Intel Says Chip-Security Fixes Leave PCs No More Than 10% Slower (axios.com)

Intel trying to defuse concern that fixes to widespread chip security vulnerabilities will slow computers, released test results late Wednesday showing that personal computers won't be affected much and promised more information on servers. From a report: The chipmaker published a table of data showing that older processors handled typical tasks 10 percent slower at most, after being updated with security patches. The information covered three generations of processors, going back to 2015, running Microsoft's Windows 10 and Windows 7 computer operating systems. Further reporting: Intel, Microsoft offer differing views on impact of chip flaw

Comments

But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

I need to hear from people who became experts in CPU design just last week.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[aliquis]

Nice try but the only thing which matter is whatever the statement is true or not.

Intel got billions of reasons to want to spread an image where this doesn't matter much.

Others may have less of a reason. But sure both sides could choose their data and try to exaggerate.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[MachineShedFred]

I don't claim to be any kind of semiconductor engineer, but I am a customer that paid for something, and post-facto have a choice between insecure, or less performance than I paid for.

If you think this is fine, then you are either a paid shill or a deluded fanboy.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[networkBoy]

Well, I'm no shill (and am no longer on Intel's payroll) but am a fanboi.

That said, the position you and Intel are in is commonly referred to by its acronym:
F.U.B.A.R.

There is no realistic recourse for Intel to offer that would satisfy the majority of the install base.

Full replacement at cost is likely to leave a lot of people very angry, and devastate Intel's Fiscal Year, but it is likely the best possible outcome.

Trying to make Intel replace everything affected for free (like with the FDIV bug) is a non starter. Intel can't likely even fab the old chips any more, and even if they could it would still require a redesign, so it's a non-starter. Giving everyone new chips would not be like for like, so you have issues where old software won't run, but is still required, also a non-starter. Additionally, both those options would likely bankrupt the company entirely, meaning people *still* wouldn't get replacements, and you'd have 100K freshly unemployed.

The most likely outcome I see is a rebate/coupon towards the purchase of any system containing a new Intel CPU from any vendor where the dollar value of the rebate is tied to the age/sku of the old CPU, with no or soft requirements to return the old CPU.

What would you (as a consumer) expect?

I likely won't get squat, since all my CPUs are samples that employees were given at various times, or bought via employee purchase channels.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree replacement is not an option - hell many of the chips are soldered in place. I think a refund rather than coupon is the way to go. I'd rather have $50 than a coupon for $50 on their next defective product. Financial penalties should nearly bankrupt companies otherwise there is no incentive to not release defective products. Limiting top execs salaries to 500k for the next 5 years would be a good gesture as well.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

Firing 100k idiots? Actually that's a good idea.
Providing coupons for upgrading? Also good idea.
As always, the best idea is to compromise, lets say, decrease intel's staff by 10%, and give coupons for 10% of the value of the old CPU.
Sounds fair, ain't so?

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think this is fine, then you are either a paid shill or a deluded fanboy.

Can't I just be stupid?

Or apathetic? Most gonna be apathetic.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

You paid for a processor that in the chip programmers refer nice clearly defines the design of the pipeline. The kernel and VM developers specifically chose to ignore the pipeline flush mechanism between task and thread switches in order to achieve more performance without understanding the repercussions of doing so. As such, you received greater performance which you took for granted as though that was the design.

As an OS and to a more limited extent firmware developer, I knew of these problems and chose to ignore them for many years as they provided me a means of producing faster JITs in JavaScript execution engines. In fact, I explicitly exploited these chip flaws to shave massive processing overhead associated with cache coherency.

You simply are claiming you paid for something you clearly didnâ(TM)t understand and are blaming the chip designers who did their due process instead of blaming people like me.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, except that Intel admits this is a flaw.

Why are you trying to shift blame that even Intel is (reluctantly) accepting to someone else?

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

Exaggeration isn't necessary. Even taking Intel at their word, that 10% differential has been their selling point for years. That means the very reason people bought Intel over the competitor is now bunk. At the very least, consumers are due a rebate, and that only (barely) addresses the lost value to those consumers, to say nothing about the damage Intel caused to its competitors in peddling this lie.

The 10% figure sure sounds negligible... until you give it more than five seconds of critical thought. Any way you slice it, Intel reaped illegitimate profits. And instead of making it right, they're busy trying to discredit the very people who have supported them over the years: their customers. This is the gold standard of how not to handle a situation like this.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

So send me the 10% back. $1000 cpu for a gaming rig, but $100 plus tax in the mail!

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel gave the programmers this "feature" to use or abuse. They allowed this to be done, and knew the dangers, yet continued anyway designing CPUs like that for many more years.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

The CPU is still good for gaming and much more for a long time yet .. I simply do not see the big deal. This time the Windows / Linux / macOS patch will slow things some, probably near imperceptibly for most folks, next time the patch will be honed to speed things up. Be thankful they are working so hard to make things safer for people. Quit complaining.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

So says the intel shill.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[eclectro]

Intel can't likely even fab the old chips any more, and even if they could it would still require a redesign, so it's a non-starter.

I disagree. They would only need to do one redesign, because the architecture is the same across many different chip families. And why the flaw stretches back to 1995 in the first place.

The bigger question would be to repackage the chips to the various sockets (and voltages) where they may no longer have the specific packaging machines in place to do so.

But this is Intel with the world's best engineers. If they say they can't do it, it will give the appearance that they are being lazy and dragging their feet because they need to protect the stock sell their CEO had back in November.

On the other hand, if they really did have the best engineers eager to get the job done, they might see this as a way to create new technology that they could turn around and sell that could perhaps also extend the lifetime of legacy systems.

People should be upset for being forced to be on an upgrade mill anyway!

Re:But what of the blowhards

[aliquis]

It's very hard to put a price on it.

Right now I use the Samsung EVO 850 SSD and there it was just 4K performance which was impacted 10-12%. So not an average for my system.

However it's bought with the intent of gaming, streaming, virtual machines and security/encryption (and yeah, disk access isn't irrelevant too then again to get the good stuff HEDT / ThreadRipper is the way to go.)

I've basically paid twice the price over B350 + Ryzen 5 1600 for Z370 + i7 8700K for what isn't twice the performance but just a bit more performance because I wanted to have that extra performance. Ryzen 2 and this bug kinda removes that.

In a professional scenario whatever streaming, virtual machines, rendering, databases or what not the value of the product you may be much more valuable than the equipment you use to produce it and there a 20% performance difference may mean much more than a 20% price of the tool you use.

Also of course the risk / it's likely the case that running virtual machines and running faster storage (I do own an Optane stick too) will have more of an impact than those 10-12%.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[CaptainDork]

You are so full of shit.

Gaming calls for pushing the edges everywhere possible.

Go to the forums, look at the convos and don't bother reporting back here.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[CaptainDork]

This is the time for all good chip makers to come to the aid of new customers and emphasize the 10% penalty of Intel vs clean design.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[CaptainDork]

Be apathetic. I don't care.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

What would you (as a consumer) expect?

To be made whole. I will let the courts decide tht

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Espectr0]

i spent $260 on an i7-8700 a month ago, partly because intel had the better performance single core in gaming. If intel's patch decreases 10% in performance, and amd's upcoming spectre patch doesn't, then you could say that i wouldn't have made the same purchase today. so i don't believe it's crazy to get a 10% refund, or at the very least, a rebate in that amount for a future cpu.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

Shills are out in force tonight ;P

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

> Full replacement at cost is likely to leave a lot of people very angry, and devastate Intel's Fiscal Year, but it is likely the best possible outcome.

That seems unreasonable. We're still getting 90% (or better, supposedly) of what we asked for.

I think it would be reasonable to expect a 10% discount on the next Intel CPU, though, and Intel should eat the hit to their profits that would result.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

A good 80% of users do not use their computing device to its maximums. So for that 80% (phones, tvs, laptops, low end desktops, most HP/Dell shit) they will not notice any significant change.

Anyone that games knows that a faster CPU is the one with a higher clock speed, not more cores. So if you paid for the 6 or 8 core CPU, you already sacrificed 20% of the CPU to get those cores. So the gamers who will notice, will be the ones who bought the slower multi cores.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel made this upgrade problem themselves.

  If you have a DDR2 or DDR3 system, you would need to upgrade to DDR4, and replace the CPU,MB, RAM and even the Chasis.

And if you bought something like an iMac, laptop or other ITX or NUC system, you have to throw away the entire thing.

As much as I want to fault Intel for this, it really is not a problem with the CPU, it is a problem with how operating systems are designed with naive assumptions that out of order execution is garbage collected. The fix at the ASIC level would require something like a 'kernel bit' which would prevent user space from reading/writing to it, or doing it the same way AMD does at a higher performance penalty.

Ultimately people are being way too stupid about this. The largest performance impairment will be Amazon Web Services, and similar cloud/VPS. I would short all these companies around earnings for the next two quarters as they are forced to buy 20% more hardware just to retain customers.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[HiThere]

Don't consider the Spectre patch. All the major CPUs are vulnerable to Spectre. It's Meltdown where there is a significant difference.

Also, it's not yet clear to me that Spectre can be patched in the current chip designs (any of them) without disabling speculative execution. That's more than the 10% penalty. (How much more? I've no idea.)

This is quite annoying as I'd been thinking it was time to start considering buying a new computer, but now it looks as if buying one with one of this or the upcoming generation of chips is a bad mistake with no way around it. The chips that I need are the ones that haven't yet been designed.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, any amount of slowdown is too much. And how much do you want to bet that 10% figure only applies to the absolute latest Intel CPUs running Spyware 10?

Intel and Microsoft are going to milk this for as much as they possibly can.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you bought something like an iMac, you have to throw away the entire thing.

I'm not seeing a downside.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds fair, as long as I have the choice to use that coupon to buy an AMD-based system.

Otherwise it's exactly like a class action settlement where you get cash recompense that can only be used in the store that screwed you. Surely you're not advocating for that slimy method of redress?

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't impair desktops in any significant way unless you are running the CPU full tilt in a Bitcoin mining rig or running MMORPG gold farming bots in Virtual machines.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

No. You sue them and get your money back. You don't have to follow the lemmings to a $5 coupon

Re:But what of the blowhards

[fox171171]

We're still getting 90% (or better, supposedly) of what we asked for.

I think it would be reasonable to expect a 10% discount on the next Intel CPU, though, and Intel should eat the hit to their profits that would result.

What about folks who can't currently afford anything new, and have an Intel based system that just manages to play the games they like to play? Well 90% of what they paid for might not cut it. Is a 10% discount on something new any good to them? Not when they can't afford the other 90% to get something new. A 10% rebate won't be that helpful as their computer stutters through their games.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Narcocide]

That last 10% performance edge costs a hell of a lot more than 10% of the total price, and you know it. Everyone has always known it.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Narcocide]

Well, some of us have always known the reason was bunk. Now it's just obvious to everyone else, too.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Narcocide]

No, the 10% of cost part is not fair at all. If you want to be fair they would have to refund the difference in cost over the equivalent AMD offering these customers would otherwise have purchased at the time. Remember, that last 10% of performance is a lot more than 10% of the total cost. The actual number is going to be closer to 50% of the retail value of the chip in most cases.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

repackage the chips to the various sockets (and voltages) where they may no longer have the specific packaging machines in place to do so.

I am sure the packaging machines can be reprogrammed with the programs they ran before. However, I am equally strongly in support of the use of cruel and inhuman torture on Intel for the plethora of sockets and voltages.

In particular, the "genius" who came up with an 1155 pin socket and an 1156 pin one that is incompatible with it should be tarred* and feathered before being hung, drawn and quartered.

* I have no objection to him being bzipped as well.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

I like your suggestion. I went with Intel solely based on the performance specs. Now I find out that I will have to loose that plus some. And I paid a premium for it. So of course I expect something. If they offer a rebate/coupon then I would expect the coupon to offer significantly more value. When you factor the motherboard in (because intel refuses to adopt a standard socket design) then the loss of value us even greater.

Now if I factor in all of that then my "older" system (3-4 years but still keeps up with benchmarks) I still expect at least $100-$200 back to help me rebuild with non-affected tech. And that assumes I can find a compatable motherboard that takes my now older ddr3 ram. (Note: I am not expecting them to pay for everything, just help me upgrade my system so that I am no longer affected by this.)

Ya this does not look good for Intel. But as a consumer, should I not expect something back? Why should I have to take a "loss" at no fault of my own.

Re:But what of the blowhards

[AmiMoJo]

I'm looking for cash so I can spend it on an AMD CPU, not a voucher for more Intel crap. The law backs me up here - the UK Sale of Goods Act require Intel to either fix the problem quickly (impossible) or give me cash in compensation.

I've had about 50% of the expected life out of my systems with Intel CPUs. Of course, writing the CPU off (server is now unable to cope with the workloads I require) means also replacing the motherboard, RAM and OS (Windows 8 doesn't support modern CPUs). Unfortunately I'll need to replace the PSU as well (long story), and spend several hours working on the change over.

I already opened a support case with Intel about this. After that it's small claims court.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I want to fault Intel for this, it really is not a problem with the CPU, it is a problem with how operating systems are designed with naive assumptions that out of order execution is garbage collected.

Not at all. Model of execution is strictly sequential. OoO execution, caching, speculation and the like are hardware implementation details to boost performance, and should have no effect on program semantics and visible state. The bulk of the problem stems from the fact that speculation leaves visible traces, compounded by disregard for protection domains in Intel's case.

Re: But what of the blowhards

[aliquis]

Except that's bullshit.

Until the last year or two quad-cores did fine but now quad-cores without hyper-threading is limiting games and more cores are better for some.

Also the i7 8700K can be overclocked to ~4.9 GHz without delid and 5-5.2 or so with.

The i7 8600K maybe you can reach 5.1 GHz or so without delid so you gain 200 MHz or 4% but you lose hyper-threading for 6 cores ..

I can stream game-play with 1.5-7% processor load (1.5-6 mbps x264), so I guess the best would be to put OBS on one core and the game on the other five, anyway in that scenario of course the i7 8700K is better than say an i5 7600K (i3 8350K by now.)

Re:But what of the blowhards

[strikethree]

Additionally, both those options would likely bankrupt the company entirely, meaning people *still* wouldn't get replacements, and you'd have 100K freshly unemployed.

Isn't this what should happen in a capitalist system? Those who are unfit to survive, die. General Motors should have been allowed to fail; instead, nothing changed and we keep getting crappy vehicles from them. The same will happen here with Intel.

Privatize gains and socialize losses is a winning strategy!

Someone needs to make processors. Those 100k employees will not stay unemployed forever. Besides, they have unemployment to rely on, right? (lol)

So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel was knowingly breaking security to make their crap seem faster.

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[aliquis]

Even with this change FX wouldn't become faster.

I also assume it wasn't supposed to have these consequences when designed.

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Anonymous Coward]

They were told about it over 20 years ago, by the very people who were most likely to exploit it before it became public knowledge...

On 8 May 1995, a paper called "The Intel 80x86 Processor Architecture: Pitfalls for Secure Systems" published at the 1995 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy warned against covert timing channel in CPU cache and translation lookaside buffer (TLB).[23] This analysis was performed under the auspices of the National Security Agency's Trusted Evaluation Program (TPEP).

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where's your proof they knew about this prior to being notified by the researchers that found it?

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I also assume it wasn't supposed to have these consequences when designed." How do you arrive at that assumption? They've been paid to backdoor already.

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the internet, snowflake. Intel were warned about this AGES ago, and did nothing. If you want evidence, just ask google instead of asking to be spoon fed.

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here:

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/2209/42809262c17b6631c0f6536c91aaf7756857.pdf

It's very unlikely Intell had not come across that document given where it appeared.

It's not the only one. Do search at your leisure...

Re: So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, multitenent applications executing in multiple threads within the same process have the same exact problems on AMD as on Intel. The same fixes are needed and the same performance degradation is needed.

You can still use JavaScript exploits on web pages to steal information from other web pages and the browser cache on AMD. So, a well written JavaScript exploit could for example keylog and steal your credit card information across threads on either Intel or AMD so long as both pages are rendered in the same process even if across different threads.

So, if you patch the Intel chips and not the AMD chips, itâ(TM)s like the Mac users who donâ(TM)t run antivirus because they believe their computers donâ(TM)t need them.

Re: So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Anonymous Coward]

NO, that is what Intel is trying to message, but that is not what researchers have reported.
AMD is exposed to the Spectre flaw, which Intel has attempted to cross-link to Meltdown

Here is the relevant section from wikipedia:

Affected hardware[edit]
The Meltdown vulnerability primarily affects Intel microprocessors.[41] It is assumed that the vulnerability does not affect AMD microprocessors.[18][42][43][44] Intel has countered that the flaws affect all processors,[45] but AMD has denied this, claiming that there is virtually no chance for their processors to be affected by Meltdown due to the architectural differences of their processors.[46] Researchers have indicated that the Meltdown vulnerability is exclusive to Intel processors, while the Spectre vulnerability can possibly affect some Intel, AMD, and ARM processors.

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been paid to backdoor already.

Citation needed.

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[aliquis]

Part of the enforcement is that you don't tell about it.

My first thought was if the flaw was put there with intent too.

That may not make sense with my comment about how I didn't thought so but that was from different perspectives, that of the NSA, CIA and FBI and that of the engineers/designers of Intel with the goal of creating as good of a processor as they could.

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[nuckfuts]

Intel was knowingly breaking security to make their crap seem faster.

Branch prediction doesn't seem faster. It is faster.

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[HiThere]

Both chips did branch prediction, AMD just checked address validity before the speculative execution rather than afterwards. This allowed Intel chips to be faster at executing the code by ignoring certain (apparently known) security problems.

But whether it was actually faster or not can be disputed, because Intel is also known to have gamed compilers to disadvantage AMD. In that case they made the AMD chips seem slower by cheating. The question is how many of the benchmarks were done with the altered compilers. And this is where the accusation that Intel made their chips *seem* faster gains validity.

Re:So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Narcocide]

It's funny, I remember being at work when they announced this speculative execution crap. I remember thinking to myself "wait... that doesn't sound very secure..." and my co-workers suggested not to worry as it would be years before anyone discovered an exploit. I was uneasy, but I wasn't holding any Intel stock either, so I shrugged it off and moved on with my day. Funny how the past catches up like that.

Re: So AMD processors were faster all along?

[Jesus H Rolle]

The NSA publicly warned Intel about this flaw back in 1995?? Nothing makes sense anymore

Mac OSX UPdate

[Anonymous Coward]

So, it's not me. I installed the Mac OSX update last night and my Mini is a little bit sluggish. I

Re:Mac OSX UPdate

[Anonymous Coward]

Your Mini is a little bit sluggish because there hasn't been a new model in over 3 years, and it wasn't exactly cracking to begin with, being essentially low-wattage laptop bits in a tiny desktop.

Re: Mac OSX UPdate

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this modded down? lol I guess facts aren't relevant.

Everything he posted is 100% fact.

Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

Put into context, my US state's sales tax was 5% and it went up to 6% a few years ago. Everyone was pissed by a 1% change (and I still think about it when I make some purchases based on how it increases the price).

So 10% slower for "typical" tasks seems like our computers had a minor stroke. There should be a discount on future Intel chips based on owning a current one, but that won't happen.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[SlaveToTheGrind]

my US state's sales tax was 5% and it went up to 6% a few years ago. Everyone was pissed by a 1% change

That's a 20% change.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[eepok]

Oh you and your sneaky use of percentages with very small values!

My favorite: "Did you you age slower and slower every year? True story. Going from 1 y/o to 2 y/o, you've increased in age by 100%. Going from 100 y/o to 101 y/o, you're aging only 1%. Isn't life amazing?"

Re: Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude. STFU. Are you seriously defending Intel? Sorry that your hardware sucks and you have no use for it ,anyways. In fact, you are using it to make the world a worst place. Congratulations.

Re: Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you expect that youâ(TM)ll live to 100, then going from age 1 to age 2 only takes away ~1% of your life expectancy, but going from 50 to 51 takes away 2%, or 100% more of your life expectancy

death is certain, kill youâ(TM)re self

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like you're a Trump cabinet member. Secretary of the Fuckwits?

Re:Oh, just 10%

[hey!]

The relevant base to calculate from depends on what you're focused on.

Take an increase of sales tax from 5% to 6%. If you're focused on how much money you're giving to your local government, 20% is the correct figure to use. If you're focused on the effective change in total prices, 1% is the correct figure to use.

What computer users are naturally focused on is the amount of CPU capacity available for work. A 10% reduction in that is significant, but not catastrophic for most users. In fact many might not ever see any perceptible difference. However, in computer performance there is a powerful, non-linear difference between "just barely enough" and "not quite enough" resources. That means some users are bound to experience this marginal reduction in power as a dramatic difference on some workloads.

Re: Oh, just 10%

[Megol]

And this is why one shouldn't argue on the Internet: there are a lot of anonymous idiots.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Jason1729]

Why does that surprise you? Going from 1 to 2 years your life and existence go through amazing changes you learn so much, ever experience is huge and shapes who or what you are. The year seems to last forever because you are experiencing and changing so much. You've become a completely different person in that year, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Going from 100 to 101 you don't really change much, it's a tiny blip in your life that seems to go by in a blink.

If you have a 1 year old child when you're 19 years old, you are 19 times their age. A year later you're only 10 times their age. You've also gone from 19 times their life experiences to only 10 times their life experience. They really have gained a whole lot more than you have and they really have closed the gap between you and them. There's a huge difference between a 2 and 20 year old there's a heck of a lot less difference between a 72 and 90 year old. So yes, the gap is shrinking every year.

So, the only question is ..... why do you find this to be strange or unusual?

Re: Oh, just 10%

[Archtech]

"Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and the pig enjoys it". - George Bernard Shaw

Re:Oh, just 10%

[mnemotronic]

My gramma had a good saying: If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all. Otherwise I'll have to rip off your miserable balls and stuff them down your fucking throat. Now run along and play. There's a good boy..

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

while that remark is technically correct it's a misleadingly obnoxious misinterpreted technicality of the previous remark, and you know what he/she meant.

he/she is logically thinking 1% added to the previous tax value and result in an end tax of 6% over the income and the way you reply make it sound as if he/she suffered an added 16% end tax value on top of the previous 5% that changed to 6% as if now he/she is paying 6%+14% added that would make final tax value change to 20% as you would misleadingly imply.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah dude. Percentages are amazing. How-many[1] is awesome.

But what about plus[2], take-away[3] and times[4].
They’re awesome too! You should check them out!

[1] Division
[2] Addition
[3] Subtraction
[4] Multiplication

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

20% is a matter of perspective. The sales tax increased by 1%. It was a 20% change from the current value, but it's an extra 1% tax on top of the existing sales tax (adding versus multiplying).

Ironically the captcha is "deltas".

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

17.5%... unless I'm mistaken.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[EndlessNameless]

A 10% reduction in that is significant, but not catastrophic for most users.

That 10% is also an average, with some loads seeing a greater hit. I imagine the people on the tail end of the distribution are going to be very unhappy. Also, Intel is only considering processors from the last 3 years, whereas Microsoft has stated publicly that older processors see an even greater hit.

Most enterprises replace their equipment on a 2-4 year cycle, depending on the business. For them, 3-year-old processors are either trash or on the chopping block for the next tech refresh. They will grumble, but they won't really care once the frenzy of patching is done. Home users---especially those on a budgets---are more likely to run into the larger performance hits that Intel isn't discussing.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

shut the fuck up.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine the people on the tail end of the distribution are going to be very unhappy

One gaming company ( EPIC ) had a screenshot of their servers performance pre and post meltdown patch performance. Their CPU usage doubled.

https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/forums/news/announcements/132642-epic-services-stability-update

Re: Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, I've noticed an awful lot of named idiots too. :)

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see it being a big issue on low end computers, particularly, if as is often the case, they have lots of crapware installed.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

shut the fuck up.

hehe. continuing with the i'm part of the problem not part of the solution theme, that's what sister teresa-catalonia would whisper to me when nobody could hear.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

And also, I paid 1000USD for those 10%!

Re:Oh, just 10%

[HiThere]

One place I worked replaced about 1/10th of the computers every year. If you were lucky and got a new one, your old one went to someone with an older computer. So about 1/10th of the people had a computer 10 years old. Not quite, as if a computer died, it was replaced and not counted, but that didn't happen too often.

Re: Oh, just 10%

[Megol]

True. :)

Re: Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post makes me want to sqrt. Sqrt!!! Sqrt! Sqrrrrrt!!!

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

It was increased by 1 percent point, or 20%.
Saying is was increased by 1% is simply incorrect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Oh, just 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

20% is a matter of perspective. The sales tax increased by 1%. It was a 20% change from the current value, but it's an extra 1% tax on top of the existing sales tax (adding versus multiplying).

Ironically the captcha is "deltas".

No, it increased by one percentage point. It did not increase by 1%. It did increase 20%.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[david_thornley]

There's also the question of what the computer is doing. If the computer is doing one specific task (email, WoW, whatever), the question is whether there's enough CPU to do that one task, and even with a 10% reduction in speed the answer is "almost certainly". If the computer is compiling a large codebase (one of my common activities at work), then a 10% slowdown might mean I surf Slashdot 10% more, and get less work done. If it's a server, a 10% reduction in performance can mean having to have 11% more servers, which is going to be more than 11% more expense.

Re:Oh, just 10%

[david_thornley]

Which is why I haven't mentioned Windows 10 in a while.

But the IME flaw remains, what else is in there?

[Anonymous Coward]

These people lied about every aspect of each of these major vulnerabilities. 10% is whatever, that's bad but worse is that NOBODY CAN TRUST INTEL WHATSOEVER, and they are the market leader.

Their obfuscation of the meltdown issue is unreasonably bad management, and their CEO sold a ton of shares right as the company secretly found out a year ago? The combination is absolutely toxic.

Clean house or watch it burn.

Older Chips?

[gettin2old]

According to their chart, he oldest CPU they tested is 2.5 years old. Giving that some more proactive businesses have a 3+ year retention rate on hardware, "older" is hardly the word i'd use.

Re:Older Chips?

[amicusNYCL]

I noticed the same thing. Just the other week I was marveling at how hardware had finally slowed down on the rate of increase (I don't think things have been doubling in speed every 18 months for quite a while now). My gaming computer was built in 2011 when Skyrim came out, and it can still run the majority of games today at very reasonable levels. So I see the article testing chips that were made in 2015 wondering if everyone else is still trying to upgrade every couple years or so. I've got an i5-2500K and Geforce 560 which can run Witcher 3 at a very good detail level and framerate.

Re:Older Chips?

[ripvlan]

I noticed the same thing. I still have a perfectly viable i7 quad-core (gaming) laptop from c.2010. No CPU patch for me?!

Since there currently aren't processors (from Intel) that correctly handle BOTH issues - why should I upgrade my old PC? I'd be paying money to buy a defective product - and waiting years for a better one to come along. If anything I'll wait for "next year" and CPUs that have circuitry to better handle the work-around. Video cards have the same problem!

On the other hand - I'll realistically take a risk based approach and wait for the first real exploit. Since the Browser is the most likely surface area on my PC - I want to see this Javascript that can perform the attack. If somebody makes it onto my PC through other means - I already have bigger issues. The point is - making sure the browser isn't the Easy vector.

Re: Older Chips?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the whitepaper, something as simple as a for loop while reading a large uninitialized array will return content from other processes. Exploit code is already here

Re:Older Chips?

[drinkypoo]

Since there currently aren't processors (from Intel) that correctly handle BOTH issues - why should I upgrade my old PC?

Obviously, you should upgrade to AMD because mitigation is cheap and they have been more scrupulous than Intel all along.

Re:Older Chips?

[jrumney]

I have an almost 4 year old Sandy Bridge server which I updated 2 days ago to Ubuntu Linux kernel 4.4.0-108 and it still hasn't rebooted. That is just a tad more than a 10% slowdown.

Re:Older Chips?

[david_thornley]

I'd have to get a new motherboard. Of course, if replacing my current Intel CPU would require a new motherboard, it makes the decision easier. Besides, I can just buy an AMD CPU that isn't susceptible to Meltdown, and I don't think Intel's selling one now.

Great, then give me...

[Anonymous Coward]

...back no more than 10% of the money I've spent on fundamentally insecure Intel processors over the last couple of decades.

Re:Great, then give me...

[HiThere]

Yes, it is definitely Intel's intention to not give you more than 10% of the money you've spent on their products. (0% *is* less than 10% isn't it?)

What about older CPUs?

[SolarAxix]

While I donâ(TM)t have specific numbers at hand, I would think that the majority of active computers with Intel CPUs contain CPUs that were released before 2015.

Intel should release a statement that would cover CPUs that have been released since 2010 (because itâ(TM)s a round number and would probably cover a good majority of system). Microsoftâ(TM)s statement seem to indicate a bigger penalty for older CPUs which Intelâ(TM)s does not cover.

Re:What about older CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop posting with your iphone

Re:What about older CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Time to start down-modding these posts.

Re:What about older CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does any other website have this problem?

Maybe time to down-mod this website?

Re: What about older CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Turn off Smart Punctuation please.

Re:What about older CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel should release a statement that would cover CPUs that have been released since 2010 (because itâ(TM)s a round number and would probably cover a good majority of system). Microsoftâ(TM)s statement seem to indicate a bigger penalty for older CPUs which Intelâ(TM)s does not cover.

Actually, it's before 2010. I've got a few Intel Core 2 Quad processors, and they face the web. I think they were released in 2007 or 2008.

Re: What about older CPUs?

[Anne Thwacks]

Turn off Smart Punctuation please.

Turn it off? Surely this is a case for nuking from high orbit!

Re:What about older CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Alright, I'm just going to have to start doing all my computing on my 8751BH. Now, if I can find some sequential sunny days to clear the UV-EPROM....

I kid... I kid...

Note they only go back to 6th generation

[Hal_Porter]

I.e. the 6700K.

I.e. all the chips have PCID

It's a bit hazy when PCID and INVPCID became supported.

This says PCID was first supported in Westmere

https://www.realworldtech.com/...

Another long overdue improvement to the page tables is the Processor Context ID (PCID). The PCID is a field in each TLB entry that associates a given page to a process. Previously, Intel's TLB could only contain entries from a single process and whenever the CR3 register was written (e.g. a context switch), the TLB was flushed. The PCID lets pages from different processes safely inhabit the TLB together, so that CR3 writes no longer flush the TLB. Whenever a process tries to access a page in memory, the PCID is checked to determine whether the page is actually mapped into the process' address space; if the PCID does not match then a TLB miss occurred. This is very much analogous to Intel's VPID, which enables the TLB to contain pages from different virtual machines and avoid TLB flushes during VM transitions.

The LWN patch says

http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/l...

PCIDs are generally available on Sandybridge and newer CPUs. However,
the accompanying INVPCID instruction did not become available until
Haswell (the ones with "v4", or called fourth-generation Core). This
instruction allows non-current-PCID TLB entries to be flushed without
switching CR3 and global pages to be flushed without a double
MOV-to-CR4.

I.e. it'd be interesting to see what happens on a CPU old enough not to support enough of PCID/INVPCID to optimized KPTI.

The claims of >10% hits are all for these old CPUs.

Re:Note they only go back to 6th generation

[erapert]

So this now puts Intel chips right in line with AMD's Ryzen per-core performance... except Ryzen costs less and delivers more cores.
I wish I'd bought AMD stock two years ago...

Re:Note they only go back to 6th generation

[Hal_Porter]

Interesting thing is that PCID predates INVPCID. And you can get some of the effects of an INVPCID on a processor which only supports PCID.

I.e.

http://forum.osdev.org/viewtop...

MOV to CR3. The behavior of the instruction depends on the value of CR4.PCIDE:

If CR4.PCIDE = 0, the instruction invalidates all TLB entries associated with PCID 000H except those for global pages. It also invalidates all entries in all paging-structure caches associated with PCID 000H.

If CR4.PCIDE = 1 and bit 63 of the instructionâ(TM)s source operand is 0, the instruction invalidates all TLB entries associated with the PCID specified in bits 11:0 of the instructionâ(TM)s source operand except those for global pages. It also invalidates all entries in all paging-structure caches associated with that PCID. It is not required to invalidate entries in the TLBs and paging-structure caches that are associated with other PCIDs.

If CR4.PCIDE = 1 and bit 63 of the instructionâ(TM)s source operand is 1, the instruction is not required to invalidate any TLB entries or entries in paging-structure caches.

See
https://www.intel.com/content/... page 145

This chap tried it, and apparently it works

http://www.dumais.io/index.php...

I.e. with bit 63 and 0:11 set to PCID a write to CR3 works like INVPCID in processors which don't have INVPCID.

This actually makes a difference. My 2012 Macbook pro has a

machdep.cpu.brand_string: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3210M CPU @ 2.50GHz
machdep.cpu.features: FPU VME DE PSE TSC MSR PAE MCE CX8 APIC SEP MTRR PGE MCA CMOV PAT PSE36 CLFSH DS ACPI MMX FXSR SSE SSE2 SS HTT TM PBE SSE3 PCLMULQDQ DTES64 MON DSCPL VMX EST TM2 SSSE3 CX16 TPR PDCM SSE4.1 SSE4.2 x2APIC POPCNT AES PCID XSAVE OSXSAVE TSCTMR AVX1.0 RDRAND F16C

I.e. assuming the patches know the bit 63 set in writes to cr3 trick, they should be able to do page table invalidation per PCID even on rather old chips.

It looks like KAISER on Linux supports/will support this

https://github.com/nathanchanc...

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/... [currently down(!) but the title is "Subject [PATCH 4/6] x86/mm/kaiser: Support PCID without INVPCID"]

Re:Note they only go back to 6th generation

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop posting with your iphone.

Re:Note they only go back to 6th generation

[PhrostyMcByte]

Well, hold on. Intel gets the added slowdown that any I/O is going to take a lot more cycles to perform than it used to, but AMD isn't out of the hot seat either. The Spectre variant that AMD is also vulnerable to is going to cause an even larger general-purpose slowdown to fix. Any app with the fix will have effectively disabled branch target prediction, which many modern programming languages depend on being fast.

So for instance, the ~10% slowdown Intel measured on some worst-case Javascript is also going to apply to AMD. It might be more or less depending on how well optimized AMD's branch target prediction implementation is.

Re:Note they only go back to 6th generation

[EndlessNameless]

At most, Intel will adjust prices downward to compensate for the performance delta.

This single event isn't enough to turn AMD's fortunes around. AMD's financial woes cut far deeper than a single quarter or even an entire year can fix.

Re: Note they only go back to 6th generation

[Anonymous Coward]

Only Intel is vulnerable to Meltdown when it comes to x86/64 PCs.
They are both impacted by gravity and the laws of physics.
We don't bring up gravity and the speed of light in typical discussions because they affect both CPUs about equally. Similarly, Spectre doesn't matter.

Re:Note they only go back to 6th generation

[TeknoHog]

I wish I'd bought AMD stock two years ago...

Neither AMD nor Intel stock price has moved much after the Meltdown/Spectre news. It looks like Intel's propaganda machine is running on AMD.

Re:Note they only go back to 6th generation

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume Meltdown/Spectre will have the greatest impact on Intel's stock price after they release the first quarterly results containing sales affected by the bug.

Re:Note they only go back to 6th generation

[luther349]

amd is just as effected as intel on this. the first issue no but all chips are weak to the second even newer 64bit arm

Re: Note they only go back to 6th generation

[luther349]

no there only going back that far with the patch but every chip sense the first core series are effected.

Re:Note they only go back to 6th generation

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I'd bought AMD stock two years ago...

Or bitcoin, or got on the dotcom boom at just the right time and off it before the crash.

Risks are risks. The reason you aren't homeless is because you don't take all of them.

Re: Note they only go back to 6th generation

[Anonymous Coward]

While they are both affected by spectre, the performance impact from fixes may not. I'd like to buy a new PC. I'd desperately like new benchmarks run for intel and AMD with full mitigation or fixes implemented for both meltdown and spectre, but these don't yet exist because not all fixes have even been released yet.

Re: Note they only go back to 6th generation

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy, buy AMD. Done.

huh?

[jbmartin6]

Is 10 percent "at most" supposed to be reassuring?

Re:huh?

[gfxguy]

I work in computer graphics.... the impact of a render farm running 10% slower is HUGE.

Re:huh?

[KingMotley]

And most likely a graphics rendering farm will see 0-1% difference, if you actually care.

Re:huh?

[Jason1729]

Considering most of the last 10 years each generation of chip has brought about 5% more performance, I'd say 10% is a horrible loss in performance.

And once you're at the more expensive part of the price/performance curve, that extra 10% performance costs a fortune .

10% is actually a lot worse than I'd expected.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

If your renderfarm is letting anonymous users run their own code... you're doing it wrong.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing a render farm is using GPUs that aren't affected, right?

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't expect to see any decrease in performance on my various Haswell processors, as my applications are not of the sort that would be affected by the patches.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad thing that Nvidia recently published news that their GPUs were affected, right?

Re:huh?

[jwhyche]

How about we demand a 10% refund on our chips? I wonder how that would fly. I think replacement would be a better offer though.

Re:huh?

[jwhyche]

I doubt that most users would even notice a 10% difference. I've applied all the appropriate patches and I haven't noticed any difference in performance. Still that being said, I didn't pay for 90% performance. I paid for 100% performance, and I expect to have it.

I switched from AMD to Intel for this cycles build. I'm starting to rethink that.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

If those GPUs rely on syscalls, then they are affected.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

10% means 1 of each 10 chickens will be killed.

10% in datacenter means equivalently 1 of each 10 computers will be shut down and wasting 10% of electricity for nothing.

10% wasting in electricity means you will pay 10% more on electricity cash each year.

Re:huh?

[gfxguy]

I was addressing the point that 10% can't be considered "only."

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

So Intel owes everyone a 10% rebate.

Re:huh?

[djrobxx]

How about we demand a 10% refund on our chips? I wonder how that would fly. I think replacement would be a better offer though.

I don't think a 10% refund covers it. Depending on how cutting edge your processor was when you bought it, you may have paid a pretty steep premium to get an extra 10% performance vs lower speed processors. If you look through the chart, small performance differences can have huge costs associated with them.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/h...

Re:huh?

[Isaac-Lew]

Unless you're running CPU-intensive task(s), you're not anywhere close to using 100% of your available CPU cycles.

Re:huh?

[luther349]

people dont get that 10% will only be for certen use cases sense most games are not cpu heavy you probably wont see any difference at all.

Re:huh?

[sjames]

Try an I/O heavy batch process. You'll notice.

Re:huh?

[sjames]

I'll bet Intel wouldn't characterize THAT 10% as insignificant.

Re:huh?

[AmiMoJo]

10% lower performance chips cost about 30-40% less at the high end.

Re:huh?

[Anne Thwacks]

10% wasting in electricity means you will pay 10% more on electricity cash each year.

10% wasting in electricity means the data centre will pay 10% more on electricity cash each year.

10% extra cost to the data centre means you will pay 20% more cash each year.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is 10 percent "at most" supposed to be reassuring?

Yes.

And when you read between the lines you also see that the statement only applies to "typical tasks" which translates into "checking Facebook and YouTube".
Anything else and you may experience a 1% slowdown or a 99% one, whatever, that isn't important.
The important thing is that we have this case here where the slowdown is 10% and that isn't much right?

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want a 10% refund, that would mean Intel gets to keep 90% of the money while I want to replace my Intel CPU with one from AMD.

Re:huh?

[fox171171]

people dont get that 10% will only be for certen use cases sense most games are not cpu heavy you probably wont see any difference at all.

Cities Skylines. Very CPU intensive. Population and traffic simulation. It's going to lower the city size you can simulate.

Re:huh?

[david_thornley]

One of my cow-orkers says he was way slowed down by the patch. Currently, we have a volunteer for the patch who will tell us what it does to our compile times.

Re:huh?

[ChrisMaple]

Please learn English.

Re:huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would hazard a guess that the impact of a render farm running 10% slower, is that it runs 10% slower. That is you'd need 11% more resources to compensate. Is that "HUGE", I wouldn't describe it that way, it is certainly significant, but whether or not you'd consider it huge is a matter of perspective.

This is basic maths, not rocket science.

Desktop machines with slow ass SSD

[aliquis]

https://newsroom.intel.com/edi...
https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-...
i7 8700K Windows 10 SSD
SYSMark 2014 SE Responsiveness 88%

So even then it's a larger impact than 10%. On the latest processor. But the system used had their 600p SSD which is really slow. How about the 960 Pro or their Optane stuff?

As for what the responsiveness test actually test I don't know (may be possible to google that) but file-performance and virtualization may be worse.

There will be cases where the impact is beyond 10%, a 10% average would be pretty crappy. Mind you that you can get a B350 board and a Ryzen 5 1600 processor for about half the price of a Z370 board and an Intel i7 8700K.

That is huge

[110010001000]

If Intel is admitting a 10% slowdown then it must be much much larger. Because Intel and benchmarks don't live in reality.

Re:That is huge

[thegarbz]

If Intel is admitting a 10% slowdown then it must be much much larger. Because Intel and benchmarks don't live in reality.

Depends on how you benchmark. Most users will see 0% change in speed. Don't worry your alarmist sky is falling posts will be hitting Slashdot at the same speed they always have.

Only very select workloads will hit the 10% mark, and older CPUs will be worse effected than more recent ones. So if you run a datacentre in your home then freak out, those 10% are going to break you.

Re:That is huge

[110010001000]

"Most users will see 0% change in speed."

Wow, amazing. You must have run your own benchmarks. Even Intel didn't say 0%! You should work for Intel.

Re:That is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Also that is 10% with this patch, then when there is a work around for this patch it will take another 10% (10% is probably the average speed impact but I would guess if changes according to application, as the patch is probably resident in the cache then any application which is cache dependant for speed is probably going to become choked by the memory bandwidth now, note that they process speed is not changed the processor is just spending it's time waiting for memory.)

Next patch, another 10%, next patch ....

I wonder how intels share price is going
http://stockcharts.com/h-sc/ui?s=INTC

Re:That is huge

[thegarbz]

Wow, amazing. You must have run your own benchmarks. Even Intel didn't say 0%! You should work for Intel.

Your cynicism is amazing. It's almost like you didn't realise that every sort of benchmark on a wide variety of loads, OSes and system configurations have been plastering the entire internet on this issue for the past week.

Even Intel didn't say 0% because they didn't run the loads that show a 0% change, i.e. games, web browsing, office applications. You know, the kind of things most users do, and the kind of things that have been widely benchmarked in the past week.

The internet is an amazing place, you should visit it.

Re:That is huge

[eclectro]

Because Intel and benchmarks don't live in reality.

Because they live in "virtual" reality??

Thank you, I'll be here all week. Try the veal.

Re:That is huge

[luther349]

yea if intel is admitting 10% i just dont wanna know what the is in real life as on avg there benchmarks are a good 50% off the real world mark.

Re:That is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on how you benchmark. Most users will see 0% change in speed.

That is pretty scary, because that means Intel spent a lot of money developing a feature that didn't lead to any noticeable improvement, which means that the purpose of the feature was the backdoor all along.

Ok.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be asking for 10% of my money back from intel.

Re:Ok.

[freeze128]

In reality, you'll be getting 10% support from Intel on that matter.

Re:Ok.

[110010001000]

The only problem is from the chart some of the workflows were even faster by 3% to 5%. I might need to send them some more money if I start using those workflows.

Re:Ok.

[fox171171]

I'll be asking for 10% of my money back from intel.

For people who have bleeding edge top of the line stuff, the last 10% performance probably cost them 50% more. (That's a bit of a random guess, but you get the idea. Performance/cost is not linear.)

Does anyone believe Intel any more ?

[Alain Williams]

after the way, last week, that they put it about that the problems affected all chips from all manufacturers to the same degree. They showed themselves to have better skills at sophistry that chip design.

Re:Does anyone believe Intel any more ?

[ScentCone]

No, that's just you pretending you can't understand the difference between the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities.

Re:Does anyone believe Intel any more ?

[Waffle Iron]

The main reason that so many people are confused about the difference between Meltdown and Spectre is that Intel has been intentionally trying to conflate the two issues.

Refund?

[apoc.famine]

Then I guess I'm expecting at least 10% of the cost of the processor cost back as a refund.

Re:Refund?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will you be writing NVidia a check for 30% of the cost of your GPU when they optimize it for your favorite game?

Re:Refund?

[Anonymous Coward]

That makes no sense.

The performance of the Intel CPU was one of the selling points, and one of the product promises that came along with the sale. It was not met, so a refund is in order.

If NVidia chooses to freely improve their already-existing offerings after purchase, that is their choice and nobody owes them anything for that.

Re: Refund?

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation needed.

Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[SuperKendall]

After an OSX update a real world compile of a project that takes around two minutes to complete, too almost exactly the same amount of time, or slightly faster... since compilation involves lots of small files and system calls I would expect it to be harder hit than most tasks. However because they had a partial Meltdown patch in around December, not sure if we would see much of an effect... no-one in December complained about slowdowns from the OSX update at that time though either.

I don't think things most people do will be that affected by the patch.

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[110010001000]

Right..probably not for desktop users. They are used to things being slow. However a 2 minute compile isn't a very good test. The big problem is going to be server side. If you were getting a certain throughput previously and now it is 10% to 50% slower that is a big problem because that comes out of your pocket. Intel is going to have to make people whole and recall their processors.

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait,
Why does intel have to do a recall, but every day we let a dozen software companies off the hook for making software slower?

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[110010001000]

I don't know why you have to let a dozen software companies off the hook if they sold you software that claimed a certain processing rate and then made it slower. Why do you? Only you can answer that question.

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[Anonymous Coward]

The only person who is saying anything even remotely close to 50% is you, because you seem to have a ponderosa pine sized stick up your ass about this.

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[SuperKendall]

I agree the bigger problem is server side, but like I said after an update I'm not seeing a small decline - I'm seeing zero decline, possibly a small speed increase. So I'm not even sure what server tasks will really see much impact... the main thing I could see possibly being an issue would be database performance, I'll bet Oracle has a much better handle on the real impact of this than almost anyone else...

Although I'd be inclined to be skeptical of Intel as well, I'm not sure they are wrong on this and it could be they are being careful to be conservative with statements so the PR issues are not worse than they already are.

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[110010001000]

You should publish your benchmarks and tell Intel. They aren't agreeing with you.

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[Anonymous Coward]

You really are clueless. For real work, there is an impact. It has been benchmarked. You are being obtuse on your single sample size of a tiny compile. Article below.

https://reverse.put.as/2018/01/07/measuring-osx-meltdown-patches-performance/

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[Anonymous Coward]

Did Intel actually make that claim in any manner that would be considered anything other than the usual marketing puffery, let alone wrt to a specific application program?

Re: Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'm seeing zero decline, possibly a small speed increase. So I'm not even sure what server tasks will really see much impact.."

You basically said "I'm seeing 0% decline in my desktop, therefore, servers shouldn't really see much impact"

You sir, are a fucking idiot lol. The reason I call you an idiot is because YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER.

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[sjames]

Depending on your hardware, are you sure you're not I/O bound? Try a load with significant I/O that is nevertheless CPU bound.

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[AmiMoJo]

Compilation isn't really very disk I/O intensive these days. Everything gets cached and it barely loads an SSD.

Databases, BitTorrent on a fast connection, stuff that involves a lot of small reads and writes, is going to be hardest hit. Early server benchmarks from Epic Games production servers show a 60% performance loss.

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to spend 100% of your time posting this. It simply isn't going to happen.

Re:Not seeing any so far in real tasks

[Anonymous Coward]

Keep in mind that SuperKendall lives in an alt-reality.

You misspelled "Intel lies".

[Anonymous Coward]

A notorious liar who has time and time proven that he has no conscience, will not be believed. Period.

In all honesty

[taustin]

With Windows 7, this update didn't slow things down any more than any other update. The longer an OS is around, the slower it gets from updates.

Were I conspiracy theory minded, I'd conclude that Microsoft does that on purpose to force upgrades to new versions.

"Windows 10 isn't as good as 7!"

"Well, it's too much work to make 10 better, so let's make 7 worse!"

Re:In all honesty

[Anonymous Coward]

With Windows 7, this update didn't slow things down any more than any other update. The longer an OS is around, the slower it gets from updates.

Were I conspiracy theory minded, I'd conclude that Microsoft does that on purpose to force upgrades to new versions.

"Windows 10 isn't as good as 7!"

"Well, it's too much work to make 10 better, so let's make 7 worse!"

That's the conspiracy most of the folks in Microsoft believe they are taking part in.

However, I suspect there's extra-super-duper-secret conspiracy by some Linux zealots in Microsoft who have created the above fake-conspiracy in order to (eventually) kill Windows & facilitate folks moving to Linux.

(It's working. Whenever I buy a new PC step 1 is to install Linux instead of Windows 10.)

Why not just disable the ME once and for all?

[MindPrison]

I was thinking, disable the ME and keep the 10% - and add extra security on top, by simply not having an ME available for the world to enter.

https://hardenedlinux.github.i...

Re:Why not just disable the ME once and for all?

[erapert]

I despise Intel's ME sleazyness as much as anyone, but ME has nothing to do with Meltdown or Spectre.
If you wanted to argue that ME is tangentially related because it's a backdoor that might allow someone to then use Meltdown to attack a machine then that sounds very plausible to me, but again, that's only tangentially related and also has nothing to do with performance of Intel's chips.

Fix to the Problem or Software Workaround?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still not clear on if the slowdown is due to the per-OS workaround, or if Intel is talking about their eventual fix to the hardware/firmware problem causing the slowdown...TFA seems to indicate a "fix" to Windows OS' specifically, which would imply the per-OS workaround.

Anyone?

Re:Fix to the Problem or Software Workaround?

[110010001000]

There is no hardware or firmware fix to the problems, just software workarounds. The only hardware fix is to remove your processor and throw it away and replace it with something else that isn't broken.

Re:Fix to the Problem or Software Workaround?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, no, there are no fixes to the existing hardware certainly. The firmware living on the chips? I dunno, probably not possible by end-users to flash that either. So right, existing CPUs are screwed. Done.

But the question I'm asking is if Intel is reporting a 10% slowdown on the "workaround" at the OS level (which seems implied), or in whatever fix to the problem that will be in their next series of chips WITHOUT the flaw? Are they projecting the new chips to be 10% slower than their earlier-model counterparts without the OS-Level fix?

Is this needed on home PCs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I understand there could be malicious browser-based javascript code that can exploit the vulnerability. Are there other common use-cases?

Would it be worthwhile to have the option to apply full "fix" or close the common use-cases?

B U L L S H I T

[sexconker]

On this machine (i5-5250U in an NUC5i5RYK) performance is fucking AWFUL after the Windows 7 patch and BIOS update. Webpages like YouTube peg a CPU core somehow. So does SSMS.

My main machine is fine, because it's so old (2600k) that there is no BIOS update available for my motherboard. Allegedly you can download the microcode patch and shove it in yourself if your odn't get an official BIOS release. But fuck it. I'll be upgrading to the next Ryzen revision in a couple of months, hopefully. But FUCK current RAM prices.

Re:B U L L S H I T

[thegarbz]

Webpages like YouTube peg a CPU core somehow

Then something got fucked with the patching. Absolute single worst case scenario with a synthetic benchmark specifically designed to bring out the worst in the changes puts it at somewhere around 20-25%. Except a desktop user will *never* hit that workload, and sure as heck won't do it in a browser which should see an immeserable change even on your old pre-PCID support hardware.

You broke something.

Re:B U L L S H I T

[Anonymous Coward]

I can vouch for this, I've had shit performance after just the Windows update on a work computer, i5 3470 chokes on a couple of Excel and word documents plus Chrome running a couple of tabs.

Re:B U L L S H I T

[Anonymous Coward]

You know you can trust Intel's benchmarks. They've never been caught intentionally skewing them in the past. Multiple times. Specifically to screw over the competition, even.

Re:B U L L S H I T

[Anonymous Coward]

Know how I know you didn't read the article? Here is the table published by Intel, from Intel's website, that covers all the benchmarks they felt like making public. Look at the one that covers "responsiveness." That covers very basic tasks that all desktop users will be familiar with, and will experience dozens or hundreds of times per day.

It's not just about how fast your code compiles; it's also about sluggishness in drawing windows, multitasking, and spinning up new processes, all of which can steal a few seconds here and there, eventually coming out to minutes or hours lost over arbitrary usage periods. A 20% drop in "responsiveness" is a big fucking deal, regardless of whether you or Intel want to admit it.

Re:B U L L S H I T

[rahvin112]

You and me both buddy, fuck the RAM producers right in their ass.

They are colluding on prices again for like the 8th time, where is the government investigation this time around?

Re:B U L L S H I T

[sexconker]

Nope. Intel broke something.

Ever since the BIOS patch and MS patch (both applied at nearly the same time so I can't isolate the cause between them), my system has been fucking slow. Scrolling a result set from SSMS? Forget about it! YouTube? Hah! Looking through a a large folder ("label") in Gmail? Be prepared to wait. Even something as simple as dimming the display to show the UAC prompt takes a lot longer. And I get random hitching where my mouse (and everything else) will just freeze up for a couple of seconds.

At first I thought that the CPU was thermal throttling or getting locked into the low power state, but running CPU-Z and a stress test such as Prime95 shows that isn't happening. It clocks up and down just fine, and temps are fine. (The actual performance in Prime95 is slow as shit, but I don't have a baseline to compare it to.)

Even a fresh boot is shit. I can open task manager and bring up the performance tab and it looks like the EKG of 4 hogs having an extended orgasm.

And I'm not the only one - a newer NUC in the office next to me was patched yesterday and received its first BSOD today. Friends with gaming boxes that have gotten updates are bitching about the performance drop as well.

Something's fucked, and Intel/MS did it. My money is on Intel (or both).

Re:B U L L S H I T

[thegarbz]

My money is on Intel

Smart money is on MS. They also fucked up AMD, to say nothing of their general software quality (Yay my Surface got the Creators update yesterday and now can't last half the day without the battery going flat).

Ubuntu also fucked up a kernel release but that was patched almost as quickly as it was noticed.

The changes issued by Intel are incredibly small literally a few hundred bytes of microcode changes (excluding of course that Intel mostly wrote KPTI for the Linux kernel).

Re:B U L L S H I T

[sexconker]

Small changes, especially at such a low level, can have huge effects.

A week ago it was negligible

[rsilvergun]

now it's 10%. Also, define "Personal Computer". My bro regularly runs 3-4 VMs in a virtual computer lab on his i7 while learning new tech or testing our scripts. And it's a 4th Gen i7 to boot.

Re:A week ago it was negligible

[thegarbz]

No nothing has changed in the past week. The patches slow down specific workloads and effect specific chips differently.

I.e. if you have PCID expect at worst a 10% performance drop. If you are a desktop user, expect no performance drop. Your bro is not a desktop user. If you synthetically bench systems without PCID in a way specifically designed to show the worst effect of this change expect somewhere between 20-30% drop, though in more realistic workloads that expose the worst it will likely be 10-20%.

Gamers will see 0% change.
Office users will see 0% change.
Your Facebooking mother will see a 0% change too.

Re:A week ago it was negligible

[Archtech]

The patches slow down specific workloads and effect specific chips differently.

They ***affect*** specific chips differently.

I find it hard to accept advice on complex technical matters from someone who is unfamiliar with English - although I suspect it is your first language.

Maybe you will reply that such small differences hardly matter.

Which, when you think it through, is exactly why you are defending Intel's decision. They clearly think that way too.

Re: A week ago it was negligible

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are you shillig false info for Intel?

You have no clue what slowdowns will effect what. You are making things.

Please point me in the direction that says I'll have a 0% performance impact when I'm gaming. Please share. Also if you believe Intel benchmarks you are special. We(the slashdot collective) all know Intel bullshits on their benchmarks.

Re:A week ago it was negligible

[thegarbz]

although I suspect it is your first language

Third language actually. But I'm deeply sorry... that you're the type of shitstain to take offence at this.

Re: A week ago it was negligible

[thegarbz]

Why are you shillig false info for Intel?

I'm not shilling false info for Intel. I'm shilling correct information for geekbench, endgadget, phoronix, anandtech, and probably several other's who's benchmarks I looked at the last few days but whose sites I've forgotten.

Please point me in the direction that says I'll have a 0% performance impact when I'm gaming. Please share.

https://www.techspot.com/artic...

That's just the first google result. Feel free to look at more of them. There actually is a performance impact. In a few games you get a 1 FPS speed boost after the patch. You're welcome.

Anybody else hear Sideshow Mel?

[sl3xd]

I'm covered in the dust of the leader. He favors me!

I am even dustier -- dustier than thou!

hm

[Anonymous Coward]

so....will Intel be sending back to customers 10% refund per CPU?

Great, "only" a 10% slowdown for PCs...

[jwegman]

...what about the $15,000 servers I bought 6 months ago?

Re:Great, "only" a 10% slowdown for PCs...

[110010001000]

Just replace them once the next generation of processors comes out and you will be able to get back to the previous processing level. Problem solved.

Re:Great, "only" a 10% slowdown for PCs...

[klingens]

Not with Intel CPUs. They only get 3-5% faster at best per generation. So you need at least 2 Generations. Consider then that we have the 3rd CPU family but still the same gen (Skylake, Kaby Lake, Coffeelake are all the same CPU, just clocked differently), I don't see better Intel CPUs anytime soon.

Re:Great, "only" a 10% slowdown for PCs...

[geekmux]

Just replace them once the next generation of processors comes out and you will be able to get back to the previous processing level. Problem solved.

When a fix ultimately generates more revenue for those who fucked up, expect them to fuck up bigger and faster in the future.

The Board of Directors will not have it any other way.

Re:Great, "only" a 10% slowdown for PCs...

[110010001000]

OK then wait two generations and throw away your servers after every generation. I fail to see the problem.

Re:Great, "only" a 10% slowdown for PCs...

[AvitarX]

I would think this is going to be a pretty big boost to AMD.

They'll be way ahead in multi thread performance per $, and about at parity for single thread performance per $.

The effective 10% boost for AMD is a pretty big deal.

Re:Great, "only" a 10% slowdown for PCs...

[jdschulteis]

The first CPU generation that addresses these vulnerabilities in hardware will eliminate the entire 10% loss caused by the current software fixes, in addition to the usual few percent per generation improvement.

Refund

[JMJimmy]

CPU cost $999 so $99.90 refund coming my way - sweet

Re:refund

[Archtech]

My thought precisely. (Apologies for a similar post a moment ago).

It does occur to me that Intel has adopted a very old Microsoft practice. Namely making paying customers carry out beta tests, thereby saving immense amounts of money and time.

Re:Refund

[toddestan]

I'd be pissed. You really pay for those few extra percent of performance at the high end. When your $999 CPU was new, the one with 90% of the performance was probably something like $399.

Re:Refund

[JMJimmy]

The difference between the low end of the chart and the high end, price wise for "high end CPUs" is $3,748. A 10% drop in performance is up to $2,157 drop in price among the top 10.

So Linux servers with AMD are better?

[WillAffleckUW]

Sounds to me like you could get faster performance by building Linux AMD blade servers for a heck of a lot less money and they would perform better.

At least, that's my takeaway.

Re:So Linux servers with AMD are better?

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD servers are suffering a 40-60% slowdown as a result of this fiasco. Our Opteron-based servers were completely unable to keep up with demand after we deployed the "fixes."

Given this is only a theoretical, lab-environment exploit that is so difficult to implement and successfully exploit in the field one would have better luck with Lotto tickets, I don't know why we even accepted the patches.

refund

[Anonymous Coward]

Refund 10% of my money

"Older" CPUs

[MSTCrow5429]

I don't think there is a small amount of Intel chippery prior to 2015 running around. I'm probably an outlier, but mine is from 2008, (c) 2007.

Re:"Older" CPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, it's not like the age actually matters since Intel doesn't have any current products unimpacted, and they're unlikely to release anything new this year either.

Re:"Older" CPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 What are we to do with these things, burn them? I was perfectly happy and secure on my "old" "slow" c2d before this shit exploded.

Re:"Older" CPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a Q6600 in my main fileserver/work computer, and 2013 era mobile i7s in two laptops. The Q6600 is still fantastic.

Re:"Older" CPUs

[NettiWelho]

I don't think there is a small amount of Intel chippery prior to 2015 running around. I'm probably an outlier, but mine is from 2008, (c) 2007.

I am running with 2011 made i5-2500K, windows 7, asus P8Z68 mobo and nvidia 1070

After installing the patch I overclocked from stock 3.3ghz to 4.5ghz, just in case, and called it a day.

At least fallout 4 and playerunknowns battlegrounds seem to running smooth as ever as they did before patching.

Re:"Older" CPUs

[Baron_Yam]

I run my computers until they drive me to insanity before replacing them. A 10 year old computer still being used isn't unheard of in my house.

As long as it plays whatever games I have and can surf the Internet, I'm good. My most recent upgrades were last year... and that was just a video card on my workstation so I could improve the appearance of GTA V. I still have a laptop from 2007 that I've only JUST given up on because of issues with 32bit processors. FFS, I'm still using a BlackBerry Playbook as a tablet.

Y'all are lucky I'm not chiselling this post into a stone tablet instead of using a networked computer.

Re:"Older" CPUs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running a Dell XPS 15z i7-2640 which google says was introduced Q4 2011.
I had a newer ASUS but it died a premature death, so I'm back on ole' reliable.

Re:"Older" CPUs

[AmiMoJo]

Lots of people are still running the 2700k and 2500k from 2011. They are still good gaming CPUs. I have a 2700k in a workstation. Also Xeons from around the same time, and an i7 mobile CPU from 2012.

just set the flag and get your speed back

[Joe_Dragon]

just set the flag and get your speed back

'Responsiveness' down 31 percent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Responsiveness
The Responsiveness scenario includes usage models such as application launches, application installation, web browsing with many tabs open, file copies photo manipulation, and multi-tasking.

SYSMark 2014 SE Responsiveness
8700K, 8650U, 7920HQ, 6700K: W10/SSD -- W7/SSD -- W7 HDD)
  88%   86%    86%         :   79%   --  89%   -- 101%

Ten per cent, eh?

[Archtech]

So when are we customers going to get ten per cent of our money back?

Moore’s Law

[Anonymous Coward]

How does 10% slower jibe with Moore’s Law?

Re:Moore’s Law

[110010001000]

Moore's Law has been dead for over 10 years now.

Do I get a rebate?

[dhaen]

If one of my products turned out to do only 90% of advertised, I'd offer a rebate or return for credit (customer's choice). Maybe that's why I'm a small company, not a mega-corp.

secondary cost

[tomxor]

The most likely outcome I see is a rebate/coupon towards the purchase of any system containing a new Intel CPU from any vendor where the dollar value of the rebate is tied to the age/sku of the old CPU, with no or soft requirements to return the old CPU

That rebate is extremely unlikely to cover more than the value of the CPU, what about the secondary cost of replacing the rest of the computer it was attached to. If it uses a different socket, or is soldered directly or more likely isn't even compatible anyway, then it has been rendered worthless. I don't buy a new computer every year, nor do I want to: consumer looses, Intel wins.

Re:secondary cost

[networkBoy]

hence why I think the situation matches FUBAR.
I don't think there is a good way out of this.

Re:secondary cost

[tomxor]

The best way out for users seems to be to look for an alternative to Intel, there's not point trying to get water out of a stone and their attitude stinks, not to mention the other negatives like IME. AMD seem better over all but they have a management engine of their own and even ARM does to some extent.

No more than 10%?!?!? Are you f***ing kidding me?

[bigtiny]

I assume that Intel will be offering their flawed processors for 10% LESS across the board?

So if their next generation was 10% faster...

[Anonymous Coward]

...than their previous one would their press blurbs also state "It's only 10% faster"?

Now they'll be 10% cheaper?

[Anonymous Coward]

Right?

Actually faster than you think

[HalAtWork]

Even faster if you don't use rigged benchmarks and compilers!

Re:But the IME flaw remains, what else is in there

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel does this because Intel gets away with this.

Intel will continue doing this because Intel will continue getting away with it. Nothing you post, nor any vote you cast, nor any action you can take will change this.

The world is not a just place. It never has been.

Re:'Responsiveness' down 31 percent!

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks UP 1% to me. Way to go, Intel.

Thanks for link. essentially what I said

[SuperKendall]

Obviously just one test does not mean a lot, but a full build of an application (especially a very large one) does make use of a lot of different system resources, so it's a pretty good indicator of general issues.

That article is really good because it does something I did not have time to do - try out something between 10.12 and 10.13 (I only measured the impact before and after the latest security patch on 10.13). So thanks for providing a link... it looks like system calls do indeed have large performance impacts, but that when you are talking about real cases (like compiling, as I did and they did also as a test) the real performance loss is under 10% - when there is any, and on some systems moving to High Sierra still has an overall gain on performance for some tasks from Sierra. Not all work people do on a computer will see an impact.

I'm also thinking over time we'll see more efforts put in to mitigate the speed losses, all OS makers are just being extra cautious to start with.

Re: Thanks for link. essentially what I said

[Brockmire]

2 minute compile is a very large application? Lol. To others, that's very fast. Building embedded Linux or synthesizing FPGA'S that take an hour on a 16 core will be interesting. Your 2 minute compile means fuck all.

Re: Thanks for link. essentially what I said

[Anonymous Coward]

2 minute compile is a very large application? Lol. To others, that's very fast. Building embedded Linux or synthesizing FPGA'S that take an hour on a 16 core will be interesting. Your 2 minute compile means fuck all.

So your 2 hour FPGA synthesis will finish 10 minutes later. OMG!

Loser.

well 10% is 10% less then we bought

[Anonymous Coward]

Even so, 10% loss is a loss we never expected to lose. I believe my older Hazwell desktop and a Broadwell chip in another PC are examples of more then 10% loss in performance. Yes, maybe my Kaby Lake laptop will have negligible losses in performance. But I guess it is what it is and I am not willing to forego security for 10%. But I may choose AMD or something else next time. This most likely will bring Intel down a notch or two.

Re:well 10% is 10% less then we bought

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly I was going to buy an 8th gen I5 system this year and now I am looking at getting a Ryzen system instead. Anyone that thinks Intel will walk away without consequences is wrong.

Bunk

[scdeimos]

This page over here, using actual benchmarking software before and after the Meltdown and Spectre patches, shows iPhone performance losses around 40% after applying the patches: https://melv1n.com/iphone-perf...

Given that most of the last week's media spiel has been saying that "ARM's CPUs are supposed to be largely unaffected by these things" I doubt Intel's CPUs would behave much differently, certainly not better and certainly not "only 10% impact at worst".

Older?

[dos1]

> going back to 2015
> older CPUs

A good CPU from 2015 (Haswell) is a pretty new CPU. High-end CPUs from 2012 (Ivy Bridge) are still perfectly capable, especially in laptops. If you don't need stuff like USB 3.0, you can easily end up today with a pretty beefy Ivy Bridge/Haswell laptop by just doing RAM and storage updates (and maybe WiFi). This is just a carefully designed PR piece to make the issue look less bad, nothing to see here.

Re:Older?

[NettiWelho]

2011 built and bought(with +95% online time since then), Sandy Bridge i5-2500K here; Games still run on ultra, I did however overclock for the first time, from stock 3.3ghz to 4.5ghz.

Only upgraded parts on my build are SSDs and graphics.

Re:Older?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah im on sandy bridge as well. With samsung 850 ssd and packed full of mem. Don't see any need for faster cpu other than it would be needed for more memory.

cool, no problem, now give me back $30

[elcor]

fair, no?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Why no "false advertising" lawsuit to get this all cleaned-up?

~Re: Mac OSX UPdate

[Anonymous Coward]

I modded him up if that makes you feel better! There is Slashdot comment censorship against the holy Apple going on.

IBM PVUs

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean the PVU for my intel chips will dip by 10% allowing me to use more processors, or newer processors without forking out more cash?

best case

[ReneR]

with higher SSD i/o load it can easily reach 50%, and on pre-Haswell or so CPUs it can also be more, well done. get an AMD today ;-)

Fuck. Wow. Fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/sp/1995/7015/00/70150211.pdf

I hope those class actions tear Intel a butthole so big it bleeds.

Intel CEO decided to sell off shares after Intel were warned but before the public were told: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-09/u-s-senators-urge-government-to-probe-intel-ceo-s-share-sales

but when you are that rich laws don't apply yes???

Huge 21% outlier

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice that they glossed over the 79% figure for win 10 on skylake with an SSD for the âresponsivenessâ(TM) benchmark. That does not seem to bode well for the user experience on such a platform.

So what?

[jason777]

I just spent a lot of money building a gaming rig, and overclocking it to get another 20% boost. Every bit matters in games. So, -10% is still huge to me. Intel should offer some compensation. Maybe not a whole new chip, but maybe at least a voucher of say $100 on a new CPU.

/o\

[easyTree]

That's a shame as I'd really rather hoped for more than 10% of the costs of my Intel-based computer refunded.

Intel *will* be offering partial refund for fault goods, right?

Can the "fix" be turned off?

[Anonymous Coward]

10% is significant for data centers.

Does anyone know if the "fixes" can be turned off if the computers are behind a firewall? I heard the fixes are done in the Linux kernel.

Alrighty then

[slashmydots]

Okay, then give me a 10% refund on your defective product because this isn't what I paid for. I literally JUST GOT my Nvidia compensation check for their single lane 512MB block of GDDR5 that they pretended had full speed access.

Re:Alrighty then

[scdeimos]

On Red Hat they can be disabled by kernel command line switches: noibrs, noibpb, and nopti. REF: https://access.redhat.com/arti...

I believe there are similar kernel command line switches for a lot of other distros though you'll have to Google them yourself.

Security

[Anonymous Coward]

I think MY security is being chipped away.

Doesn't matter

[OmegaWolf747]

That doesn't matter! People pay good money for these PCs and should be entitled to a full speed machine, not a ten percent decrease in performance. If that's Intel's attitude, they won't last much longer in this market.

Re:Moore's Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. My 2003 PC was 2.4 GHz, my 2008 PC was 2.4 GHz (dual core / 4 thread), and my 2013 PC was also 2.4 GHz (quad core / 8 thread). I'm due for an upgrade this year, but I'll probably put it off.

Pretty sure not I/O bound

[SuperKendall]

These are compiles on a laptop with an SSD (a bit older, but still). Pretty much all time is spent in the CPU on the build. It's around 700 something files to compile, so it does have a decent amount of data to fetch but most of the time does seem to be spent in the compiler... it may impact other tasks more but if compiler impact is negligible I'm pretty happy as that's most of my day-to-day load.

Re:Pretty sure not I/O bound

[sjames]

It's good that it isn't causing you problems with your workload. OYOH, I've seen database benchmarks with a 30% loss. Not exactly a desktop load, but certainly a realistic load for a server.

Re:Pretty sure not I/O bound

[SuperKendall]

Yeah, I did think databases would be worst case... hopefully there are ways that can be mitigated, I wonder if different types of databases would fare better than others. 30% is too big a hit to eat without change for most servers I think...

So just refund everyone 10%

[Anonymous Coward]

So just refund everyone 10%, no big deal at all. They've just admitted that that amount is totally insignificant.

What's truly amazing is that AMD could come from so far behind to be light years ahead in both cost and performance. And have actually have a clue about security and engineering in general.

AMD? Within 10% of Intel?

[Anonymous Coward]

Within the past 15 years?

Ahahahahahaha.

keep my old cpu

[Anonymous Coward]

Brought a pc already 6 years ago. The newest CPU's seem to be like 10% faster, but after those fixes, why do I need a new PC ?

OK lets change that to headline speak

[Chrisq]

Intel Says Chip-Security Fixes Leave PCs No More Than 10% Slower

or

Intel confess that performance may be decimated

Re:Moore's Law

[jdschulteis]

Moore's Law says nothing about clock speeds, it's about transistor counts.

Some of the extra transistors in the next generation of CPU's will go toward fixing these flaws, instead of toward additional cores, or additional cache, or faster integrated graphics.

The software fixes that cause the 10% slowdown will then no longer be necessary.