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From my perspective: I've been singing Intel's praises for the last decade as they regularly (for my own tests/usage) beat out AMD in performance, clock for clo

From my perspective: I've been singing Intel's praises for the last decade as they regularly (for my own tests/usage) beat out AMD in performance, clock for clock if not dollar for dollar. With this recent news, I feel like part of the reason that Intel has been doing so well is that they have been _cheating_.

DougN7 9y ago
Is it really cheating? What they are doing is well known and published, with one side effect that didn’t get rolled back (which seems more like a bug). At least that’s what I’ve understood from what I’ve read.
- lmm 9y ago
  Implementing a cool optimization that happens to break your processor's security features is cheating, yes, even if you did it unintentionally, like accidentally taking a performance-enhancing drug.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    Intent matters, at least to me. This does not seem to be a case like VW's diesel-emissions shenanigans.
    - _ph_ 9y ago
      The problem still is: one of the units responsible for increasing the processor performance was not working correctly. So the increased performance of the processor was obtained by not working correctly. That qualifies as cheating - if not by intent but then by nature of the design. It remains to be investigated how much of the security implications of their design choices was or could have been known to Intel. The fundamental attack concept was known for many years.
      - bonzini 9y ago
        It is working correctly. A side channel is unfortunate, but in no way comparable to a missed page fault.
      - matthewmacleod 9y ago
        No, it just doesn’t. You’re diluting the meaning of that term to irrelevance. There are plenty of other words that adequately describe what happened - sloppy, careless, short-sighted. Cheating isn’t one of them.
        LamaOfRuin 9y ago
        You can easily cheat, without bad faith, by being sloppy or careless. You can also cheat in bad faith and call it being sloppy or careless. Breaking rules often has nothing to do with intent.
  - emn13 9y ago
    They didn't unintentionally break security features; they knowingly did so - the potential for information disclosure was widely documented. In their defense - the solution isn't trivial in general, and large parts of at least spectre apply in ways a CPU would be hard pressed to prevent (how is a CPU to know that even though memory isn't marked as protected from currently running code in actual fact that's because the JIT and the JIT-tted code are running in the same memory space?). But the intel CPUs are leaking a lot more data than reasonable.
    - pritambaral 9y ago
      Your parent was talking about Meltdown; that's the one that breaks security features, specifically: memory safety of a higher privilege level from a lower one.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    In that case, probably no processors are “clean” as 100% elimination of all bugs is highly unlikely. Just like a bit of growth hormones slipped into your food supply without your knowledge.
dtech 9y ago
Clock speed has been an awful metric for 2 decades now (except for within a single CPU model series). All processors (including AMD/ARM) since the early 90's have been using instruction pipelining. It's a universal performance improvement, not Intel cheating.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  Intel get drastically more instructions per clock cycle than anyone else, which is a very useful metric. Intel processors still dominate in single-threaded workflows. Meltdown makes that performance advantage look slightly suspect - Intel might be cutting corners to squeeze out extra IPC at the expense of security, reliability or accuracy.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Intel is cheating by validating the protection ring of speculative executions asynchronously, aka Meltdown, which makes this timing attack work in kernel space and requires the PTI mitigation. ARM does this on some cores too. AMD insists that they do not.
smoyer 9y ago
I don't think this is equivalent to the VW emissions cheating ... I guess we could find out otherwise later but if so it would amaze me that such a large and variable organization kept a secret for 20 years.

DougN7 9y ago

Is it really cheating? What they are doing is well known and published, with one side effect that didn’t get rolled back (which seems more like a bug). At least that’s what I’ve understood from what I’ve read.

lmm 9y ago
Implementing a cool optimization that happens to break your processor's security features is cheating, yes, even if you did it unintentionally, like accidentally taking a performance-enhancing drug.
- mannykannot 9y ago
  Intent matters, at least to me. This does not seem to be a case like VW's diesel-emissions shenanigans.
  - _ph_ 9y ago
    The problem still is: one of the units responsible for increasing the processor performance was not working correctly. So the increased performance of the processor was obtained by not working correctly. That qualifies as cheating - if not by intent but then by nature of the design. It remains to be investigated how much of the security implications of their design choices was or could have been known to Intel. The fundamental attack concept was known for many years.
    - bonzini 9y ago
      It is working correctly. A side channel is unfortunate, but in no way comparable to a missed page fault.
    - matthewmacleod 9y ago
      No, it just doesn’t. You’re diluting the meaning of that term to irrelevance. There are plenty of other words that adequately describe what happened - sloppy, careless, short-sighted. Cheating isn’t one of them.
      - LamaOfRuin 9y ago
        You can easily cheat, without bad faith, by being sloppy or careless. You can also cheat in bad faith and call it being sloppy or careless. Breaking rules often has nothing to do with intent.
- emn13 9y ago
  They didn't unintentionally break security features; they knowingly did so - the potential for information disclosure was widely documented. In their defense - the solution isn't trivial in general, and large parts of at least spectre apply in ways a CPU would be hard pressed to prevent (how is a CPU to know that even though memory isn't marked as protected from currently running code in actual fact that's because the JIT and the JIT-tted code are running in the same memory space?). But the intel CPUs are leaking a lot more data than reasonable.
  - pritambaral 9y ago
    Your parent was talking about Meltdown; that's the one that breaks security features, specifically: memory safety of a higher privilege level from a lower one.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  In that case, probably no processors are “clean” as 100% elimination of all bugs is highly unlikely. Just like a bit of growth hormones slipped into your food supply without your knowledge.

dtech 9y ago

Clock speed has been an awful metric for 2 decades now (except for within a single CPU model series). All processors (including AMD/ARM) since the early 90's have been using instruction pipelining. It's a universal performance improvement, not Intel cheating.

jdietrich 9y ago
Intel get drastically more instructions per clock cycle than anyone else, which is a very useful metric. Intel processors still dominate in single-threaded workflows. Meltdown makes that performance advantage look slightly suspect - Intel might be cutting corners to squeeze out extra IPC at the expense of security, reliability or accuracy.
cookiecaper 9y ago
Intel is cheating by validating the protection ring of speculative executions asynchronously, aka Meltdown, which makes this timing attack work in kernel space and requires the PTI mitigation. ARM does this on some cores too. AMD insists that they do not.

smoyer 9y ago

I don't think this is equivalent to the VW emissions cheating ... I guess we could find out otherwise later but if so it would amaze me that such a large and variable organization kept a secret for 20 years.