Slashdot Mirror
AMD Is Releasing Spectre Firmware Updates To Fix CPU Vulnerabilities (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: AMD's initial response to the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws made it clear "there is a near zero risk to AMD processors." That zero risk doesn't mean zero impact, as we're starting to discover today. "We have defined additional steps through a combination of processor microcode updates and OS patches that we will make available to AMD customers and partners to further mitigate the threat," says Mark Papermaster, AMD's chief technology officer. AMD is making firmware updates available for Ryzen and EPYC owners this week, and the company is planning to update older processors "over the coming weeks." Like Intel, these firmware updates will be provided to PC makers, and it will be up to suppliers to ensure customers receive these. AMD isn't saying whether there will be any performance impacts from applying these firmware updates, nor whether servers using EPYC processors will be greatly impacted or not. AMD is also revealing that its Radeon GPU architecture isn't impacted by Meltdown or Spectre, simply because those GPUs "do not use speculative execution and thus are not susceptible to these threats." AMD says it plans to issue further statements as it continues to develop security updates for its processors.
You are confusing Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown: only Intel. Spectre: almost everything.
You are confusing Meltdown and Spectre. Meltdown: only Intel. Spectre: almost everything.
And spectre has two variants, and the second variant doesn't affect AMD Zen processors, but does affect older AMD processors.
AMD never said there was a near zero risk for Spectre. AMD is not affected by Meltdown. AMD and Intel affected by Spectre. Period. Stop trying to push Intels problems on AMD.
The Verge is obvioulsy a non-credible source. Or does that just apply to stories editors don't want to publish (*ahem* twitter *ahem) ?
What a terrible article. Here Slashdot editors, a better one from a no-name site that actually gets the facts right :
https://www.lowyat.net/2018/152301/amd-begin-distributing-firmware-updates-patch-spectre-vulnerability/
Or just use the damn primary source :
http://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
Your PC maker or motherboard maker should have a patch for firmware / microcode. To completely mitigate the vulnerability on Intel based computers - you will have to patch both the OS and the firmware. I believe the firmware patch is required as part of Spectre (probably 2nd variant). Without both, your computer will be still vulnerable. Unfortunately I believe there is a chance that the patch could fail silently - but there is a powerscript that will tell you the status of the vulnerability patches.
Also: Spectre: Pretty old news, just somebody made it more practical now.
The only reason Spectre is pushed in the news is that Intel is desperately trying to obscure the magnitude of their screw-up with Meltdown.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
MS was set to release the update but reports of claims of older AMD powered machines were fail to boot after the update with no ability to roll back to before the update. MS pulled the patch from being pushed out pending they fix the problem.
Not just Intel. Meltdown also affects ARM (Cortex-A75)
Just one chip from ARM (all other ARM processors are not affected by Meltdown), allowing Intel to cry "it's not just all our processors!". So yeah, it's almost exclusively every single Intel chip in the last 20 years (since the Pentium Pro) that is fundamentally shafted. It's sure not like Intel to have a history of significant hardware flaws (F00F, FDIV), right?
I've read so many articles on Meltdown/Spectre and many of them at least get some of it wrong. Even Microsoft and Intel can't agree on this significance of performance slowdowns. I personally think AMD tried to capitalize on this and downplayed their chips exposure to this.
Quite the opposite. Intel conflated Meltdown and Spectre in order to downplay their chips exposure. Meltdown is the Intel-only extreme performance killer, causing the OS to jump through retarded flaming hoops just to stay safe. None of the spectre mitigations impact performance, but hey let's mix it in with Meltdown so it looks like other chipmakers produced shitty chips too, right?
Well, the *lowest* performance embedded systems tend to have in-order execution, so there's a plus there at least. e.g. the original Atom CPUs (pre-Silvermont) were in-order, so speculative execution is at least not a problem on that front. That's the same reason a lot of embedded ARM systems are safe, etc. ...also the cache-access-before-protection-check problem with Meltdown requires reliable cache timing, which means they are easier to exploit on systems with large caches. I imagine this is harder to exploit on those ultra-low-cost systems with small caches... and the cache-flush mitigation strategies will have less of an impact on them since the caches weren't that big to begin with.
This is an update to microcode which fundamentally modifies the behavior of the instructions within a processor. You could argue that it's just a specific type of firmware but if that's the case then call it by title it's been given! It's not like this is a website for non-technical people.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Reading some new gaming benchmarks of both games and a wide range of synthetic tests, performance is the same within the margin of error and actually biased to being faster if anything. The 4k random read benchmark on an NVME drive pushing a blistering fast 300k-iops took a 30% hit. That was the only benchmark that showed a negative impact.