4 ms·

Forgive me my ignorance, but I fail to see how this is such a big deal. Even 50% performance hit/cost increase would be... bearable, computations are rather che

Forgive me my ignorance, but I fail to see how this is such a big deal. Even 50% performance hit/cost increase would be... bearable, computations are rather cheap today. ML and other intensive calculations aren't done on CPU anyway. It's not like technical progress of our civilization is slowed down by 30% or something... On the other hand, shrinking Intel's market share due to bad PR and thus adding some competition into the industry could actually foster that progress.

cdoxsey 9y ago
If you run things efficiently you're eaking every ounce of performance out of this hardware. A 30% performance hit means a 30% cost increase. The bigger issue is for things that don't scale easily. That sql server that was at 90% capacity is suddenly unable to handle the load. Sure that could've happened organically, but now it happens (perhaps literally) overnight for everyone all at once. Expect a bunch of outages in the next few weeks as companies scramble to fix this.
- mkagenius 9y ago
  Should the individual companies hurry to patch it. There is no news of exploit as such.
  - rkeene2 9y ago
    There is now !
    - mkagenius 9y ago
      Intel CEO added - "But when you take a look at the difficulty it is to actually go and execute this exploit — you have to get access to the systems, and then access to the memory and operating system — we're fairly confident, given the checks we've done, that we haven't been able to identify an exploit yet." It seems you need root or physical access to the system as a prerequisite for the attack.
      - ubernostrum 9y ago
        You don't need root, and you don't need physical access. For Meltdown, you only need the ability to run your own code on the target machine. Where that gets tricky is when everyone's using cloud hosting solutions where the physical machines are abstracted away, and a given physical server may be running multiple virtual servers for different customers. Think of it like this: * Somewhere in a data center at a cloud provider is a physical server, wired up in a rack.. * That server runs virtualization software, allowing it to host Virtual Server 1, Virtual Server 2, and Virtual Server 3. * Virtual Server 1 belongs to Customer A. Virtual Servers 2 and 3 belong to Customer B. * Normally, Virtual Server 1 can't access any memory allocated to Virtual Servers 2 and 3. * BUT: Customer A can now use Meltdown to read the entire memory of the physical server. Which includes all the memory space of Virtual Servers 2 and 3, exposing Customer B's data to Customer A. That's the threat here.
- ClassyJacket 9y ago
  "A 30% performance hit means a 30% cost increase." Just wanna point out that a 30% performance hit means a 43% cost increase.
  - planteen 9y ago
    Yes. This is so often forgotten when talking about stock prices (which those 2x or 3x daily derivatives are so dangerous). For those confused: the math here is a 30% decrease puts you at 70%. To go from 70% back to 100%, 30% only gets you to 91% (0.70*1.3). 1/0.7 = 1.43 means you need 43% to recover.
cheeze 9y ago
I think you're vastly underestimating the potential impact to cloud providers. Azure/AWS/GCP all definitely have extra capacity, but they have forecasting down to a science. Requiring even 10% more capacity is quite a large undertaking alone.
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  Even the non provider side of google will see some impact and even 5% datacenter increase won’t happen overnight
djsumdog 9y ago
Have you worked in a company where you've hit CPU performance limits. At my last job, we'd have some services run in 25 containers in parallel and we'd have to optimize as much as we could for performance bottlenecks. We'd literally get thousands of assets per minute some mornings, and had a ton of microservices to properly index tag, thumbnail and transcode them. Our ElasticSearch nodes all had 32GB of ram and we had 10 of them and they were all being pushed to the max. Something like this would be a massive hit, requiring a lot more work into identifying new bottlenecks and scaling up appropriately.

cdoxsey 9y ago

If you run things efficiently you're eaking every ounce of performance out of this hardware. A 30% performance hit means a 30% cost increase. The bigger issue is for things that don't scale easily. That sql server that was at 90% capacity is suddenly unable to handle the load. Sure that could've happened organically, but now it happens (perhaps literally) overnight for everyone all at once. Expect a bunch of outages in the next few weeks as companies scramble to fix this.

mkagenius 9y ago
Should the individual companies hurry to patch it. There is no news of exploit as such.
- rkeene2 9y ago
  There is now !
  - mkagenius 9y ago
    Intel CEO added - "But when you take a look at the difficulty it is to actually go and execute this exploit — you have to get access to the systems, and then access to the memory and operating system — we're fairly confident, given the checks we've done, that we haven't been able to identify an exploit yet." It seems you need root or physical access to the system as a prerequisite for the attack.
    - ubernostrum 9y ago
      You don't need root, and you don't need physical access. For Meltdown, you only need the ability to run your own code on the target machine. Where that gets tricky is when everyone's using cloud hosting solutions where the physical machines are abstracted away, and a given physical server may be running multiple virtual servers for different customers. Think of it like this: * Somewhere in a data center at a cloud provider is a physical server, wired up in a rack.. * That server runs virtualization software, allowing it to host Virtual Server 1, Virtual Server 2, and Virtual Server 3. * Virtual Server 1 belongs to Customer A. Virtual Servers 2 and 3 belong to Customer B. * Normally, Virtual Server 1 can't access any memory allocated to Virtual Servers 2 and 3. * BUT: Customer A can now use Meltdown to read the entire memory of the physical server. Which includes all the memory space of Virtual Servers 2 and 3, exposing Customer B's data to Customer A. That's the threat here.
ClassyJacket 9y ago
"A 30% performance hit means a 30% cost increase." Just wanna point out that a 30% performance hit means a 43% cost increase.
- planteen 9y ago
  Yes. This is so often forgotten when talking about stock prices (which those 2x or 3x daily derivatives are so dangerous). For those confused: the math here is a 30% decrease puts you at 70%. To go from 70% back to 100%, 30% only gets you to 91% (0.70*1.3). 1/0.7 = 1.43 means you need 43% to recover.

cheeze 9y ago

I think you're vastly underestimating the potential impact to cloud providers. Azure/AWS/GCP all definitely have extra capacity, but they have forecasting down to a science. Requiring even 10% more capacity is quite a large undertaking alone.

LoSboccacc 9y ago
Even the non provider side of google will see some impact and even 5% datacenter increase won’t happen overnight

djsumdog 9y ago

Have you worked in a company where you've hit CPU performance limits. At my last job, we'd have some services run in 25 containers in parallel and we'd have to optimize as much as we could for performance bottlenecks. We'd literally get thousands of assets per minute some mornings, and had a ton of microservices to properly index tag, thumbnail and transcode them. Our ElasticSearch nodes all had 32GB of ram and we had 10 of them and they were all being pushed to the max. Something like this would be a massive hit, requiring a lot more work into identifying new bottlenecks and scaling up appropriately.