7 ms·

You think Intel would publish if they had found spectre themselves? Edit: Okay, this reads like a snarky question ala "as if Intel would have done that!" but t

by Daho0n 6y ago

You think Intel would publish if they had found spectre themselves? Edit: Okay, this reads like a snarky question ala "as if Intel would have done that!" but that wasn't what I were aiming for. Sorry about that.

woofie11 6y ago
I think classic Intel would. Intel's major cash cow and selling point was trust and brand. Until recently, I bought Intel processors and motherboards through good and bad because Intel had brand credibility. AMD sometimes gave better price-performance, but no one beat Intel for reliability and trust. Intel processors, chipsets, wifi, etc. were stable, had quality drivers, and QC was excellent. I knew the stuff would work. I don't care about a 30% difference in performance nearly as much as that. Historically, Intel was very good about publishing processor manuals, and bug lists. They weren't always perfect about fixing them, mind you, but they weren't bad either. Recall the FDIV bug. They took a lot of flack for that, but ultimately, they agreed to replace all affected processors. Or read e.g. an Intel 80486 manual and errata. Intel seems to be imploding right now, and I don't know that they would publish something like this today, but that's a pretty recent phenomenon -- past five years or so. I just bought my first AMD desktop (with ECC!), but I'm still kind of hoping Intel will go back to the old ways -- transparent, reliable, documented, stable, and trustworthy. I'd rather get that, even if I need to pay double or lose a little bit of performance. Those allowed Intel to sell high-margin products. I'm not sure if the market would sustain that today. Perhaps the market for high-margin products has imploded. Right now, cloud infrastructure seems to rely on massive numbers of less reliable systems, rather than super-reliable servers as we had even a decade ago. Scientific computing has moved in a similar direction. No one makes serious business laptops/desktops anymore like classic IBM ThinkPads (which ran around $10k in today's dollars) or Sun/SGI/HP/etc. workstations for that matter. Or it might be that Intel drove the market in that direction. I can't quite tell. Or it might be that AMD is taking Intel's former niche. Again, with AMD, my desktop finally has ECC again. That's something I haven't had for many years. What I'd really like is a reliable laptop which could self-monitor. Memory has ECC. SSD has RAID. Every wire is monitored for errors, and if there's an issue somewhere, it can be pinpointed to the user. USB devices can't crash my computer. If any IC is unreliable, I'm immediately let know about what failed. If a hard drive has a bad cable, I'm told which cable is bad. If a fan is failing, I know. All voltages are monitored. If a heatsink falls off, the system shuts itself down with no damage and logs the event. Computations is error-correcting. Etc. The hardware Just Works, and if something breaks, I can fix it proactively rather than reactively when I lose my data. Think of the systems NASA used in the space shuttle. It wouldn't add much to the cost; most of this is just NREs. The amount of actual silicon needed would be pretty small.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  You may not care about the +30% performance for a desktop machine, but for a laptop it means +30% time spending in a café without needing to bring your charger with you, and in a datacenter it means -30% electricity bills. I haven't seen the numbers, but I think desktops are getting less important market for CPU makers.
  - derefr 6y ago
    You’d better see those numbers, then: desktops saw a major rebound since COVID. Employers are buying their remote employees home-office workstations, rather than laptops. A work laptop (as we’ve mostly stabilized on for the last decade) doesn’t make as much sense when the employer knows they won’t be asking the employee to commute, let alone travel for work. May as well get more bang for your buck with a fixed installation.
  - tedunangst 6y ago
    Sadly, my laptop doesn't devote 100% of its power budget to CPU.
  - woofie11 6y ago
    30% hit to performance isn't the same as 30% hit to power. Right now, I'm typing text into an HTML textarea element. Most of my laptop's power is going to the LCD backlight, I would guess. Dunno, though. Maybe some tab in the background is sucking up 100% CPU not doing anything, in which case, power consumption is the same. In one scenario, that tab is sucking up less compute. If you're sitting in a cafe, using your laptop to train machine learning algorithms, you might lose 30% battery time, but you're probably doing something wrong. And I would gladly pay 30% more on my AWS bills for more reliable machines. It depends on what you're doing, but for what I'm doing, server costs are a rounding error in our budget. Most money goes to people. But I don't think I'd pay 30% more in AWS bills since a lot of what they do is IO-bound and not CPU-bound. I think the tougher calculation would be on GPUs. At least for what I do, on the rest of the computer, it's a no-brainer.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
parsimo2010 6y ago
I'm not sure if they would or not. I'm sure they employ security researchers. What I don't know is, if Intel was the first to discover a vulnerability of this size and knew that mitigation would impact performance, whether they would have tried to cover it up. I expect that they would have disclosed the vulnerability as soon as they had a mitigation option. But Intel wasn't the first to discover the Spectre (and Meltdown), and therefore they were stuck with the disadvantage of having to respond to outsiders discovering a vulnerability, rather than being able to get out in front of it, which is what AMD is doing right now. The end result is the same with both brands: you have to disable speculative execution and take a hit to secure your computer, and I don't think either company should be telling customers not to worry. But AMD has the messaging advantage.
totalZero 6y ago
The context is different here though. The vulnerability as a general problem has already been disclosed and studied. Its impact to customers today is not the same as it was in 2018.

by Daho0n 6y ago

woofie11 6y ago

I think classic Intel would. Intel's major cash cow and selling point was trust and brand. Until recently, I bought Intel processors and motherboards through good and bad because Intel had brand credibility. AMD sometimes gave better price-performance, but no one beat Intel for reliability and trust. Intel processors, chipsets, wifi, etc. were stable, had quality drivers, and QC was excellent. I knew the stuff would work. I don't care about a 30% difference in performance nearly as much as that. Historically, Intel was very good about publishing processor manuals, and bug lists. They weren't always perfect about fixing them, mind you, but they weren't bad either. Recall the FDIV bug. They took a lot of flack for that, but ultimately, they agreed to replace all affected processors. Or read e.g. an Intel 80486 manual and errata. Intel seems to be imploding right now, and I don't know that they would publish something like this today, but that's a pretty recent phenomenon -- past five years or so. I just bought my first AMD desktop (with ECC!), but I'm still kind of hoping Intel will go back to the old ways -- transparent, reliable, documented, stable, and trustworthy. I'd rather get that, even if I need to pay double or lose a little bit of performance. Those allowed Intel to sell high-margin products. I'm not sure if the market would sustain that today. Perhaps the market for high-margin products has imploded. Right now, cloud infrastructure seems to rely on massive numbers of less reliable systems, rather than super-reliable servers as we had even a decade ago. Scientific computing has moved in a similar direction. No one makes serious business laptops/desktops anymore like classic IBM ThinkPads (which ran around $10k in today's dollars) or Sun/SGI/HP/etc. workstations for that matter. Or it might be that Intel drove the market in that direction. I can't quite tell. Or it might be that AMD is taking Intel's former niche. Again, with AMD, my desktop finally has ECC again. That's something I haven't had for many years. What I'd really like is a reliable laptop which could self-monitor. Memory has ECC. SSD has RAID. Every wire is monitored for errors, and if there's an issue somewhere, it can be pinpointed to the user. USB devices can't crash my computer. If any IC is unreliable, I'm immediately let know about what failed. If a hard drive has a bad cable, I'm told which cable is bad. If a fan is failing, I know. All voltages are monitored. If a heatsink falls off, the system shuts itself down with no damage and logs the event. Computations is error-correcting. Etc. The hardware Just Works, and if something breaks, I can fix it proactively rather than reactively when I lose my data. Think of the systems NASA used in the space shuttle. It wouldn't add much to the cost; most of this is just NREs. The amount of actual silicon needed would be pretty small.

xiphias2 6y ago
You may not care about the +30% performance for a desktop machine, but for a laptop it means +30% time spending in a café without needing to bring your charger with you, and in a datacenter it means -30% electricity bills. I haven't seen the numbers, but I think desktops are getting less important market for CPU makers.
- derefr 6y ago
  You’d better see those numbers, then: desktops saw a major rebound since COVID. Employers are buying their remote employees home-office workstations, rather than laptops. A work laptop (as we’ve mostly stabilized on for the last decade) doesn’t make as much sense when the employer knows they won’t be asking the employee to commute, let alone travel for work. May as well get more bang for your buck with a fixed installation.
- tedunangst 6y ago
  Sadly, my laptop doesn't devote 100% of its power budget to CPU.
- woofie11 6y ago
  30% hit to performance isn't the same as 30% hit to power. Right now, I'm typing text into an HTML textarea element. Most of my laptop's power is going to the LCD backlight, I would guess. Dunno, though. Maybe some tab in the background is sucking up 100% CPU not doing anything, in which case, power consumption is the same. In one scenario, that tab is sucking up less compute. If you're sitting in a cafe, using your laptop to train machine learning algorithms, you might lose 30% battery time, but you're probably doing something wrong. And I would gladly pay 30% more on my AWS bills for more reliable machines. It depends on what you're doing, but for what I'm doing, server costs are a rounding error in our budget. Most money goes to people. But I don't think I'd pay 30% more in AWS bills since a lot of what they do is IO-bound and not CPU-bound. I think the tougher calculation would be on GPUs. At least for what I do, on the rest of the computer, it's a no-brainer.
  - xiphias2 6y ago

parsimo2010 6y ago

I'm not sure if they would or not. I'm sure they employ security researchers. What I don't know is, if Intel was the first to discover a vulnerability of this size and knew that mitigation would impact performance, whether they would have tried to cover it up. I expect that they would have disclosed the vulnerability as soon as they had a mitigation option. But Intel wasn't the first to discover the Spectre (and Meltdown), and therefore they were stuck with the disadvantage of having to respond to outsiders discovering a vulnerability, rather than being able to get out in front of it, which is what AMD is doing right now. The end result is the same with both brands: you have to disable speculative execution and take a hit to secure your computer, and I don't think either company should be telling customers not to worry. But AMD has the messaging advantage.

totalZero 6y ago

The context is different here though. The vulnerability as a general problem has already been disclosed and studied. Its impact to customers today is not the same as it was in 2018.