Intel Unveils New Coffee Lake 8th Gen Core Line-Up With First Core i9 Mobile CPU (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Intel is announcing a big update to its processor families today, with new 8th Gen Coffee Lake-based Core chips for both mobile and desktop platforms. On the mobile side of the equation, the most interesting processors are no doubt Intel's new six-core Coffee Lake parts, starting with the Core i7-8750H. This processor comes with base/max single-core turbo boost clocks of 2.2GHz and 4.2GHz respectively, while the Core i7-8850H bumps those clocks to 2.6GHz and 4.3GHz respectively. Both processors have six cores (12 threads), a TDP of 45 watts and 9MB of shared Smart Cache.However, the new flagship processor is without question the Intel Core i9-8950HK, which is the first Core i9-branded mobile processor. It retains the 6/12 (core/thread) count of the lower-end parts, but features base and turbo clocks of 2.9GHz and 4.8GHz respectively. The chip also comes unlocked since it caters to gaming enthusiasts and bumps the amount of Smart Cache to 12MB. Intel is also announcing a number of lower powered Coffee Lake-U series chips for thin and light notebooks, some of which have on board Iris Plus integrated graphics with 128MB of on-chip eDRAM, along with some lower powered six-core and quad-core desktop chips that support the company's Optane memory in Intel's new 300 series chipset platform.

Comments

Meltdown and Spectre compatible?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am curious if these chips will break compatibility with the previous Meltdown and Spectre data sharing apps. Have they made changes to this feature set?

Re:Meltdown and Spectre compatible?

[tigersha]

The coffee lake was caused by a Meltdown of a valve in the Santa Clara Starbucks, so no, I suspect not.

Have they fixed Meltdown and Spectre?

[Anonymous Coward]

So do these new chips have Meltdown and Spectre hardware fixes?

Re:Have they fixed Meltdown and Spectre?

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Only workarounds in microcode that reduce performance.

Re:Have they fixed Meltdown and Spectre?

[93 Escort Wagon]

No. Only workarounds in microcode that reduce performance.

They also contain Intel's patented Deflect-Towards-AMD technology.

Re:Have they fixed Meltdown and Spectre?

[Billly Gates]

No. Only workarounds in microcode that reduce performance.

Neither. Branch prediction is so Central to the CPU architecture that it can't be disabled. MS is working on it's compiler to see if can do special assembly tricks to hide the cache.

Linux has kernel hacks which attempt to hide the data from the cache which hackers can still overide with skill

Re:Have they fixed Meltdown and Spectre?

[RoccamOccam]

My understanding was that Intel's version of branch-prediction applies an access-rights check too late (allowing Meltdown snooping). That doesn't sound like it couldn't be fixed, especially since AMD doesn't have that same problem.

Re:Have they fixed Meltdown and Spectre?

[F.Ultra]

It can be fixed with a new architecture but not with a new microcode (microcode can only change so much).

Re:Have they fixed Meltdown and Spectre?

[hcs_$reboot]

Anyway, Facebook leaks data on our behalf, so why bother.

Re:Have they fixed Meltdown and Spectre?

[TheRaven64]

Meltdown allows you to use timing attacks to snoop data across a system call. This is because Intel used an optimisation where they treated system calls as branches, whereas on AMD chips they resulted in a pipeline stall. The Spectre vulnerabilities work at the same hardware privilege level, though not necessarily at the same software privilege level (for example, you can read past a bounds check in a NaCl or JavaScript sandbox and read memory outside of the sandbox, which gives you the memory disclosure vulnerability that you need to launch a code reuse attack).

The defence against Meltdown is to unmap kernel memory when in userspace. This means that the CPU would have to speculate past the CR3 update (switch page tables to the userspace mappings) to be vulnerable. Current CPUs don't do that, because it's really hard to do: You need to be able to invalidate TLB fills, because the page tables that you've installed might be wrong. TLB fills as a result of normal speculative execution are fine, because the TLB is always an arbitrary subset of the contents of the page tables, so you don't need to invalidate them. Sometimes this can even give a big performance boost. Apple found a few years ago that they were getting a big speedup because a mispredicted branch was prefetching some data into the cache that they were using later. The mispredicted branch was much cheaper than stalling for the cache fill. In hindsight, I should have realised that Spectre-like attacks were possible when I learned about this.

The defence against the Spectre variant 1 attack is to add a data dependency where previously there was a control dependency. For example, if you have some code that looks roughly like this pseudocode:

if (bounds_check(address, offset))
{
load(address + offset);
}

You turn it into something like:

check = bounds_check(address, offset);
if (check)
{
load(select(check, address + offset, 0));
}

Where the select becomes a conditional move instruction (or some equivalent arithmetic operation). This transformation means that the load now has a data dependency on the result of the bounds check and so won't be dispatched until the bounds check has been calculated. This, in turn, means that there won't be any observable side effects of the load if the branch would not be taken because the instructions inside the conditional will be canceled as soon as the branch is determined to be not taken. This probably has a small performance overhead, because it will introduce pipeline bubbles. I'd be surprised if it were more than 5% though.

Variant 2 involves poisoning the branch target buffer so that at a specific point in execution the CPU will predict a jump to attacker-controlled code. You can then put timing sensitive instructions at that point and probe register values. The mitigation for this is called a retpoline, where you perform an indirect branch using a return instruction, which then uses the return buffer for prediction and so will predict the address after the last call. This basically forces a branch mispredict, but to a location that isn't controlled by the attacker.

Some of the proposed hardware fixes involve not sharing branch predictor state across security contexts. This is not ideal, because often that sharing is beneficial. For example, if you an Android app, it's forked from a zyogte process that sets up the VM and pre-loads a bunch of classes. All apps will have the same core system code in the same addresses and can benefit from sharing branch predictor state. Similarly, if you run a server in a pre-fork model.

Re:Have they fixed Meltdown and Spectre?

[F.Ultra]

Without the extreme penalty that there is now with the software solution but they will loose that slight performance benefit that they got over say AMD by cheating with the MMU check. For a context switch heavy application you pay around 30% penalty if the benchmarks are anything to go by, with a new architecture I'm sure that the penalty is below 0.01%

New CPUs come in so they refuse to fix Spectre

[Anonymous Coward]

In the meantime they have posted that there will be *NO* microcode updates for the older generations as stated in https://newsroom.intel.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/11/2018/04/microcode-update-guidance.pdf (serach for "stopped").

There are software workarounds, but well... still leaves a bad taste considering they originally wanted to develop new microcode for those generations.

Re:New CPUs come in so they refuse to fix Spectre

[thegarbz]

Given their previous microcode rollouts I think we can all collectively sigh with relief.

Obligatory silly name joke

[o'reor]

So, at long last, does this 9th generation Intel Core processor make coffee, as suggested by its name ?

Come on now, we developers have been waiting ages for this essential feature !

#CoffeeLake

Re:Obligatory silly name joke

[chmod a x mojo]

It's been out for decades! Just put your perc pot over the molten hole where your Prescott processor used to be before it melted through the motherboard, floor, and planets core. You should have a fresh pot in no time at all.

Re: Obligatory silly name joke

[aliquis]

It's the first Intel chip which refuses to run Java?

Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all window dressing. This is about as exciting as the difference between a 2017 Hyundai Elantra and and 2018 Hyundai Elantra. We are approaching almost a decade since Intel offered anything significantly different or improved.

Re:Why bother?

[110010001000]

That is because Moore's Law has been dead for sometime now, because physics. Digital computing is reaching a dead end now. Apple is smart to start creating their new chips because Intel has hit a ceiling with nowhere to go.

Re:Why bother?

[sinij]

Digital computing is reaching a dead end now.

Not until Netcraft confirms it.

Re:Why bother?

[TFlan91]

To extend your analogy, I would certainly purchase a 2018 Hyundai Elantra over my current 2008 model. But I've heard there were some safety risks with the newer ones, so I'll go with the Tesla (AMD).

Re:Why bother?

[TheRaven64]

Moore's Law gets you better performance because more transistors give you better performance. In particular, Dennard Scaling meant that the smaller transistors used less power so you could have more specialised pipelines, more complex specialised instructions, and so on. Unfortunately, Dennard Scaling ran out about a decade ago, so although Moore's Law has given us more transistors, the number that you can power at any given time has stayed almost constant.

Re:Why bother?

[Billly Gates]

Funny I swear I had a 56 core Xeon running Windows server in our MDF

Re: Why bother?

[aliquis]

Graphics cards has done fine.
Ryzen did too.

The problem is lack of competition.
See what Nvidia do now as far as new models go.

For 3D, CAD And DCC Users This Is Great News

[dryriver]

Laptops for content creators and CAD designers have been stuck in 4-Core, 3.3 - 3.7 GHz land for many, many years. 6 cores, 4.8 GHz max and also Optane memory will definitely make a difference in this area. If your last Core i7 laptop was bought 2 - 3 years ago, a new Core i9 laptop should feel much faster in comparison. I would have loved 8-cores instead of 6, but maybe that's coming next.

Re:For 3D, CAD And DCC Users This Is Great News

[Khyber]

"Laptops for content creators and CAD designers have been stuck in 4-Core, 3.3 - 3.7 GHz land for many, many years."

That's because CAD has historically been gimped by GPU performance, not CPU performance. Please try your pondering again when you have actually used CAD machines for over 20 years!

Re:For 3D, CAD And DCC Users This Is Great News

[TheRaven64]

I expect the 64-128MB of eDDR as a L4 cache will have more of an impact. For FPGA place and route, we've found that the desktop versions with this are about 50% faster than anything else on the market (performance is dominated by the sequential bits of the algorithm and the working set doesn't fit in cache).

Where the market is

[AlanObject]

We are approaching almost a decade since Intel offered anything significantly different or improved.

One of the hardest lessons for hardware tech entrepreneurs to learn is that IT and personal-computing buyers, the majority of business for Intel, is not really interested in anything "different." What they want is what they bought last year faster and cheaper and 101% software compatible.

I wonder...

[WolfgangVL]

Every time I see the word "unveil", I first wonder, how long was it veiled to begin with? Then I wonder, how many more iterations are still "veiled", awaiting the perfect time to "unveil", so as to maximize profits?

I imagine a bunch of marble pedestals with thin white sheets over them, each with red LCD displays counting down...... every now and then an alarm goes off and the room full of monkeys next door starts typing till they come up with a name......

Just not in California

[ScentCone]

Doesn't California now consider anything with "Coffee" in the name to be a carcinogen?

We'd get these in a 5 yrs

[postmortem]

if AMD didn't come up with its competitive lineup. Suddenly intel is all interested in making chips that are beyond regular evolution process of last 5-10 yrs.

Re:We'd get these in a 5 yrs

[thelexx]

They seriously need to check their prices too. I just retired an I3 machine taking only the vid and p/s to the new one, and had a thought about keeping the old one going with a slightly upgraded cpu. Seeing I5's going for only slightly less than the Ryzen 1700X I just went with for my main, I changed my mind quickly. Utterly ridiculous.

Re:We'd get these in a 5 yrs

[Billly Gates]

They seriously need to check their prices too. I just retired an I3 machine taking only the vid and p/s to the new one, and had a thought about keeping the old one going with a slightly upgraded cpu. Seeing I5's going for only slightly less than the Ryzen 1700X I just went with for my main, I changed my mind quickly. Utterly ridiculous.

Intel commands a premium with it's brand name. Especially among gamers where an i5 is faster than a Ryzen

same pci lanes bottleneck

[eaglesrule]

16 pci-e lanes ought to be enough for everyone.

intel needs to up the pci-e lanes / faster DMI

[Joe_Dragon]

intel needs to up the pci-e lanes / faster DMI.

Most boards link to the CPU-X16 to slots but while M.2 / networking / usb / sound / etc is all on that X4 DMI link just one m.2 card can max out on it's own.

Intel's Most Jittery Processor Yet!

[Hallux-F-Sinister]

Intel Unveils New Coffee Lake 8th Gen Core Line-Up With First Core i9 Mobile CPU

I wonder how jittery a processor designed with a LAKE of coffee will be. Bet it makes the computer really good at taking a SHIT though, amiright?!?

August 04, 2017,....

[AbRASiON]

https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

"There's a "z390" (?) is a cannonlake chipset or "PCH" - and it's coming out next year - but that chipset is only for cannonlake processors, except there are (apparently) none of those planned for desktop."

No sign of this chipset, no sign of an 8 core processor.
Note this: https://www.intel.com/content/...

The new chipsets do include the rumoured 'free' "Intel® Wireless-AC MAC"
As well as a newer USB revision, 3.1 vs 3.0

So what you end up with is the 'premium' z370 chipset, now a 'gimped' product, lacking several of the new features (I'd also heard Bluetooth 5 on the H370 also?)

A real mess Intel has got itself into with product launch delays, push forwards, branding changes, just totally sloppy. One would normally assume you get the be-all and end all solution at the top end, sadly not the case.
(I will say the 6 core CPUs from late last year are a good move forward, if you're wanting to hang on though, in another 12 months we might see 8 core with that free Wifi AC and USB 3.1 support)

Oh and when is 2.5 and 5 GBit going to become common? I could really do with this soon. Knowing Intel? Not for a while.