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Intel Discloses Three More Chip Flaws (reuters.com)
Intel on Tuesday disclosed three more possible flaws in some of its microprocessors that can be exploited to gain access to certain data from computer memory. From a report: Its commonly used Core and Xeon processors were among the products that were affected, the company said. "We are not aware of reports that any of these methods have been used in real-world exploits, but this further underscores the need for everyone to adhere to security best practices," the company said in a blog post. Intel also released updates to address the issue and said new updates coupled those released earlier in the year will reduce the risk for users, including personal computer clients and data centres. In January, the company came under scrutiny after security researchers disclosed flaws that they said could let hackers steal sensitive information from nearly every modern computing device containing chips from Intel, Advanced Micro Devices and ARM.
Today's Wired article says the details of the Foreshadow attack would be presented tomorrow. Somebody is coordinating all this.
Intel seems to be having problems again, while AMD is rolling out 2nd Gen Ryzen Threadrippers this week. AMD's got the high-end processor market all to itself, while Intel is revealing that they were never that good as they advertised.
Intel could have had a monopoly if they didn't make the Pentium bug math error. Computers are supposed to be "perfect" at computations, but the Intel bug threw some court cases in the wrong direction. I'm not sure they can be trusted anymore.
Now AMD is rolling out processor changes that were discussed here on Slashdot years ago, and they're off in the speed races and higher core limits. (Intel maxes out at about 6, new Threadripers offer 32 hyperthreaded cores that simulate 64 processors.)
Intel better go back to the drawing boards... they're behind in a game they used to always win.
Good lord, you can't be serious. The road to silicon nirvana is paved with errata sheets. (And always has been.)
Furthermore, the division bug is a terrible example to bolster your cause, because the algorithm was correct in the first place, and the implementation of the algorithm in digital logic was correct in the first place, and then they dropped a very small stitch in the transfer to silicon layout. Had the stitch been any larger, they would have easily caught it during silicon validation. Hint: on randomized inputs, the bug is only triggered about once in 9 billion cases.
Achieving 100% test coverage for all 3.1 million transistors is non-trivial, especially given the processing power available in 1990 three years before the Pentium was first released (what with cheap-ass PC memory costing $60,000/GB in 1990 dollars; double that for server-grade ECC).
The only shitty thing Intel did in this chapter was try to sweep it under the run after the horse bolted the barn.
And the truth of this is that back then, not a lot of software used the FP unit (most people had previously saved a few bucks by purchasing the 486SX castrato, which lacked the hardware floating point unit altogether, and most development shops pretty much assumed this was the defacto situation on the ground, so integer math was almost always preferred).
It really was true that 90% of the people purchasing these chips were at low risk of any real consequence (the two-frame bump in the night right as you're closing in for the money shot in Falcon 3.0 possibly excepted—Falcon 3.0 was legendary for actually using the hardware floating point unit to actually compute a (mildly degraded) military-calibre flight model back in the 486 era (when nothing else did). The accurate inertial momentum effects when rolling hard simply blew everyone's mind. It was so good, you almost felt it through your feet (if you had been wise enough to invest in the 486DX).
Poof! VERTIGO! VERTIGO! as the conspicuous fourth wall universally present in every kinetic 3-space simulator up until then suddenly vanished without a trace.
There was just no way to point this recall at only those who needed it (proof of a previous 486DX purchase order would have been a not-bad fence; hard to believe if you had previously purchased the 486SX that just now you suddenly gave a shit, though wankers are gonna wank).
So it's either pay to recall 9 processors causing a problem for every 1 processor that really needs to be replaced (at an enormous, globally unproductive expense), or panic and do a fatally stupid PR snow job. Intel picked door #2.
"Daddy, daddy, where does CO2 come from?"
"Well, son, it comes from flushing $500 million worth of almost perfectly good CPUs down the crapper practically unused, and then baking up a fresh set."
Guess what? I'm old as fuck, and still sharp as a tack. So if your asbestos underpants are in any kind of mild disrepair, I'd stick to spinning mythical stories about the 1970s or the 1960s, if I were you.
(Hint: I was already reading the 8008 data sheet to pass the time in my grade eight literature classroom. I would have had to mow my weekends to smithereens to actual own one at the price back in the day—not the very first version from 1972—but right around the time they came up with a simplified version reducing the number of mandatory voltage supplies from -12, +12, +5 to just +5. So even the mid-seventies are not quite free and clear for mythical reconstruction, wherever my lawn is found.)