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NVIDIA GPUs Weren't Immune To Spectre Security Flaws Either (engadget.com)
Nvidia has became the latest chipmaker to release software patches for the Spectre microchip security threat, indicating that the chipset flaw was affecting graphic processors as well as CPUs. From a report: To that end, NVIDIA has detailed how its GPUs are affected by the speculative execution attacks and has started releasing updated drivers that tackle the issue. All its GeForce, Quadro, NVS, Tesla and GRID chips appear to be safe from Meltdown (aka variant 3 of the attacks), but are definitely susceptible to at least one version of Spectre (variant 1) and "potentially affected" by the other (variant 2). The new software mitigates the first Spectre flaw, but NVIDIA is promising future mitigations as well as eventual updates to address the second. Most of the updates are available now, although Tesla and GRID users will have to wait until late January.
Time to switch back to AMD. I would rather have a slower video card than a compromised video card.
The current generation of computers are going to be even slower than the last generation. Nice job all around!
If this is another thing that AMD got right while the competition got it wrong, they're really going to come out looking like the only responsible parties.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
NVIDIA GPUs do not do speculative execution. They do not have access to kernel memory. They are not susceptible to these flaws. These are patches in their drivers to account for CPU (not GPU) exploits. I.E. Intel and AMD flaws. I bet NVIDIA releases a clarification soon.
Wonder what impact this will have on cryptocurrency markets. Regardless of actual slowdown in mining, it is the perception that will probably matter...
Check your premises.
Didn't they forbid datacenters from consumer-level driver upgrades a few days ago?
This is some bad, bad hurt.
Oh noes! The bad guys will access my game textures!
#DeleteFacebook
NVIDIA’s core business is GPU computing. We believe our GPU hardware is immune to the reported security issue and are updating our GPU drivers to help mitigate the CPU security issue. As for our SoCs with ARM CPUs, we have analyzed them to determine which are affected and are preparing appropriate mitigations.
Holy shit this is bad reporting. Nowhere on the Nvidia page does it say that GPUs are actually affected by Spectre or Meltdown. It's in fact impossible since GPUs don't perform speculative execution. On top of that, GPUs don't run kernel code (so cannot leak it), don't run an OS, have a completely different architecture to begin with and so on.
So what's this announcement about? It's a driver update to mitigate Spectre/Meltdown which could potentially affect the driver's CPU code. This has also been confirmed by Nvidia many days ago.
Shameful reporting by Engadget, not that I'm surprised considering they barely qualify as "tech" reporting.
Even if the Nvidia chips are exposed, why would anyone attack a GPU that has no access to any personal information? GPU's store pixel data and other display data not personal data. I guess for myself I would be more concerned about Intel's and AMD's new chip combinations that at least implies a closer connection between the two. Not suggestion a current security threat, but certainly might be a potential target if a flaw were to exist.
These flaws having been introduced so widely and having existed for so long is a side effect of petal to the metal semiconductor advancement. I can only suspect other flaws will be found in time. If this forces an extra layer of thoughtfulness to a technology that stands as the centerpiece of modern civilization and represents (at least to me) the greatest technological realization of the modern scientific age (arguable) then things can only be that much better moving forward. Dye fabrication size is already introducing fantastic new engineering challenges. The more architectural hurdles that can be recognized the better.
I do wonder that if we eventually turn semiconductor design and other future computing technologies over to AI in what now seems likely a very near future, if at some point those tools may introduce features too subtle for us to notice or even understand in order to benefit themselves or itself alone, perhaps even ensuring their own protection. Without ever telling us, of course.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
GP is right. Some tech journalist made a flawed deduction and the resulting entirely false story spread virally, even to slashdot. According to their official statement, Nvidia is simply updating its GPU drivers to help mitigate the CPU security issue, a normal and expected move that will be followed by many software vendors since spectre (specifically CVE-2017-5753) actually represents a new class of security vulnerabilities - like "buffer over-read" but different.
In answer to your post, while GPUs do support branching, they don't engage in branch prediction, which makes them immune. In simple terms, superscalar CPUs process data in a "scalar" fashion, but use all kinds of tricks (like speculative execution) to perform more ops per cycle than would be possible for an equivalent scalar design (hence "super"). While superscalar designs fulfill strong market pressure for high per-thread performance, they comes at the cost of using a lot of silicon (and power). Also, one of these "superscalar tricks" just now has turned out too tricky for its own good.
In contrast, GPUs take a whole different approach in getting around the inherent bottleneck of a scalar design: they perform simple operations on a whole array worth of data at once, and can be seen as a cluster of hundreds of simplified scalar CPUs running in parallel (to give an example of "simplified": they commonly share instruction decoding logic to some extent). The advantage of this approach is that you can use silicon for actual computations that would otherwise be "wasted" on "superscalar tricks", which is why GPUs have such phenomenal computational throughput per unit of power consumption compared to CPUs. The disadvantage is that your workload needs to be optimized for this design, which isn't always possible, leave alone easy. They're great for graphic rendering, though. ;)
Anyhow, given the above, you can see that some would argue that going superscalar would defeat the whole point of a GPU living alongside a CPU in the same box...
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follow the white rabbit...
Knock knock Arkh89
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Well, I for one, would like to thank you for being there.
It is worrisome that everyone is issuing patches for something not entirely their fault. This cannot become a trend.
And today's captcha is reacting
Days ago I got the Win7 update (as Malwarebytes who helps me a LOT in my work patched the registry for it last Friday) early & I suspected DRIVERS would be affected on GAMING (usermode in Win NT 4.0 onward or not, DirectX DOES talk to kernelmode back INTO usermode memory address space) https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11564899&cid=55862769/ (on IP stack PnP hybrid design) & DIRECTLY (pun intended) on DirectX relation to NVidia drivers https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11564899&cid=55862695/
* Yes, folks - it's NOT EASY being "world-class" (like me, lol)...
APK
P.S.=> I am just glad it's all getting fixed - Microsoft did an EXCELLENT job & I'm FASTER for it (I 'felt it' on reboot after patch & LATER TechSpot released FORMAL testing bearing it out https://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=11574131&cid=55874785/)... apk
I find it ironic that the much-maligned Itanium seems to be the only modern processor that Meltdown and Spectre can't break.
My nVidia control panel started crashing after messing around with these Windows meltdown patches.
Maybe these new drivers have something to fix this crap.
Sounds to me that hyper-threading instead of speculation is the way things should have gone.