Slashdot Mirror
Nope, No Intel Chip Recall After Spectre and Meltdown, CEO Says (cnet.com)
Hoping the Meltdown and Spectre security problems might mean Intel would be buying you a shiny new computer after a chip recall? Sorry, that's not on the cards. From a report: Intel famously paid hundreds of millions of dollars to recall its Pentium processors after the 1994 discovery of the "FDIV bug" that revealed rare but real calculation errors. But Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the new problems are much more easily fixed -- and indeed are already well on their way to being fixed, at least in the case of Intel-powered PCs and servers. "This is very very different from FDIV," Krzanich said, criticizing media coverage of Meltdown and Spectre as overblown. "This is not an issue that is not fixable... we're seeing now the first iterations of patches." On Thursday, Intel said it was aiming to fix 90 percent of all Intel products that have been introduced within the past year by end of next week. CNET asked if the company was looking at older Intel processors? From the report: "We're working with [computer makers] to determine which ones to prioritize based on what they see as systems in the field," an executive at the company said. Intel also is fixing the problem in future chips, starting with products that will arrive later this year. Intel is effectively taking the software fixes being released now and building them directly into hardware, he said.
Once the lawsuits come rolling in he won't have a choice. This isn't fixable. The best you can do is mitigate the damage. Good thing he sold all his stock before this went public.
It's not possible recall all the processors that ever existed. Society doesn't have the resources even to think about such a thing.
Besides, computers run software, which is almost infinitely malleable; it can be crafted to mitigate the problems of hardware—as it has always done. So much of programming is about working around someone else's boneheaded mistakes.
Now, that being said, this is actually a good reason to support FOSS. You cannot trust other people (especially large, flush corporations) to care enough about your particular situation to fix up the software so as to mitigate such problems. If only more software in the world were open to inspection, then at least people who really care could go about fixing things themselves, and the rest of you consumer nitwits could at least benefit from their hard work, too.
We'll get there one day.
Caveat Emptor.
Intel offered a product, and you chose to buy it. The whole thing was voluntary. There was no fraud, either; Intel never said its chips were free defects; indeed, anyone who has had even a passing interest in the world of computing knows that a huge amount of software (especially kernel stuff) is devoted hiding and working around hardware-level "quirks" (read: bugs).
If anybody sues Intel, they'll be suing Intel only for providing an optional feature that makes computations faster. That's it. You don't want the security risk? Well, turn off that optional performance optimization.
Bullshit. The suggestion is frankly completely bonkers - there are no similarities at all!
What you are suggesting is that Intel willingly incorporated a security violating bug in order to gain some performance... How the hell would that work out?
No don't respond as it's obvious you don't know enough to answer.
A lot of users won't be impacted. My brothers pissed because this is going to tank performance in the IO heavy strategy games he plays and he bought his i7 specifically to play them. It's looks like enough to knock him down to high end i5 territory. That's about $75-$100 worth of performance gone in a puff of smoke....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It found out about the bug in June and continued to sell defective processors for the last seven months.
So yes, Intel willingly incorporated a security violating bug, for at least the last seven months.