4 ms·

This seems to corroborate what SemiAccurate published earlier: https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/01/remote-security-exploit-2008-intel-platforms/ https://semiacc

by mastax 10y ago

This seems to corroborate what SemiAccurate published earlier: https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/01/remote-security-exploit-2008-intel-platforms/ https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/01/remote-security-exploit-... Crazy. A lot of the HN discussion was incredulous based on SA's reputation. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14237266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14237266

sjburt 10y ago
It's rather unclear whether this exploit is related to the one the SA thinks they have found, and at the time SA published their article it was unknown whether any actual exploit existed--the only real public information that SA had in their article was that Intel had distributed a new firmware.
colemannugent 10y ago
I was really hoping that time would prove them wrong, but on the other hand, it was only a matter of time until a vuln like this was discovered.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Fiora Aeterna posted this about SemiAccurate on Lobsters with a hilarious part about the effect of triangles on SIMD used in graphics pipelines. "Semiaccurate is well-known for posting speculation as fact, but worse, they often have major misunderstandings of the material they report on, leading to errors, incorrect deductions, wild speculation, etc. My favorite example (a real quote, not satire): 'You probably don’t remember but the Midgard architecture you know and love is a four wide architecture four stages deep. Each cycle one thread, aka a triangle or quad, is issued to the execution units. Since they are four wide they can take a full quad a cycle which is a really good thing. Unfortunately most game developers seem stuck on triangles which tend to use only three of the SIMD vector lanes. This is bad but modern power gating means it won’t consume hideous amounts of power, it just doesn’t utilize the hardware to its maximum potential often. The technical term for this is inefficiency.'"
  - theossuary 10y ago
    Waaat? I read that quote a few times, and I still can't tell what it's trying to say. Is it saying triangles as the basic building block of 3d objects is used as a way to power gate certain cpus that supposedly have better support for squares because they're "four wide"? If so, then yes I agree who ever wrote that has no understanding of what they're talking about.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      The "too reliant on triangles" is the first hint. As if the game and GPU industry are full of idiots that don't know the fundamentals of their field. Then, a triangle utilizes three lanes of SIMD. What, because it has three sides it uses three instructions? Or is it the GPU drawing those things? And lets see what StackOverflow might tell us if we were the authors researching quads superiority to triangles for gaming: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/66312/quads-vs-triangles https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/66312/quads-vs-t...

by mastax 10y ago

sjburt 10y ago

It's rather unclear whether this exploit is related to the one the SA thinks they have found, and at the time SA published their article it was unknown whether any actual exploit existed--the only real public information that SA had in their article was that Intel had distributed a new firmware.

colemannugent 10y ago

I was really hoping that time would prove them wrong, but on the other hand, it was only a matter of time until a vuln like this was discovered.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Fiora Aeterna posted this about SemiAccurate on Lobsters with a hilarious part about the effect of triangles on SIMD used in graphics pipelines. "Semiaccurate is well-known for posting speculation as fact, but worse, they often have major misunderstandings of the material they report on, leading to errors, incorrect deductions, wild speculation, etc. My favorite example (a real quote, not satire): 'You probably don’t remember but the Midgard architecture you know and love is a four wide architecture four stages deep. Each cycle one thread, aka a triangle or quad, is issued to the execution units. Since they are four wide they can take a full quad a cycle which is a really good thing. Unfortunately most game developers seem stuck on triangles which tend to use only three of the SIMD vector lanes. This is bad but modern power gating means it won’t consume hideous amounts of power, it just doesn’t utilize the hardware to its maximum potential often. The technical term for this is inefficiency.'"
- theossuary 10y ago
  Waaat? I read that quote a few times, and I still can't tell what it's trying to say. Is it saying triangles as the basic building block of 3d objects is used as a way to power gate certain cpus that supposedly have better support for squares because they're "four wide"? If so, then yes I agree who ever wrote that has no understanding of what they're talking about.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    The "too reliant on triangles" is the first hint. As if the game and GPU industry are full of idiots that don't know the fundamentals of their field. Then, a triangle utilizes three lanes of SIMD. What, because it has three sides it uses three instructions? Or is it the GPU drawing those things? And lets see what StackOverflow might tell us if we were the authors researching quads superiority to triangles for gaming: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/66312/quads-vs-triangles https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/66312/quads-vs-t...