Intel Says Some CPU Models Will Never Receive Microcode Updates (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Intel released an update to the Meltdown and Spectre mitigation guide, revealing that it stopped working on mitigations for some processor series. The Meltdown and Spectre mitigation guide is a PDF document that Intel published in February. The file contains information on the status of microcode updates for each of Intel's CPU models released in the past years. Intel has constantly updated the document in the past weeks with new information about processor series and the microcode firmware version number that includes patches for the Meltdown and Spectre flaws.

An update published on Monday includes for the first time a "Stopped" production status. Intel says that processors with a "Stopped" status will not receive microcode updates. The reasons basically vary from "redesigning the CPU micro-architecture is impossible or not worth the effort" to "it's an old CPU" and "customers said they don't need it." The following Intel processor products received a "Stopped" status marker: Bloomfield, Bloomfield Xeon, Clarksfield, Gulftown, Harpertown Xeon C0, Harpertown Xeon E0, Jasper Forest, Penryn/QC, SoFIA 3GR, Wolfdale C0, Wolfdale M0, Wolfdale E0, Wolfdale R0, Wolfdale Xeon C0, Wolfdale Xeon E0, Yorkfield, and Yorkfield Xeon.

Comments

This is BS.

[Joey Vegetables]

I'm sorry, but if I'm investing in a high-end, server-class CPU, I expect it to be supported for as long as is reasonably possible. If they said they weren't updating 10 year old Celerons or Atoms, that might be understandable. But Xeons? Let's just say I don't plan to every buy one again, at least so long as AMD represents a reasonable alternative. In fact, I will always stick with AMD (as I long have, for other reasons) until and unless Intel makes some kind of definite, enforceable support commitment.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a brain.

Those processors are on the 10 year mark. Anyone thinking they should be in use should not deal with computers.

Re:This is BS.

[kelemvor4]

I'm sorry, but if I'm investing in a high-end, server-class CPU, I expect it to be supported for as long as is reasonably possible. If they said they weren't updating 10 year old Celerons or Atoms, that might be understandable. But Xeons? Let's just say I don't plan to every buy one again, at least so long as AMD represents a reasonable alternative. In fact, I will always stick with AMD (as I long have, for other reasons) until and unless Intel makes some kind of definite, enforceable support commitment.

Look at the release dates for the specific Xeons on their list. For example, the W3520. It was released 9 years ago. I don't blame them one bit for not updating ancient chips like that. If it was a chip released in 2016 I think owners could reasonably be upset. Intel only provides 3 year warranties on Xeon processors. If they were feeling generous, they might provide updates for chips 5 years out...

Re:This is BS.

[Joey Vegetables]

Hello Intel troll. Sorry you're feeling even more inadequate today than usual. Given the news, I can't say I blame you.

Re:This is BS.

[Opportunist]

I'm as upset as you are, but let's face it, we're dealing with 8-10 year old processors here. Yes, for many applications still way more than good enough, but still. I think it's asking a bit much to expect patches for hardware that is about 3-4 generations old.

Price isn't a deciding factor here, unless of course part of that price was the promise of support above and beyond what could reasonably be expected.

Re:This is BS.

[Joey Vegetables]

None of this makes me feel any more inclined to favor Intel over AMD. This isn't their first "brown paper bag" bug and I doubt it will be their last. If only a 3 year warranty is even offered on some of the highest-end chips they made at the time, when some new cars are warrantied for 10, I think that says something really awful about even Intel's own assessment of whether its products can be supported in the long term. AMD may or may not be drastically better, but Intel has set a very low bar, and it is going to take them serious time to earn back my business, assuming they ever do.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, I will always stick with AMD (as I long have, for other reasons)

I'm sure Intel are really upset about losing you as a customer since you weren't one anyway.

Re:This is BS.

[Archtech]

The processor of the PC on which I am writing this is just ten years old. Why do you believe that a ten-year-old processor should not be in use? (You should see my car: it's 18 years old. But then it's a Volvo, properly designed and robustly built).

It's not even as if you can buy processors today that are very much faster than my ancient i7-940. Their price/performance may be better, but guess what? I don't care because I *already paid for mine*. Of course, I am referring to single-core performance which is the limiting factor for most desktop applications. The i7-940 has four cores, which I feel is about right for a desktop - any software that does benefit from parallelism will see a significant speed-up.

Perhaps you are a devotee of the cult of technical progress. In which case you should take a long look at the facts, and understand that Intel microprocessors are not a very good example of such progress.

Re:This is BS.

[Joey Vegetables]

There is no such thing as the Mafia. Pure fiction. So that is NOT my Mafia name. No such thing. But let's just say that long ago, I used to work in debt collection, and back in those days, it was a very bad idea to not pay my boss whatever money he was owed. Or to try to troll me on Slashdot. :)

Re:This is BS.

[Aaden42]

Realistically most enterprise customers use hardware for 3 to a MAXIMUM of 5 years, then it's out the door. Even high-end Xeon CPU's. It's entirely plausible that the bulk of actual enterprise customers(*) don't care.

(*) Note: actual enterprise customers, not nerds who buy surplus servers off eBay to run in their basements.

Disclaimer: I am one such nerd.

Re:This is BS.

[Sarten-X]

For what it's worth, AMD also has only a 3-year warranty.

Re:This is BS.

[MightyYar]

I wish! We still have SPARC machines.

Re:This is BS.

[Barny]

Yes and no. I had an i7 960 myself, and was starting to find performance slipping on some media tasks (in my case exporting in GIMP) as well as general multitasking. I was planning an upgrade, and looked at the sky-high prices of modern intel CPUs, and decided to try AMD. Quite happy with my Rizon 1700X system I built, and I have yet to see it actually slow down at all.

Note: the i7 960 is still in use. It got migrated down the chain of ownership to be the center of a FreeNAS box. As such I don't need the microcode upgrade for it, since no potentially hostile code runs on it.

Re:This is BS.

[Penguinisto]

Query: Do these servers connect directly to the Internet w/o any sort of firewall, DMZ rigging, load balancer, or similar? If not, the odds are fairly low. If so, you got bigger problems than anything Intel does or doesn't do.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you ever run any javascript in any of your web browsers (which most sites require to work at all)? If so then it can be exploited.

Re:This is BS.

[butzwonker]

I've had a slightly overclocked i7 920 until a few weeks ago and it was perfectly capable of running yesteryears games. I've only upgraded in order to be able to play this years games, and even those didn't really require the CPU update but rather need more than 6GB RAM and upgrading such an old machine wasn't worth it.

So yeah, for standard tasks like web browsing, development without large compilations, writing, and so on, even an i7 920 would be perfectly fine if it weren't for Intel's fuck-up. It kind of bothers me that by not fixing older CPUs they might make even more money.

That being said, I bought an AMD 1800x so the joke's on them.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Every company has to care about having products that win over new customers. Otherwise, they are on a loosing path.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Realistically most enterprise customers use hardware for 3 to a MAXIMUM of 5 years.

You must be thinking of desktops and notebooks.

It's not that uncommon for some larger organizations to be running servers that are much older than five years. The penny-pinching bean counters have significant influence over whether systems get maintained/upgraded and, too often, they rely on "look, it hasn't broken so far, right?" when deciding whether or not to upgrade. Some people are surprisingly short-sighted that way, preferring reactive over proactive.

Re:This is BS.

[The Grim Reefer]

Look at the release dates for the specific Xeons on their list. For example, the W3520. It was released 9 years ago. I don't blame them one bit for not updating ancient chips like that. If it was a chip released in 2016 I think owners could reasonably be upset. Intel only provides 3 year warranties on Xeon processors. If they were feeling generous, they might provide updates for chips 5 years out...

I find it amazing how most people are trying to be more conscious of pollution, CO2, and E-waste these days. There are a bunch of CPUs in use that are 10+ years old. And frankly if you're not gaming or doing video editing or other CPU intensive things, many, if not most, 10 year old CPUs are more than adequate.

I have at least three computers in use with processors that were released 8+ years ago. I have no plans to replace them either.

Intel fucked up, not me. But in their minds, and yours, that's not their problem. I should just toss out a perfectly functional system and send it off to India or China to pollute their land and water. I should also give them more money for a new system that also contributed to even more pollution. [s]Yea, that sounds perfectly reasonable to me. [/s]

I'm not saying that they should be providing updates for all processor until the end of time. But 10 years is not all that long for a computer any more. This isn't 1990. I'm not seeing substantial improvements every 2 years. If they don't want to release minor bug fixes and such after 3 to 5 years, that seem perfectly reasonable. But this is a security flaw. Companies that produce these products should be on the hook for security for as along as more than just a handful of the product is still in use. This includes security for IOT devices too. If a company can't implement proper security, then they shouldn't be in business in this day and age.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

2018 Internet Tough Guy

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not how it works. Hardware tends to stay where it is as long as it works and does the job sufficiently well. Frequently longer than that.

Most businesses are run by economists, who see "IT" and "computers" as something which only costs money. The costs associated with failing or poorly performing hardware rarely enters their spreadsheets, which is why so often nothing is done about it until the long predicted disaster strikes.

Re:This is BS.

[Joey Vegetables]

Yeah. Shame on them too for that. But then I haven't needed to have an AMD chip re-microcoded, much less replaced. The Honda I drive has a much shorter factory warranty than the Hyundai I don't, but that doesn't bother me so much because I know from much experience (mine plus that of countless others) that a well-maintained Honda will typically last a very long time and the warranty won't likely be needed.

Re:This is BS.

[Joey Vegetables]

Exactly. If I expected to upgrade every 2-3 years, I'd be less irritated. But today I hope to keep even a mid-range laptop or desktop around for at least 5 and hopefully longer. And I've had plenty of much older machines retired from their main use but still doing other useful work. I now have to factor into my purchasing decisions that if Intel commits another abomination like this, it won't replace bubkes, and thus my options are (a) crap (replace it outright, long before I'd have done otherwise); or (b) crappier (risk a potentially life-changing security breach).

Re:This is BS.

[Joey Vegetables]

I evaluate desktop CPUs based on performance per unit cost, and laptops based on that *plus* power usage, battery life, etc. Usually, that favored AMD on the desktop but Intel on the laptop. But, now, I have to consider the large possibility that security concerns will obsolete a laptop before anything else does. So, now, I keep using AMD on desktops, but now favor AMD on laptops as well, which, previously, I did not.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dual 3Ghz E5450's giving 8 cores with 64Gb of ram keeping fed two gtx graphics cards running CUDA under linux in my "good" box here. I use it for hash cracking, running multiple vm environments to test, building binaries and other stuff that a pair of older but grunty xeons can do well still, what do you do that makes you qualified to say I should not deal with computers?

Intel, twats.

Re:This is BS.

[Joey Vegetables]

The advent of laptops, thumb drives and mobile devices long ago rendered life inside the firewall or DMZ just as scary as life outside it. Yes, my experience is that servers are left running as long as they can be, and they are often very vulnerable. Companies typically value stability over security; in their view, a security upgrade is as likely to cause them inconvenience as would an overt security breach. And not to turn this into a yet another Windows versus Linux debate, but Windows servers are typically administered through the GUI, which increases their attack surface, one which you don't need to use necessarily, but most people do, because it's more convenient than to learn how to do Powershell or other command-line scripting. While many Linux servers do have GUIs (contrary to what I would consider best practice), they are strictly optional, and in my experience, Linux admins are not afraid of the command line as are some (not all) of their Windows counterparts.

Re:This is BS.

[Kokuyo]

I can only agree... I bought the same mobo off of ebay a few weeks back the replace my faulty one. Overclocked my i5-4670k gives me single core power I will be hard pressed to pull ahead of without investing several hundreds in a completely new system...

Re: This is BS.

[jddj]

My HTPC runs one of these "Stopped" chips, as does another similar machine I keep around 'cuz it's handy.

There's no reason for these perfectly functional machines to hit the landfill. Not while they're selling far less powerful or refined Raspberry Pi's for $35 without a case.

If you think of being involved in computing as "own a single huge honking piece of iron", perhaps you're not very involved in computing yourself.

Re:This is BS.

[Threni]

"I'm sorry, but if I'm investing in a high-end, server-class CPU, I expect it to be supported for as long as is reasonably possible."

You're not getting an update no matter what you post on Slashdot. Just pretend you're buying an Android phone.

The CEO of Intel sold all of his shares just in time, huh?!

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you seriously running server hardware from ~2006? Penryn was 2006-2007ish.. Bloomfield came out in 2009.

Re:This is BS.

[rahvin112]

Hah, Most enterprises are using computers for a minimum of 5 years now because the hardware isn't improving at a fast enough rate. As an example, Anandtech recommended that with the most recent Kaby Lake processors it was finally worth it to replace Sandy Bridge processors as KL finally represented a 20 percent increase in performance over SB. KL and SB are more than 10 year apart (KL is generation 8 Core Microarchitecture, and SB is generation 2 Core Microarchitecture) that means it took 6 revisions before there was a 20% difference in performance.

CPU performance growth has drastically slowed since about 2008, you'd have to be crazy to replace a PC before 5 years at this point because there is literally no benefit to doing so.

Re:This is BS.

[Rick Schumann]

I wouldn't at all be surprised if part of the strategy here is to scare people into dumping older systems and buying new ones so they're 'protected'.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care because I *already paid for mine*.

You might not realize, but energy efficiency is so much better today that you might as well consider you are *still paying* for it. You know electricity isn't free right?

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

to say I should not deal with computers?

Intel, twats.

Humph. You really shouldn't. A Sandy Bridge i7 from 2011 would run circles around your OMG "dual E5450's". Plus, they cost peanuts now. But by all means just keep using that box until the end of time.

Re:This is BS.

[ddtmm]

Or until AMD does something similar...

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

KL and SB are more than 10 year apart

Ahm, no they aren't. SB only came to existence at the end of 2010. KL was available at the beginning of 2017. So it's 7 years at most.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Peanuts eh? of course it means a new motherboard, and a new case because its a HP mid range workstation, and a new psu, probably some new gpu's too, and the ram will be incompatible with a newer cpu probably because its a odd special for the vendor. And cooler hardware as its bespoke to the motherboard.
So what you really mean is landfill my entire machine and buy a new one, when this one was more than up to the tasks I used it for.
How much is a 64Gb ram equipped i7 run to? or are your peanuts more expensive than the ones in the stores here. Can I expect them to reasonably support a out of date machine with problems baked right into the silicon that in reality they were warned about years ago? yes I can, if only to reduce their PR damage amongst customers.

I certainly won't be replacing it with another intel. Ditto next DC I get involved with I'll be pushing alternatives.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

the first atom model (N270) were in-order architecture, thus not affected by either specter or meltdown. 2

Re:This is BS.

[luvirini]

Well, as example one of our customers has following servers in their server room doing variety of tasks:

-One is brand new and is the primary server running a bunch of virtual machines.
-A second is the four or five year old server that it replaced and is retained as backup to run the virtual machines if needed.
-The main production management system has 2 servers (main and backup), both were bought in 2007/2008. (so approx 10 years).
-There is the exchange server from about 2011(so about 7 years). Will be removed this summer so one less old server after that.
-There is the warehouse system that was migrated to a new server about 2005. It requires a dongle placed on a parallel port and a NT 3.51 driver, that luckily apparently works in server 2003 at least.
-There is the telephony server from about 2011 or 2012.

That customer is the most obvious such, but there is a surprising number of old servers here and there, though more and more of them are being replaced by cloud solutions or moved into virtual machines.

The main servers are often fairly new, but there is a surprising number of special servers doing some specific thing that were bought at one time and never updated, that could usually be migrated to virtual machines but many customers are reluctant to do anything on a system that works.

Looking at a few customers documentation there is quite often at least one server running something like windows server 2003 in the original server it was installed on.

Re:This is BS.

[ckaminski]

> rather need more than 6GB RAM

This right here.

I'm sick of downpurposing CPUs and being restricted to some stupid memory limitation. The NUCs are a fine example of this.

They'll last 10+ years most likely, and in those 10 years still be limited to 8GB - 16GB.

The only reason I'm updating some of my Atom machines is memory limitations, and I'm doing it with non-bleeding edge stuff. Intel doesn't really like the hobbyist I guess.

Re:This is BS.

[ckaminski]

You are most certainly correct. To replace dual E5450 would require an 8 core i7.

E5450 is LGA771

i7 is not. So you WOULD need a new motherboard. Quite likely the memroy would work (DDR3 and ECC) .

There are NO 8 core i7 processors.

Either way, you're looking at $4-500 for a modest increase in TDP and cache, and maybe burst performance.

Re:This is BS.

[ckaminski]

My mistake, there were a few i7 processors with >=8 cores

https://ark.intel.com/Search/FeatureFilter?productType=processors&CoreCountMin=8&FamilyText=Intel%C2%AE%20Core%E2%84%A2%20Processors

Re: This is BS.

[arth1]

I'm glad I didn't find my Tualatin-S on the "stopped" list.
I'm looking forward to a new update, because it's been a while since the last one.

Re:This is BS.

[Anne Thwacks]

Not the OP here, but I don't expect a fix. what I do expect in the absence of a fix, is pin compatible replacements made with today's technology. Failing that, compensation:

• to me, for having to replace my entire system including embroidery machine, ATE system, yacht navigation system,
• the world at large for huge numbers of large, complex systems going to landfill

Intel are causing massive disruption to people who are not nerdy games players trapped in their parents basement, or cloud providers, and don't need more performance than they have, and for whom the processor is less than 1% of the system cost.

No, you don't get to choose CPU supplier when buying a body scanner for $1m. Hopefully, this will change soon.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you believe that a ten-year-old processor should not be in use?

Why are you asking me that question? The person I was replying to said verbatim "If they said they weren't updating 10 year old Celerons or Atoms, that might be understandable". I was simply pointing out that the listed Xeon CPUs fit their 10 year old criteria.

Re:This is BS.

[arth1]

I'm as upset as you are, but let's face it, we're dealing with 8-10 year old processors here. Yes, for many applications still way more than good enough, but still. I think it's asking a bit much to expect patches for hardware that is about 3-4 generations old.

When companies like Red Hat and Microsoft offer extended OS service plans so you can keep the OS updated with security patches for 10 years, it would be nice if the firmware on those machines certified for that OS could also receive security updates. Even for a price, because the price of migrating large software systems can be very high, and companies want to avoid doing it when it doesn't buy anything extra for as long as possible.
So yes, you will find 10 year old systems in many companies, going on doing what they always have, and making money for the business.

Re:This is BS.

[jddimarco]

There's no ECC on i7.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between warranty for a failure and addressing something that is defective by design and was broken the day it shipped. This didn't fail after five years, it failed the first day and is provable that it was defective before the customer received it.

Re:This is BS.

[hairyfeet]

The netbox at the shop is a quad core Q9505S which means its getting screwed by Intel...now why EXACTLY should I be forced to replace a system that does its job VERY well? So Intel can make more money by trying to sell me a new chip because they BORKED their own CPU design? This chip is more than powerful enough to not only do its main job of downloading drivers and looking up parts but its also quite good for converting analog formats to digital thanks to the hauppauge built into the Pavilion Media Center...so why should I have to sink money to replace a unit whose ONLY issue is that Intel decided they weren't gonna bother fixing their mistakes?

The only thing this bullshit has convinced me of is that I made the right choice to be AMD exclusive and once this last Intel unit dies there won't be any more Intel at the shop that I'm not working on for a customer, they just aren't trustworthy.

Re:This is BS.

[SeaFox]

...rather need more than 6GB RAM

This right here.

I'm sick of downpurposing CPUs and being restricted to some stupid memory limitation. The NUCs are a fine example of this.

Pretty sure that poster just didn't see the reason to spend the money on the memory upgrade, it wasn't a limitation of the CPU. I have an i7 920 as well. I started with 6 GB of RAM also when I built it (3 x 2GB, triple-channel config), and a couple years ago I upgraded to 16 GB (4 x 4GB, dual-channel config) so there was room for VM work.

Re:This is BS.

[arth1]

You might not realize, but energy efficiency is so much better today that you might as well consider you are *still paying* for it. You know electricity isn't free right?

That's not always an argument. My main server runs on a PIII 1133S, which runs well without even a CPU fan. The load is so low that it most of the time pulls very little power, but even when it runs full out, the bogomips/TDP rating of 82.9 is so good that there aren't many newer options that do better.
There are some other server CPUs that are also quite frugal.
Newer CPUs can do more, but that's not always needed.

And, for some, increased power usage isn't that big of an issue either, unless you run a big datacenter. A server located in Northern cold climates will produce heat that's needed anyhow most of the year, and the heat produced by the server can be subtracted from the heat needed to be produced by a heater.

Re:This is BS.

[arth1]

The penny-pinching bean counters have significant influence over whether systems get maintained/upgraded and, too often, they rely on "look, it hasn't broken so far, right?" when deciding whether or not to upgrade. Some people are surprisingly short-sighted that way, preferring reactive over proactive.

It can be a bit more expensive than just replacing a server. Often, systems have bespoke software that requires specific hardware or capabilities not compatible in newer systems, or where new licenses aren't procurable. And porting large software projects can increase the costs a lot. I've seen a quote for over a million for porting the software on a server that would cost ten k to replace.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah, Most enterprises are using computers for a minimum of 5 years now because the hardware isn't improving at a fast enough rate. As an example, Anandtech recommended that with the most recent Kaby Lake processors it was finally worth it to replace Sandy Bridge processors as KL finally represented a 20 percent increase in performance over SB. KL and SB are more than 10 year apart (KL is generation 8 Core Microarchitecture, and SB is generation 2 Core Microarchitecture) that means it took 6 revisions before there was a 20% difference in performance.

CPU performance growth has drastically slowed since about 2008, you'd have to be crazy to replace a PC before 5 years at this point because there is literally no benefit to doing so.

This is simply not true.

Just because you think, "hell these are good enough for a long time, large enterprises must keep them forever then!" doesn't mean it is true.

Real hard numbers, the ones that indicate the things that are actually happening, show that enterprises replace their servers every 3-5 years.

It is not worth the money saved to have a server that doesn't have 24 hour warranty service. THAT is the limiting factor. Scientifically, statistically, in the real world, this is what happens. Your internal ideas of what you think happens means nothing.

Re: This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation for these "real hard" numbers.

Re:This is BS.

[blind biker]

AMD may or may not be drastically better,

Seeing as though AMD CPUs are not susceptible to Meltdown, I would say they have an enormous advantage over intel's. The fact is that Meltdown, unlike Spectre, is very easily exploitable in practical terms, and is the one people should be actually worried about.

Re:This is BS.

[epine]

Intel only provides 3 year warranties on Xeon processors. If they were feeling generous, they might provide updates for chips 5 years out...

What does warranty have to do with this?

If a baby seat kills babies because it's defective by design, this is not a warranty issue. Not even if the baby seat only kills babies when combined with other safety systems that weren't invented yet at the time the baby seat was originally sold.

Both of these ends of the telescope are too extreme for the matter at hand, but at least mine is wide awake, whereas as yours is snoozing behind the wheel.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Current Volvos are among the worst on Consumer Report's reliability ratings.

Re:This is BS.

[AbRASiON]

The law of diminishing returns, fairly reasonable quality components says you're off a bit there.

The innovations in performance nowadays has slowed down so much that a beast server built 7 or 8 years ago, is still perfectly acceptable at performing some tasks for customers. It's chewing a bit more power but the amount of performance they gain by replacing said server isn't that wildly different.

I would say the oldest I've seen is 10 but 7 was certainly still common in the last place I was at. Over 3000 servers, just had hardware support contracts for the older stuff.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish! We still have SPARC machines.

In some ways I miss dealing with SPARC and Solaris: at least they had decent consoles. Nowadays I have to deal with GUI screen grab Java app garbage when running x86.

Zones and ZFS are also much better than LXC and NULL on Linux.

Of course there's Oracle. (hawk, spit)

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

My original i7 920 is still running a solid 1GHz overclock (2.6 - > 3.6) and is faster than more than 50% of desktop class processors intel sells today.

Thanks to tripple channel memory, it also has the same memory bandwidth as current dual channel DDR4 2400 setups today.

With a GTX 770, it also runs almost any game I throw at it. Only a few VR games run into problems.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

> In fact, I will always stick with AMD (as I long have, for other reasons) until and unless Intel makes some kind of definite, enforceable support commitment.

That is you.

For me, Intel is pushed to the end of the list of alternatives. Forever. I just don't get absolutely enraged about them because I understand this is partly our fault: we are to blame to have bought their snake oil. A more naive layman could be excused but we -- and I mean all those with some understanding of how processors work -- we should be able to expose the problem long ago.

This only makes me more paranoid about subjects we are not permitted to see in technical publications & sites.

As a small consolation, I recently tried to post a similar opinion (both in feeling and in moderation about aggressive language), only to see the comment was not approved. I hope to have better luck over here in that regard.

Were this a bug happening on a Chinese or Indian processor, we would see lots of "I told you so" remarks, as well as derogatory comments about 3rd world CPUs. I see no reason to view American products in a better light.

Some 5 computers of mine run well on Linux and will probably become inappropriate for e.g. banking. And it will be better if things work that way, for instance with a big warning at bank login about "your CPU is insecure, you might lose money and the bank won't refund you".

As I type this, I just checked cpuinfo and there they are: "retpoline", "cpu_meltdown", "spectre_v1" and "spectre_v2". Some open source microcode is already installed. As always, Linux developers are something out of this world. Maybe we could see some message warning about unfixable hardware bugs when we start Linux one day... I know we won't be able to see any with WIndows.

Alas, the problem is finding machines with anything other than Intel. It's a de facto monopoly.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the "Intel experience inside" what they promote in the document. They are saying that "We sold you shit, but could you buy a new CPU, which not any faster and is still having the same bug but it has this year's label on it." Fuck Intel, I'm done with them. Luckily the competitors are now selling equal devices with smaller price tags.

Re:This is BS.

[TheRaven64]

For some value of exploited. Spectre lets the JavaScript snoop on the contents of RAM within the same process. Given that most web browsers perform tab-granularity sandboxing, that basically means that the JavaScript can snoop on all of the data that's associated with the tab that provided the JavaScript. It may mean that malicious JavaScript in an ad can snoop credentials from the enclosing page if it's in an iframe, but that's about it. The bigger danger is that this can be combined with other vulnerabilities to provide the disclosure step in a code reuse attack.

For most server workloads, unless you're allowing arbitrary untrusted code to run then it shouldn't matter.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, let's look at the *Xeon* W3500 family. It uses the *same* *microcode* as the Xeon 5500 family, it uses nearly the same *die* as the Xeon 5500.

In fact, it will load up the Xeon 5500 updated anti-spectre microcode *JUST FINE*.

And yet it is in STOP status?! What the hell, this is actually the worst possible position, because it means the update for the Xeon 5500 can't be safely made public as it will cheerfully install into a Xeon W3500 *and* *work*.

But we don't know if it will work fine and this was Intel causing trouble to W3500 owners for no good reason, or some extremely subtle reason like having its dual-socket-topology extra QPI link disabled by a fuse (it is the only really visible difference between a Xeon 3500 and a 5500) suddenly changes how the execution unit, branch prediction unit and other spectre-related units work.

The same goes for the HEDT Core i7 that share the same CPU signature as the Xeon 5500/3500, for which the differences are some other fuses blown to disable ECC and maybe a few other "market-segmenting" features.

It is acceptable to stop development where it would not work in the first place, but certainly not because of an extremely broken situation Intel engineered themselves (bios + microcode update coupling) and a design *defect* they shared with many others on the industry, AMD included: incomplete tagging/aliasing of entries on the predictor caches, and handwaving of the concerns from researchers about side-channels related to shared resources, which have been around for more than a decade.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and I should add one more point: the microcode update can be actually made to apply only to Xeon 5500, all it needs is to clear some bits in the microcode mask field, as the HEDT 1st gen Core i7-X, Xeon 3500 and Xeon 5500 do _not_ share the same platform id (this is the whole purpose of that mask field!).

So, Intel is doing this on purpose to cause undue extra damage to owners of Xeon 5500 systems (no public update) and Xeon 3500 (no officially supported update), and maybe HEDT 1st gen core i7-X (if it is nearly the same die, the update should work there too). Well, whatever: one can get the microcode update (it has been made public by multiple vendors) and force-update it in their BIOSes, or load it up using the operating system. Of course, one has to do this on his own risk of damaging the BIOS or the CPU if there really is an incompatibility between them (yes, BIOS components matter and might be incompatible with the new microcode if the vendors let the BIOOS for single-socket Xeon get too far behind the BIOS for dual-socket Xeons. It is almost sure to be trouble for enthusiast HEDT boards, that for sure never got half the updates they should have...)

Re:This is BS.

[tomxor]

...and was starting to find performance slipping...

Performance does not "slip" on CPUs, it's not like a mechanical engine with parts that wear out and a gradually decreasing torque... It's your expectations that creep, software that bloats and new software built on the assumption of bleeding edge performance.

Those issues can be alleviated with more OSS which is not trying to push products, I understand this does not suit everyone, especially for all those whom's profession relies on heavy propitiatory media applications (in which case you are locked in a forward march with those vendors), but if you are lucky enough to be potentially free from all that then using decade old hardware today is extremely comfortable and difficult to perceive substantial performance differences without measuring intentionally CPU intensive tasks.

I'm not against progress in hardware of course but intel provide very little carrot and lots of stick with this move... but that stick will driver me elsewhere thanks.

Re:This is BS.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kaby Lake and Sandy Bridge are NOT 10 years apart. Try more like 5 years.

Sandy Bridge was demonstrated by Intel in 2009, but first made available for sale in January 2011.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bridge

Kaby Lake was first available for sale in 2016 (mobile)-2017(desktop).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake

Re:This is BS.

[Archtech]

OK, my processor consumes 130W. Suppose I "upgrade" to one that may be slightly faster, and consumes 50W. So I save 80W.

Over a 12-hour day, that's about 1KWh. Here in England, that costs me 12p (£0.12). Less than 10 cents, or $36.5 a year.

I can live with that financial hit.

Re:This is BS.

[Archtech]

Or about 15 cents (about $55 a year) if I did the arithmetic the right way round.

Re:This is BS.

[Archtech]

Mine was made in 2000, and it is still running fine. My garage mechanic says I'd be foolish to part with it.

Re:This is BS.

[Opportunist]

I'd be interested in the potential threat scenario for these machines due to a bug that requires remote access to a machine for exploitation by a bad actor.

Re:This is BS.

[toddestan]

Electricity isn't free, but neither are high-end processors. If you bought a new one, it might pay for itself by the time it too is 10 years old. Less so if the computer is turned off or in sleep mode when you aren't using it.

PDF ends with "Intel - Experience what's inside"

[JoeyRox]

Apparently what's inside is the experience of abandonment.

Gah please don't shoot us!

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at intel, please!

Re:Gah please don't shoot us!

[Opportunist]

Live by the QWORD, die by the QWORD.

Re:Gah please don't shoot us!

[Archtech]

Speaking for myself, at least, I have no axe to grind with Intel employees in general. I am sure they are mostly splendid people, quite brainy, and morally admirable.

I suspect that the people responsible for this and other disasters are mainly PHBs (within the strict meaning of the term). Who listened to their Alices and Dilberts explaining the risks, and then decided to rush right ahead anyway, because it's the quarter's bottom line that counts.

nota bene

[phantomfive]

Please note, that just because it receives a microcode update, doesn't mean it's secure. The processors are still buggy as hell.

BIZX says...

[Anonymous Coward]

BIZX says âoeSlashdot will never receive Unicode updates.â Ainâ(TM)t nobody got time for that!

Re:BIZX says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Get ready to be downmodded to -1 for naming Slashdot's corporate overlords.

Re:BIZX says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot's new overlord will fix this wreck.

Re:BIZX says...

[Opportunist]

So what, your phone manufacturer can't be assed to support UTF-8.

Re: BIZX says...

[Anonymous Coward]

Creimer spam mod down.

Code names

[H3lldr0p]

Can we get a run down of the retail names for these CPUs? I feel like Intel is running a fast one on us through these code names.

Bloomfield, Bloomfield Xeon, Clarksfield, Gulftown, Harpertown Xeon C0, Harpertown Xeon E0, Jasper Forest, Penryn/QC, SoFIA 3GR, Wolfdale C0, Wolfdale M0, Wolfdale E0, Wolfdale R0, Wolfdale Xeon C0, Wolfdale Xeon E0, Yorkfield, and Yorkfield Xeon

Are these 2012 or 2014 i5s or i7s? Xeons, are they the server or high end desktop kinds. Did HP or IBM use them in their products? Where should I be looking for more information guys?

Re:Code names

[Anonymous Coward]

you could just look at the pdf provide link for more information...

Re:Code names

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, the response to Intel's behavior should be easy: buy AMD until Intel can fix Meltdown in silicon. They opened a gaping security hole to eek out a 10% performance improvement (which, btw, is what made them competitive over AMD). Why should anyone trust them?

Re:Code names

[EvilSS]

Where should I be looking for more information guys?

Maybe start with the linked PDF instead of asking in here like Intel reads /.

Re:Code names

[Xenolith0]

Wikipedia has a nice table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_CPU_microarchitectures#Pentium_4_/_Core_Lines

Re:Code names

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we get a run down of the retail names for these CPUs? I feel like Intel is running a fast one on us through these code names.

RTFM. They're right there inside the document.

Re:Code names

[Anonymous Coward]

The easy answer is everything older than 2011. Being fair to intel, there's no way that the board makers are going to release a BIOS update to deliver said microcode for systems that old anyway. It's also unlikely that anyone is using a system that old as a virtualization host system which is the main problem case that the meltdown workarounds are meant to solve.

Re:Code names

[G00F]

I to hate all the code names, buzz words,marketing names, and all that to label a single chip.

Re:Code names

[thegarbz]

I feel like Intel is running a fast one on us through these code names.

You feel like Intel is running a fast one despite a 19 page PDF file linked in the summary with a list of every Intel processor by Code Name, Public Name, CPUID, and Platform ID being listed?

This! Is! Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not be a programmer.

According to programmer logic, the equivalent way of looking at your statement is that his cock is as big as his brain.

Doesn't sound so nearly bad now, does it?

Re:This! Is! Slashdot!

[Joey Vegetables]

Yeah, that could be taken several different ways, but let's just say that even though I'm well past the prime of my youth, I rarely get complaints about either one.

Re: This! Is! Slashdot!

[Anonymous Coward]

could be taken several different ways

That's what she said?

Admission of inadequacy

[Archtech]

'Intel says that processors with a "Stopped" status will not receive microcode updates. The reasons basically vary from "redesigning the CPU micro-architecture is impossible or not worth the effort" to "it's an old CPU" and "customers said they don't need it."'

Well, I am writing this on an Intel Core i-7 940, and I *do* need it. I paid quite a lot for this PC (although a while ago) and I don't see why I should not expect it to work reliably.

In general, moreover, it seems axiomatic that anyone who owns and is using one of those processors marked "Stopped" does need a fix.

It seems that Intel is ready to admit that it was (and may be still) unable to design and build processors that were dependably secure in normal operation.

Also that it is willing to let its customers down without compensation.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

I am writing this on an Intel Core i-7 940

That's a 10 year old processor. I'd say that the fact you are still running it now proves you've gotten your money's worth.

Go buy something else. You're more than due for an upgrade from that ancient 45nm, 130W chip.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[MightyYar]

I'd waggle my cane at you and give you a lecture about disposable culture and such... but depending on where he gets his electricity from, this may not be a valid criticism.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like having your passwords, encryption keys, and who knows what else swiped via javascript thus making using a web browser on most sites (which require javascript to function thanks to AJAX and such) a huge security risk?

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[tomxor]

Name one function that you use that has become unreliable and for which you deserve compensation.

Oh fuck off please... your argument is the same as Equifax's defence that it's ok to leak everyone's sensitive info because it's impossible to prove direct damages.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[nbritton]

Well, I am writing this on an Intel Core i-7 940, and I *do* need it. I paid quite a lot for this PC (although a while ago)

Do you know that you can pickup a Xeon X5670 for $30 on eBay?

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Replace your i7 940 with a Nehalem Xeon X5670 or similar. Nehalem Xeons are still supported. And you can upgrade to a hex core 12 thread CPU. Mine is running at 4.4GHz and destroys everything except the latest gen chips.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

How long did the warranty on the CPU last for (or the entire computer if you bought it pre-built).

That's a 10 year old CPU.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[tomxor]

Your CPU still works fine, it's just if you run the wrong software then there's the possibility someone might be able to hack you

You do realise that your definition of "wrong software" is anything that runs potentially untrusted code that does not also contain spectre specific mitigation.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

, it's just if you run the wrong software then there's the possibility someone might be able to hack you.

Yeah, just sandbox any risky software by running it in a vm... oh wait.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Name one function that you use that has become unreliable and for which you deserve compensation.

The virtualization extensions are basically worthless now.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

anything that runs potentially untrusted code that does not also contain spectre specific mitigation.

Of course, it's classic big corp strategy, let the little people shoulder the responsibility of their fuckup, sprinkle intel workarounds into all of the code.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel is the new Apple: You're mitigating it wrong.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you have to understand that "customers said they don't need it."' is code for "we asked one very large corporation, and they said we were cool with it, and anybody smaller than that, we don't give a fuck about".

You aren't important enough for them to expend the effort.

and I don't see why I should not expect it to work reliably

LOL, you can expect anything you want, Intel is telling you what you're going to get, which is nothing because they've decided it's not worth their time.

Also that it is willing to let its customers down without compensation.

My personal opinion of most tech companies is once they have your money, they have no interest in legacy support. From not getting firmware or security updates, or OS updates on phones ... their standard solution is "oh, that's old, buy a new one". And my standard solution is "but it won't be from you".

Honestly, for personal machines, I haven't bought Intel in ... 20 years? Because for me, the price/performance sweet spot has always been a slightly older AMD CPU, because I don't need bleeding edge.

But for most technology, companies who abandon the product as soon as they've shipped it don't get my business ... which is one of the reasons I'm going sour on Android: it's all customized/proprietary, tied to steer you to be an on-going revenue stream, and doesn't get updates. And Google seems to be dropping the ball with the Nexus idea.

The reality is, corporations don't really give a fuck about you once they have your money.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[tomxor]

Yeah, just sandbox any risky software by running it in a vm... oh wait.

Yup only if you are happy turning off hardware virtualisation for super slow performance, oh and of course make sure you are running a hypervisor with spectre mitigation patches... Yeah I feel safe... I just have to make sure I don't use the wrong software... you know the software that has intel mitigation's sprinkled everywhere because that's the right way to fix this of course.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no fix, only performance tradeoffs for security enhancements that don't have any meaning to the typical user.

Re: Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

My 15 year old Tanaka airbag was replaced FREE of charge because the manufacturer was caught lying about the quality and security of their product.

How is this any fucking different? Get their cock out of your mouth and get your head out of your ass. Consumer rights matter Doland.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

130W chip LOL!!

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[thegarbz]

and I don't see why I should not expect it to work reliably.

I don't see what reliability has to do with it. Is something not working reliably right now? I'll tell you what didn't work reliably, the last microcode update. If reliability is your concern you should probably prevent any microcode update from being installed given what happened last time it was released.

It seems that Intel is ready to admit that it was (and may be still) unable to design and build processors that were dependably secure in normal operation.

No. The only thing that you can seemingly imply from this situation is that Intel was unable to design and build a processor which allows this specific bug to be patched via microcode. And if you think that bugs in Intel, or AMD, or any other processor manufacturer are rare then you've clearly never looked up an errata document.

e.g.
Intel's Skylake errata list is already a 69 page document with 159 identified spec breaks. Some with workarounds, many without.
AMD is harder to list since they don't cover the entire generation in one document, but as an example Bulldozer processors 00h-0Fh errata list is a 95 page document, and there are about 4 other documents covering the family.

Designing processors is HARD, and no you won't get compensated for every unfixable bug that is found, in fact historically speaking you haven't even been compensated for 0.1% of the unfixable bugs found from any vendor.

Re: Admission of inadequacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a shit? The power bill is negligible. Who gives a fuck if you spend $100 a year to run it. It's not even a factor.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[DRJlaw]

You mean like having your passwords, encryption keys, and who knows what else swiped via javascript thus making using a web browser on most sites (which require javascript to function thanks to AJAX and such) a huge security risk?

So it's your position that browser mitigations do not exist or are insufficient?

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[DRJlaw]

You do realise that your definition of "wrong software" is anything that runs potentially untrusted code that does not also contain spectre specific mitigation.

Yes, I'm sure that you carefully vet all of the code that is running on your personal computer to ensure that it cannot break out of its virtualization sandbox.

Conversely, I'm sure that you're allowing third parties to execute code on your personal computer all the time and not just in a web browser.

Because if it's the former, you're a liar, and if it's the latter, you have just about the most inefficient ad hoc datacenter operation of all time.

Re:Admission of inadequacy

[tomxor]

Yes, I'm sure that you carefully vet all of the code that is running on your personal computer to ensure that it cannot break out of its virtualization sandbox.

You are arguing in my favor, it's even more likely anyone of those arbitrary environments to not have spectre and meltdown mitigations in place.

I'm sure that you're allowing third parties to execute code on your personal computer all the time and not just in a web browser

Yes, we all do, but I don't run them all under root.

Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

AFAIK, these microcode updates need to be incorporated into a bios update.

Is Dell or HP going to release a new bios/mcode update for 5 year old systems? I doubt it.

And most of these cpu's are 8-10 years old.

Cue the AMD fanboys who aren't getting updates for 8 year old AMD cpu flaws either.

Re:Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Got two two old Dell systems here at my job at a budget constrained Canadian university doing secondary / failover / temporary migration / backend roles that had older Xeon CPUs that Intel was originally going to update and has now confirmed will not. We weren't anticipating a update via Dell because they had said they weren't going to touch 10th generation PowerEdge or older... but I still held out hope that Intel would do an update and intel-microcode package in Ubuntu could be a delivery channel.

Unfortunately, not an opportunity to scare bosses into buying new gear, we have other old gear in production that did receive updates that will become available for other roles once we complete migrations of some services to hosted providers.

Re:Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Dell or HP going to release a new bios/mcode update for 5 year old systems? I doubt it.

Seeing as plenty of hardware for corporations have 5 year contracts for updates, yes. Specifically, HP definitely issued updates for some 5+ year old systems like my Elite 8300 SFF from mid-2012.

Cue the AMD fanboys who aren't getting updates for 8 year old AMD cpu flaws either.

Yes, being I'm such an AMD fanboy I want my Intel system fixed..? I understand at least the point they aren't going to issue updates for all their CPUs because the cost isn't worth it to them, but the fact is that higher end 6 or 7 year old CPUs are still very competitive today with the mid range of CPUs today. It's hard to argue that they're worthless or anything from the consumer end.

Re:Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[freeze128]

A BIOS update would certainly be nice, but it's not necessary. The OS can apply microcode updates (both windows and linux) during boot time. Also, these microcode updates don't survive a power-off event. There is no flash memory on the CPU. The OS would need to apply the microcode on every boot, which is what it does.

Re:Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[AndroSyn]

AFAIK, these microcode updates need to be incorporated into a bios update.

Incorrect. Most operating systems have the ability to upload a microcode update very early in their boot process.

This link explains the Linux driver: microcode.txt

If I remember correctly, Windows has a similar method(but I do not know Windows well enough to confirm this).

Re:Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK, these microcode updates need to be incorporated into a bios update.

Is Dell or HP going to release a new bios/mcode update for 5 year old systems? I doubt it.

And most of these cpu's are 8-10 years old.

Cue the AMD fanboys who aren't getting updates for 8 year old AMD cpu flaws either.

Dell has with their Optiplex line I'm writing on an optiplex 990 (sandybridge) patched with the Intel Microcode update BIOS A23 Feb-11-2018 date, and noticed Dell has released a bios update for the optiplex 980 (first gen Core with Nehalem)

therefore yes Dell is releasing BIOS updates on their Optiplex line going back to the first gen Core (Nehalem) CPUs.

Re:Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can update microcode post boot. Is there some specific reason this cannot be done?

Re:Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[kalpol]

Correct me if I am wrong but I don't think Windows applies microcode.

Re:Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell is patching all the way to Core 2 Duo: http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/sln308587/microprocessor-side-channel-vulnerabilities-cve-2017-5715-cve-2017-5753-cve-2017-5754-impact-on-dell-products?lang=en

Re:Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[freeze128]

You're wrong.

Re:Old CPU's...and does it matter?

[short]

> apply the microcode on every boot

Only after a powercycle, reboot keeps the updated firmware in CPU.

and Manhattan erupted in

[nimbius]

the deafening cacophony of cheers and laughter as class action suit attorneys joined hands together again in a fit of glorious praise. For today, the Intel legal team had truly blessed them with a bountiful harvest. Yes, truly, the second summer home in the Hamptons would see a new wet bar and game room after all.

Refunds

[xxxLCxxx]

It's okay. Who wants updates anyway? ### REFUND ### is the word! ;-)

WTF

[DontBeAMoran]

Intel has so many CPUs that they can't even keep track of all of them.

They listed the old Core 2 Duo of my Mac mini as STOPPED (shocking, I know), but I can't even find the i5-4660 of my gaming PC in the document.

Re:WTF

[CriticalYetLazy]

Should be Haswell, which is not included in mentioned list (and therefor should recieve an update).

Re:WTF

[freeze128]

Don't search by model name/number. Instead, find your CPU's cpuid code and search the document for that.

Re:WTF

[squiggleslash]

Well, the i5-4660 doesn't actually exist. The 4660 is a Xeon. There is an i5-4460 though.

The i5-4460 is a Haswell. Haswell is covered in the document, it's just instead of listing by four digit number, for Haswell they list by product families. It's the first entry on page 9. FWIW, the Xeon E5-4660 is also listed directly by four digit number, that's in the third row on the same page, just in the improbable event you actually do have a Xeon in your gaming PC.

Re:WTF

[DontBeAMoran]

You're right it's actually 4460 and not 4660.

Re:WTF

[dunkelfalke]

What is so improbable about it? There are LGA2011 gaming motherboards out there. My gaming CPU is a E5-2665

Re:WTF

[Anonymous Coward]

No, actually my Haswell i7-4770 is not listed. It's not a Xenon, and it's not mobile, and I can't match any CPUID in the document, so that's at least one mistake.

CPU identification is a mess

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never heard most of the code names in the list. How am I supposed to match these to the names in my laptop's manual? What are the names or IDs reported by hwinfo or cpuid on Linux?

Why is CPU identification such a mess to the average user? Is it because I'm not supposed to know my laptop actually contains an inferior variant of a powerful processor?

Re:CPU identification is a mess

[Teun]

Using Kinfocenter I saw my CPU is listed as an i7-2760QM
The search for i7-2 brought it up, they call it a Sandy Bridge.

Re:CPU identification is a mess

[Zontar The Mindless]

Looks like I'm already covered:

#~> cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -e model -e bugs | head -3 | tail -2
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4771 CPU @ 3.50GHz
bugs : cpu_meltdown spectre_v1 spectre_v2

Apple can't move to ARM fast enough

[shm]

Really wish Apple had gone with AMD.

New wish. Apple should buy Intel for their fabs and shut the rest down.

Re:Apple can't move to ARM fast enough

[Rockoon]

Apple still cant afford to buy Intel, but that wont be a problem soon. I've been saying that Intel is in very serious trouble since their first round of layoffs and their new "cloud focus" marking. That hasnt changed.

These bugs are bad for Intel, but their real problem is much much deeper. They've lost their process edge and are now falling behind. They wasted several years trying to get 10nm 3D tri-gates working because 14nm 3D tri-gates was what gave them their huge lead. Dont know how much money they directly burned chasing their dead end design, but the real cost is the time. They were over a generation ahead. Now they are a walking into being a generation behind and no indication that they figured out 10nm yet.

Wolfdale and Yorkfield

[Anonymous Coward]

That's BULLSHIT. These CPUs are everywhere and still very serviceable for 99% of tasks they are used for. I'm not a gamer why do I need a faster CPU?
   

Re:Wolfdale and Yorkfield

[Anonymous Coward]

Even a gamer does not need a fast CPU. I am still on my i7-920 which, apparently, will not be receiving updates now.

2008? Time to upgrade.... to Threadripper

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a ten your old chip, so I'm not surprised they won't support it.

Time to upgrade, just vote with your money and buy AMD.

Re:2008? Time to upgrade.... to Threadripper

[Anonymous Coward]

Still running a i7-920 Bloomfield here, everything runs quite well when combined with a modern GFX card at 1080p. Was going to upgrade this sometime year... Thank you Intel for making it so easy choosing my next CPU... AMD Ryzen!

Re:2008? Time to upgrade.... to Threadripper

[Tempest_2084]

Same here. I don' game on my PC so I don't need anything fancy, just an average graphics card and some RAM (12GB because it was cheap). Everything runs just fine (Windows 10 and Ubuntu). We're long past the 'need to upgrade every 3-4 years or be left in the dust' thing.

What about their just-announced CPUs?

[DontBeAMoran]

Are the new i5, i7 and i9 CPUs also vulnerable to these flaws?

Re:What about their just-announced CPUs?

[xxxLCxxx]

Yes.

Re:What about their just-announced CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Won't be fixed before gen 9.

Re:What about their just-announced CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

yes. i wouldn't buy anything right now.

Re:What about their just-announced CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, my gut feeling is that CPU protected from meltdown will appear after the holiday season. Meltdown is the really critical bug, the workaround is messy in terms of performance, and it can provide a covert channel with significant bandwidth. Spectre is another matter, it is much harder to fix, but also covert channel bandwidth is much lower and the performance impact of mitigations is mush lower.

Re:What about their just-announced CPUs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes

RL Support Timelines

[Zorro]

You can still buy parts for a 1955 Chevy or a 1964 Ford Mustang so why not an old computer?

For all the noise about "The Environment" you can do more by just using things as long as possible.

Re:RL Support Timelines

[Anonymous Coward]

You can still buy parts for a 1955 Chevy or a 1964 Ford Mustang so why not an old computer?

Machine shops are plentiful. Chip and circuit fabrication facilities are not.

For all the noise about "The Environment" you can do more by just using things as long as possible.

Not true. Modern devices do more with less. At some point, it makes more sense to buy new and recycle the old inefficient devices.

Re:RL Support Timelines

[mckwant]

I hear you, but there are valid reasons for driving a '55 Chevy. I'm a 2000 Civic guy myself, but old cars are pretty, and if mechanic-ing is your thing, Godspeed.

Less confident that's the case here, though. I haven't tracked Intel names for a while now, but got bored/curious, data Wikipedia except for one:

Bloomfield / Bloomfield Xeon: 4c/8t, running 2.4-3.3GHz, produced '08-'11.
Clarksfield: Mobile Quad i7, 1.6-2.0GHz base, 3.2 turbo. 45W TDP, produced '08-11.
Gulftown: 6 cores running 3.2-3.4GHz, production started in '11
Harpertown: Quad core, 2-3.4GHz, produced '07-present
Jasper Forest: Quad core, 1.7-2.4GHz, produced '10-present
Penryn: Mobile C2D, 2-4 cores, 1.2-3GHz, produced '07-'11
SoFIA 3GR: (Intel page) 2W TDP, 1.1GHz Atoms, and that's enough about that
Wolfdale: 2 cores, 2.5-3.5GHz, produced '07-'11
Yorkfield: Quad core, 2.3-3.2GHz, produced '07-'11

What in there is worth the time to refurbish? Bloomfield/Gulftown, we'll talk, maybe, but it would literally have to drop into my lap, come in a fully functioning box, and I'd have to invent a task for it. Even then, finding memory/cards/etc. would be problematic, and you're definitely stuck on USB 2.0. At best. No, I'm not doing the research.

I can see why folks are getting their shorts in a bind, but let's pump the brakes a little bit, anyway. I dunno. Probably just another "Yeah, you're officially old now" moment.

Re:RL Support Timelines

[Teun]

Sure, manufacturing has an environmental impact but only once.
Running outdated CPU's has an energy impact every day. (Cycles per Watt)
Remember modern GPU's are also large energy sponges.

Re:RL Support Timelines

[Anne Thwacks]

Cos CPU manufacturers own more congress-critters than the entire motor industry, and its easier to form/hide a cartel of two or three than a cartel of seven or more?

Re:RL Support Timelines

[grep -v '.*' *]

"Yeah, you're officially old now"

I'd agree with that comment, but I can't quite remember how old I actually am. Are 8080 CPUs and Digital Research's CP/M still a thing? PIP, anyone?? CALL 5??? Squeeze Q files???? Colonel David Winthrop????? (Sigh...)

Now get off my lawn and be sure and take some dandelions as you go.

Re:TRUMP's FAULT!!

[Penguinisto]

...didn't realize Trump worked for Intel's marketing department ;)

On a more serious note, the real reason is kinda two-fold:

* The marketing ROI is crap for many of these CPU models, to the point where the goodwill generated is gonna be way too low for the effort required to implement the fixes in them.

* The second reason can be summed up as "...maybe it's time to for you to buy some new gear...", which is still pretty much in Intel's favor (of course there's always going to be folks who get pissy enough about it to buy AMD CPU gear, but I'm betting that since most folks only see these fixes as a hindrance, the number of people going to AMD over this is not much more than statistical noise...)

It really doesn't matter for Linux...

[emil]

As long as "Full generic retpoline" is reported in the /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/spectre_v2 file, Spectre (and likely Meltdown) are not a concern.

The best was to accomplish that for Red Hat environments is to install Oracle's kernel RPM for the "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" (UEK).

Re:It really doesn't matter for Linux...

[Joey Vegetables]

Still waiting for Spectre patches to hit stable gentoo-sources. Meltdown wasn't a concern for AMD. Also, don't the retpoline patches depend on patched CPU microcode?

Re:It really doesn't matter for Linux...

[emil]

As I understand it, only Skylake and later CPUs are not completely addressed by retpolines.

Ubuntu released a kernel that reported this around 2/15.

Red Hat released one with partial support that seemed to require microcode around 3/8.

Oracle implemented the Full generic support starting 3/14.

This is not entirely fair.

[emil]

AMD isn't pushing a Spectre fix for older CPUs. Nor is Qualcomm for Snapdragon. Nor is Samsung for Exynos. We could go on for quite a long time with such a list.

If you need the fix for your i7 which Intel has abandoned (just like all the vendors above), run a modern Linux kernel where you see the file /sys/devices/system/cpu/vulnerabilities/spectre_v2. If this file contains the word "Full" then your kernel is protected, and you don't need microcode.

The microcode is only required on Skylake and newer for full remediation.

Re:This is not entirely fair.

[Archtech]

Thanks. That is a really useful, helpful reply - and I appreciate it.

Cortex A75

[emil]

Do you think that ARM will be replacing all the Cortex A75s that are vulnerable to the full range of Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities? Are we sure that Apple's ARM implementations will have superior security architecture?

Re: Cortex A75

[shm]

Well there aren't any certainties in life. A few years ago I'd have asserted yes. But looking at the QA on macOS the last few releases, I'm not so sure.

Car and chip comparison make no sense

[Anonymous Coward]

We guarantee car because they have a single purpose which is relatively constrained in its use case, and usually have a very long usage time before technology obsolete them, compared to cpu which are general purpose , and technology relatively take them over (9 years is an eternity for chips).

Re:PDF ends with "Intel - Experience what's inside

[Shotgun]

Or that unpleasant feeling of fullness while being raped?

Linux applies microcode directly.

[emil]

OpenBSD just got this capability also.

$ rpm -qi microcode_ctl | tail -3
The microcode update is volatile and needs to be uploaded on each system boot i.e. it doesn't reflash your cpu permanently, reboot and it reverts back to the old microcode.

Unrealistic expectations

[sjbe]

None of this makes me feel any more inclined to favor Intel over AMD. This isn't their first "brown paper bag" bug and I doubt it will be their last.

AMD has bugs in their chips too. They're vulnerable to Spectre as well.

If only a 3 year warranty is even offered on some of the highest-end chips they made at the time, when some new cars are warrantied for 10

You only see a 10 year warranty on powertrains (which seldom break) and even then it isn't a 10 year warranty, It's typically a 10 year OR 100,000 mile warranty, whichever comes first. The comprehensive warranties are 3-5 years OR 30-50K miles.

I think that says something really awful about even Intel's own assessment of whether its products can be supported in the long term.

Find me ANY large chip maker offering support on a ten year old chip. Why would they offer support on chips that by computer industry standards are ancient when none of their competitors do either? AMD certainly isn't offering 10 year warranties.

AMD may or may not be drastically better, but Intel has set a very low bar, and it is going to take them serious time to earn back my business, assuming they ever do.

Sounds to me like you already preferred AMD and were just looking for a reason to bash Intel. If you prefer AMD that's fine. They make good products in general and I'd have no quarrel with someone choosing AMD chips. But if you think AMD is going to be any better on the support front than Intel you are being naive.

Re:Unrealistic expectations

[Joey Vegetables]

I'll admit a certain amount of distrust of Intel right now. They did not behave as I expected them to. AMD may one day prove to be just as bad, or even worse, but, as of right now, I consider them as having by far the better track record, and I will give them the benefit of the doubt for as long as there is doubt to give them the benefit of.

Re:Unrealistic expectations

[Anonymous Coward]

I will give them the benefit of the doubt for as long as there is doubt to give them the benefit of.

Well said sir.

Please join class action lawsuits

[Anonymous Coward]

Please be aware there are many class action lawsuits against Intel on these and related flaws. Search for Intel class action spectre meltdown to find one local to you. Intel's handling of this has been ridiculous from the start: ignoring the issue, downplaying it, stalling, failing to disclose and now refusing to fix it without compensation. Fix coming soon forever and then almost a year later we get oh this looks like too much work to fix so we are giving up; please buy a computer.
Their designs compromise public safety. There is no time limit to that. Unreal!

Re:Please join class action lawsuits

[xxxLCxxx]

We could add a few more:

• CEO - illegally - selling all his shares after he received notice that their "bugs" were going to come afloat
• CEO being caught lying about it
• paid "journalists" and a surreal smear campaign against the main adversary
• "rewarding" shops for kicking out the adversary (past, lost in courts and it doesn't seem to have changed much)

• ...

and the funny naming is more BS

[swschrad]

processors do not identify to an operating system as "FurTongue Hyper," they identify with some alphanumeric code. so it does no good to say FurTongue45 is supported and DirtyTail6 is not. the whole thing is a load of nonsense that hides what's under the hood. a pox on all chipmakers' houses.

X336

[Anonymous Coward]

We still have a perfectly working IBM X336 and a 3 * X3850 (m1) you insensitive cold

Baby I'm Amazed

[jonesy16]

The sheer number of insults being thrown at Intel over this issue is pure amazement. Comparisons to cars (#causeSlashdot) and of course to AMD (#flameon), but it seems to me that there are far too great of expectations for the level of support a company should provide, especially given the sheer complexity of a processor and how it relates to security threats. To expect the design of something like a general purpose CPU to be perfect out of the door and error-free for the next several decades seems ridiculous to me. The claims that people now have to throw away their hardware because of this seem equally ridiculous.

At some point, ANY for-profit company is going to stop supporting an old product, especially in a low-margin environment. The sheer rate of technological advancement almost necessitates that. Let's stop blaming Intel for what is effectively an industry-normal rate of support. Consider that 10 years ago:

We were on the 2.4 Linux Kernel (no longer supported with updates)
Intel Processors were running on LGA775 sockets (NewEgg sells only 2 compatible motherboards directly, both from ASRock. ASUS/Gigabyte/ETC all don't sell compatible motherboards anymore)
We were running RHEL 2/3/4, all of which are no longer supported

But I don't see anyone griping that these other entities are engaged in the practice of forced upgrades, leaving their trusted and loyal customers hanging in the face of growing security concerns. So maybe all the Intel bashing should either subside or should be expanded to the entire industry, but I think the latter is a bit naive. Security threats evolve, new ones are created, old ones forgotten or mitigated. If it were easy, there wouldn't be a dozen new packages to update my OS every day. Remember that Intel can't just push all updates to these older architectures by themselves either, some require BIOS updates and now you're expecting motherboard companies to update a product they haven't touched in a decade as well.

Re:Baby I'm Amazed

[Anonymous Coward]

Security threats evolve, new ones are created, old ones forgotten or mitigated.

Nope. Old security threats are never forgotten. You might forget to protect against an old security threats but the bad guys never forget about them.

Re:Baby I'm Amazed

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, 10 years ago Linux 2.4 was already deprecated. Linux 2.6 came out more than 14 years ago.

Re:Baby I'm Amazed

[Anonymous Coward]

We were on the 2.4 Linux Kernel (no longer supported with updates)

Post the Intel microcode source for the related processors and I'll buy your argument.

Re:Baby I'm Amazed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm all for companies not providing support indefinitely. There is a caveat I require in return for a company being "off the hook" though. Give me the tools I need to fix it if the items break. That means source code, build tools, documentation, schematics, etc.

It's absolutely ridiculous that company can discontinue anything and then claim IP protection against reverse engineering, or even duplication. Once a company washes their hands of a product, the IP should revert to the public. If the company doesn't want to give up on their IP, then they can continue to support their products for the duration of their copyright.

We, as a people, have let IP laws go way too far in favor of corporations and against the interests of the people.

Re:Baby I'm Amazed

[dmpot]

Consider that 10 years ago:

We were on the 2.4 Linux Kernel (no longer supported with updates)

Linux 2.6 was released in December 2003.

Re:Baby I'm Amazed

[thegarbz]

We were on the 2.4 Linux Kernel (no longer supported with updates)

And the absurdity of that is if you did apply the microcode update, and did enable KPTI you would still get a net increase in speed simply by upgrading the kernel to something more modern.

Re:Baby I'm Amazed

[Anonymous Coward]

I can write my own RHEL 2/3/4 patches and support it myself because the code is open. It wouldn't be so bad if, when an Intel product was dropped from support, that the microprocessor documentation and microcode source were published for people to support on their own.

Re:Baby I'm Amazed

[iggymanz]

you talk like an Intel shill, do you own stock?

The flaws have existed for 2 decades.

Intel's first reaction was to say the OS vendors would have to make software fixes for their garbage design.

Re:Baby I'm Amazed

[jonesy16]

Seems irrelevant, but yes, I do own Intel stock (it has more than doubled the performance of AMD's stock over 10 years, but again I fail the see the relevance of that to this conversation). I also own Intel processors and have owned processors from Apple (iPhone), Digital (DEC Alpha), AMD (Opteron), IBM (PowerPC), and I'm sure others I can't remember right now. And the funny thing is ... they all worked and probably would still today if all of the supporting hardware was still around. I'm also pretty sure that if we found a flaw (and I'm sure we could) in any of those processors, the manufacturer would tell me where I could put it if the product was more than 10 years old.

Flaws have existed in nearly every product ever released since the beginning of time, there is little expectation that anything is perfect and companies that support their products well are rewarded, but there is a limit to the amount of support people should expect or demand, in my opinion. This is not a situation unique to Intel, and AMD is nearly as culpable for the same activities, just like the performance hit they took with the Phenom when their "flaw" was patched through a BIOS modification that affected performance (https://www.anandtech.com/show/2477/2).

Intel's design was not garbage, it just swung farther toward optimizing for performance than it did for security (and they weren't alone as most chip designers did the same thing). This is a learning curve that everyone is going through and at some point we will have to decided whether we value an extra 5% performance or protection against specific forms of security threats. As a home user you may opt for the security protection, an airgapped data center may prefer the extra performance shortcuts that sacrifice some security.

We, as consumers, drove the market to this place, by constantly demanding additional performance from hardware vendors. Now we're realizing maybe we went too far and we'll see that probably scale back and be rethought as a result. But let's stop pretending that Intel has to be the scapegoat and let's stop blaming them for not supporting 10-year-old hardware when nobody else is doing that either.

Re:Baby I'm Amazed

[iggymanz]

These flaws make the manufacturer's specs and claims of security lies.

No, the consumers did not demand bad design. That was Intel's doing.

Intels design is garbage, done with complete and reckless disregard for security. The flaws were pointed out two decades ago and they never ever bothered to fix it.

Intel Stole From Us

[Anonymous Coward]

But now they say its ok because it was 10 yeard ago now so were cool right?

Fuck you NSA-cocksuckers.

"not worth the effort"

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a refund is in order, then. My vendor shouldn't be able to arbitrarily decide that fixing a design flaw is too tedious for them when that flaw exposes me to real danger and/or requires me to purchase a replacement. I mean... what the fuck? What possible motivation do they have to do things right going forward if they aren't responsible for their fuck-ups?

Captcha: viruses

Those damned users should buy new hardware!

[gweihir]

How else is Intel going to get even richer? Users that run old hardware, simply because it is still good enough are a plague in Intel's profits! This is a perfectly fine opportunity to force them to upgrade and should not be missed.

In completely unrelated news, I am currently planning to get a nice new Ryzen 2 system when they become available.

Unhappy refurb companies

[Anonymous Coward]

If I ran a PC refurb company I wouldn't be too happy with Intel today

And I thought my server's CPU wasn't even affected

[demon driver]

So that's just a few weeks from (an of course premature and ill-conceived) "oh, my server's CPU doesn't seem to be affected" (because in the beginning of the spectre/meltdown aftermath it wasn't even on Intel's official list) to "oh, my server's CPU not only is very much affected indeed, it won't even get the necessary microcode anymore". And no, that server is definitely not being used in a closed environment. And no, it is neither uncommon nor unreasonable to use ten-year-old servers for purposes which need limited horsepower, while still profiting from all the bells and whistles of a server like a lights-out feature with its own network interface and a full-fledged RAID controller.

Thank you, Intel, for giving me such a determining reason for future purchase decisions, the next of which seems to be closer than I thought until a few minutes ago (or wanted, for that matter).

Interesting what's on the list and what's not

[rlk]

In the first generation mobile Core i processors (i7-xxx and i5-xxx), the low end ones (i7-6xx, i5-4xx, i3-3xx) are fixed, but the higher end ones (i7-7xx, i7-8xx, i7-9xx) are being stopped. Same is true with the desktop processors.

I suspect that's a matter of what's architecturally viable to fix as opposed to *ahem* marketing considerations. Perhaps the processor in question has more aggressive speculative execution baked into the hardware that's difficult (if possible at all) to mitigate.

Examine your expectations

[sjbe]

I'll admit a certain amount of distrust of Intel right now. They did not behave as I expected them to.

Seriously not meaning to sound snide but perhaps your expectations are unrealistic? I think there is no reasonable basis to expect AMD would have behaved any differently than Intel in the same situation. Intel has done pretty much exactly what I expected them or any rational profit seeking company to do.

Re:TRUMP's FAULT!!

[OneAhead]

* The second reason can be summed up as "...maybe it's time to for you to buy some new gear...", which is still pretty much in Intel's favor (of course there's always going to be folks who get pissy enough about it to buy AMD CPU gear, but I'm betting that since most folks only see these fixes as a hindrance, the number of people going to AMD over this is not much more than statistical noise...)

To me, the "customers said they don't need it" part (when applied to Bloomfield and Gulftown) sounds like "the crowd who's spent hundreds of dollars for a few % speed increase would wilfully opt out of the performance-crippling patches anyway". Though I've seen a few posts here contradicting that line of reasoning.

Woo Hoo! I'm on the List!

[xanthos]

Running a old Dell T5400 with the dual Harpertowns that I picked up used. No microcode patch to slow me down, no sir!

Dual quad cores running at 3Ghz. That's like 24Ghz right?

Not too bad

[viperidaenz]

These are the Core 2 and very first Core I series processors from 8 to 10 years ago.

Hour long are they expected to keep updating microcode? Especially when apparently their customers that pretty for support don't want too bother with these old CPUs

Re:Not too bad

[iggymanz]

10 year old computers are useful for all mainstream serious activities: word processing, spreadsheets, email, browsing

Re:TRUMP's FAULT!!

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe it's time to for you to buy some new gear

if your "system" means a new motherboard, maybe. If you are responsible for a couple of dozen installations of "Windows for Warships", and specification to commissioning takes most of 10 years, you are not a happy bunny. In fact, you may feel more like a chocolate bunny at Easter.

There are a very large number of situations where replacement is extremely expensive.

Intel need to be very severely punished for obsoleting pinouts and not providing (paid) replacements that fit the same socket. I would like to see the weight of an entire warship dropped on Intel from a great height for their constant forcing socket changes. I would probably support mediaeval torture, lynch mobs or other cruel and inhuman punishments for their CEO for having both 1155 and 1156 pin sockets. That was just so spiteful and arrogant, as well as technically immature.

also I7 no ecc less pci-e less ram channels lower

[Joe_Dragon]

also I7 no ecc less pci-e less ram channels lower ram cap.

Re:PDF ends with "Intel - Experience what's inside

[bongey]

"Intel- Experience when it's inside you with no lube"

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

"Intel announces policy aimed at inducing more people to buy new Intel products"

Because, what else are you gonna do? Mmm, sweet monoculture.

Re: TRUMP's FAULT!!

[Miamicanes]

I miss the golden days of "Socket 7", when I went for what seemed like almost 10 years by just swapping CPUs (at one point, keeping the current cpu & replacing the mobo with another socket 7 mATX board for some reason I can't remember. No matter how hard Intel tried to kill it, everyone else treated it like a de-facto standard & it just became even MORE entrenched until PC-100 ram finally became too limiting (and expensive... from what I recall, 128mb of pc100 cost about 2-3x as much as 128mb of pc133 or DDR-1, to the point where you could pay for a new mobo with the ram savings alone).

Microcode is not the same as code

[Vektuz]

They're not kidding when they say "sometimes its impossible". Microcode is NOT general purpose code. There's only so much you can do with microcode, and it often involves just messing with voltage timings and gates that are already part of the silicon. Granted, I'm sure some supply-demand / cost/benefit analysis is going on, but please challenge the assumption that they can just 'fix the bug' with microcode updates.

You largely can't reprogram what the CPU's underlying silicon actually does, using microcode. People keep talking about it like its some complete programming language. It is not.

a better analogy would be that it is similar to a program that is running the system for controlling railroad track switching. You can make the trains do a lot by making them switch tracks and change direction and so forth, but there's only so much you can do - the tracks they go on and the location of the switches are pre-set.

Re:TRUMP's FAULT!!

[OneAhead]

Oh never mind, the 'customers said they don't need it' was paraphrased from the following sentence in TFA: 'Based on customer inputs, most of these products are implemented as “closed systems” and therefore are expected to have a lower likelihood of exposure to these vulnerabilities.' So that makes it more likely they were actually referring to the 'SoFIA 3GR': a low-powered Atom part.