4 ms·
Someone made a "Never AMD" promise in purchasing, so this has pushed up lifecycles on, without exaggeration, all of our hardware by at least two years. The mobi
by washadjeffmad 7y ago
Someone made a "Never AMD" promise in purchasing, so this has pushed up lifecycles on, without exaggeration, all of our hardware by at least two years. The mobile and servers are most affected.
Worst is we support several thousand Macs, most mobile, and after I saw syscall performance choke after High Sierra, especially on apfs, I suggested we ask Apple to buy back or credit us for the loss in expected performance and lifetime.
Instead we froze purchasing on all but high end models and pushed out the replacement timeline waiting for Intel's 9-series, which was supposed to have hardware mitigation.
Now we know that even the 9-series are susceptible.
The SMT patch was pushed out last week, and we're going to have some really interesting conversations in the coming weeks.
- mistrial9 7y agoMr Jobs did a deal with the devil to put Intel-only across the product lines, before the iPhone. Now we get this unexpected penalty due to monoculture. Apple can stop bean-counting their cash hoard and start the long process of making amends, else F-U from this commentator
- dfrage 7y agoIf it had been practical to keep with the PPC line Mac users today would have the same problems, seeing as how POWER CPUs suffer from both Meltdown and Spectre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerability)#Affected_hardware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabili... This theoretical analysis says G4 and up ones look worryingly vulnerable to Spectre: http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-and-powerpc-or-why.html http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-an... Current Freescale/NXP PowerPC designs are vulnerable to Spectre: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/27/98 https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/12/27/98