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It is known since... forever?, that one should not speculate across security boundaries. This was not enough to avoid Spectre, but this was largely enough to av
by temac 7y ago
It is known since... forever?, that one should not speculate across security boundaries. This was not enough to avoid Spectre, but this was largely enough to avoid TONS of security vulns Intel is also susceptible to.
Somebody messed-up big time. Or from a business point of view did they? Intel current problems are manufacturing and the continuously lower power of their "legacy" processor (except due to manufacturing problems, this "legacy" is still mostly the current one) makes it so that people are buying more. Of course there is AMD back in the game, but the market demand is large enough; plus AMD would have been there anyway, and, in the fiction that Intel did take good parts of the perf hit upfront instead of the secu vulns, as competitive as in the current situation.
The people most annoyed are the users. Intel got away by pretending this was not really defects in their product but only new SW tricks that they will help defend against, and their clients just let them say that without much complaint (well, I guess big ones got some rebate...) but security researchers and/or processor designers know very well this is bullshit (see the vulns papers and FAQ) and that they simply fucked-up big time on Meltdown, MDS, etc. I don't care that a few other vendors did some of the same mistakes: they are still mistakes and design flaws, and not even something new.
Pretty much the only new shinny thing in this stream of vulns was Spectre and the few variants that appeared quite early on (but NOT Meltdown&co). The rest are design flaws that comes from the "oh not a big deal to leak that potentially privileged data, we will drop anything and trap before any derivative can go out anyway" mentality. Yeah, no, I'm sorry but the funding paper about speculation already told to not do that :/ Either they did not do their homework, or they voluntarily chose to violate the rule.
- simias 7y ago>It is known since... forever?, that one should not speculate across security boundaries. ... if you value security over raw performance. Clearly Intel has decided at some point that it was worth playing with fire in order to get ahead in benchmarks. In their defence it seems to have worked reasonably well for them for quite a while. >The people most annoyed are the users. I wish, but I wonder how much of that is true. Are most users even aware of these problems? They get patched automatically by OS vendors and then most of the time they won't hear about them anymore. I think the "nobody gets fired for choosing Intel" will probably still prevail for quite some time.
- ptx 7y ago"In their defence"? The fact that things worked well for the perpetrator (until they were caught) at the expense of the victim isn't an argument usually brought up by the defence.
- jrochkind1 7y agoIt is when the only "court" is how much money you can make.
- gdy 7y agoAnd you are accused of being stupid.
- qeternity 7y agoFor most of Intel’s existence people ran fairly trusted workloads side-by-side. It wasn’t until “the cloud” that things really changed.
- rcthompson 7y agoI wonder how much of Intel's long-term perceived lead over AMD in performance is explained by compromising on these security issues that are only in the past few years being (known to be) exploited.
- blackflame 7y agoThis might be true in recent history, but Intel's Core architecture had AMD on its heels for several years.
- mantap 7y agoYou have to distinguish between mitigating an issue in software/firmware, and fixing it in hardware. You can't unfab a chip, so the software/firmware mitigation is necessarily crude. The actual performance advantage Intel was getting from "cheating" was most likely small.