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>Needless to say, if Intel had played this trick it would have been pinned to the top of the front page here for the last week. Bit of a premature conjecture.

>Needless to say, if Intel had played this trick it would have been pinned to the top of the front page here for the last week. Bit of a premature conjecture. It was on the first page when the hashes were uncovered some time ago. I'm not trying to excuse problematic behaviour but when comparing apples to oranges one has to mention that AMD has an enormous, and complex, product stack and in total has one tenth the revenue of intel (most of which is earned by their CPU division) and Intel's graphics division mostly consists of homogenous integrated graphics solutions. Their graphics division was also a separate entity with their own team that struggled to make a profit and has been plagued with graphics driver issues for as long as I can remember. Overall, their drivers have improved and I think things like this will reach their software engineering department. with all side channel attacks that have been uncovered the AMD CPU division has been hammering out security features and promoting their better security to cloud providers, so I think their attention will definitely be focused on not making graphics drivers their achilles heel.

ajross 5y ago
To be clear: you're assuming hard work and good faith on the part of the developers, which I think is noble and probably well-founded. I'm talking about the clearly bad faith attempt to ship an obfuscated driver to presumably hide hardware bugs.
- washadjeffmad 5y ago
  Still pretty hyperbolic. It's just as likely that these work around Intel-specific landmines that couldn't function anyway else without violating Intel's IP. Either way, it's a Windows + AMD driver thing, not baked into any Ryzen CPUs. Your guess as what it works around is as good as mine, though.
- Out_of_Characte 5y ago
  never attribute to malice which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
  - ajross 5y ago
    You don't misname a performance hack or bug workaround or whatever this is as a "PCI Driver" by "incompetence" (quite literally it's got nothing to do with any device enumerable on the PCI buses -- it tweaks MSRs on the local CPU!). This was very clearly an attempt at obfuscation. We don't know why (or even what it does), but anyone can see what it is.

ajross 5y ago

To be clear: you're assuming hard work and good faith on the part of the developers, which I think is noble and probably well-founded. I'm talking about the clearly bad faith attempt to ship an obfuscated driver to presumably hide hardware bugs.

washadjeffmad 5y ago
Still pretty hyperbolic. It's just as likely that these work around Intel-specific landmines that couldn't function anyway else without violating Intel's IP. Either way, it's a Windows + AMD driver thing, not baked into any Ryzen CPUs. Your guess as what it works around is as good as mine, though.
Out_of_Characte 5y ago
never attribute to malice which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
- ajross 5y ago
  You don't misname a performance hack or bug workaround or whatever this is as a "PCI Driver" by "incompetence" (quite literally it's got nothing to do with any device enumerable on the PCI buses -- it tweaks MSRs on the local CPU!). This was very clearly an attempt at obfuscation. We don't know why (or even what it does), but anyone can see what it is.