sorry to go off track for a bit: is the next Threadripper based on Zen+ or Zen 2? o_o

zen+