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I fail to see how Intel deserves any benefit of the doubt after the speculative execution fiasco they engineered to make their CPUs faster. Why do people conve

I fail to see how Intel deserves any benefit of the doubt after the speculative execution fiasco they engineered to make their CPUs faster. Why do people conveniently forget even fairly recent history is beyond me.

treprinum 3y ago
Speculative execution was what made CPUs fast. That some creepy people use it for hacks is another story. Are we going to end up with super slow CPUs with super hard security in the end? As there is a trade-off between speed and security, so pick one or the other. I would rather have a fast CPU than one that prevents hacking in some narrow scenarios. Cloud operators might have another view, but why should I be punished for scenarios that won't ever happen on my laptop?
- tmtvl 3y ago
  As someone who has used computers since the early '90s even if you take away speculative execution CPUs are still ridiculously fast. The problem is that people are doing very slow stuff on them (Python, Electron, layers upon layers of abstractions) and only getting away with it due to (sometimes) dangerous hacks. Let's look at a random processor, like, say, the Intel Pentium G3420. A budget CPU released in December 2013 (coming up on its 10th birthday), it's a duo core CPU with a 3.2 GHz clock speed. Now I don't know what your usecase is, not many problems are nicely parallelizable, however at the scale we're talking it doesn't really matter that much. Because 3.2 billion instructions is a really big number. Now don't get me wrong, a million is also a quite sizable number; while 1 dollar won't even buy you a loaf of bread a million dollars will buy you a real fancy house, but a billion goes even beyond that. For example if you live to be 85 years old and from the moment you are born until the moment you pass away you do a thousand calculations per hour, every hour of the day, every day of every year, you will have done 750 million calculations. That's less than a quarter of what that ancient budget CPU does _per second_. Unfortunately some people, when given access to such power, have a tendency to abuse it. And that's what leads us to things like a chat app taking 9 seconds to launch.
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Can't these security mitigations be disabled if you are willing to endure the increased security risk ? (Though an hardware switch would be better for these.)
- beebeepka 3y ago
  It was only part of what made them fast and they should absolutely have told their clients what the price for that performance increase was. Choice is fine but it has to be a an informed one.
TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
Every modern CPU by Intel’s rivals have had speculative execution vulnerabilities too. The OG transient execution CPU vulnerability, Spectre, works on Intel, AMD, modern ARM-based, and IBM processors.

treprinum 3y ago

Speculative execution was what made CPUs fast. That some creepy people use it for hacks is another story. Are we going to end up with super slow CPUs with super hard security in the end? As there is a trade-off between speed and security, so pick one or the other. I would rather have a fast CPU than one that prevents hacking in some narrow scenarios. Cloud operators might have another view, but why should I be punished for scenarios that won't ever happen on my laptop?

tmtvl 3y ago
As someone who has used computers since the early '90s even if you take away speculative execution CPUs are still ridiculously fast. The problem is that people are doing very slow stuff on them (Python, Electron, layers upon layers of abstractions) and only getting away with it due to (sometimes) dangerous hacks. Let's look at a random processor, like, say, the Intel Pentium G3420. A budget CPU released in December 2013 (coming up on its 10th birthday), it's a duo core CPU with a 3.2 GHz clock speed. Now I don't know what your usecase is, not many problems are nicely parallelizable, however at the scale we're talking it doesn't really matter that much. Because 3.2 billion instructions is a really big number. Now don't get me wrong, a million is also a quite sizable number; while 1 dollar won't even buy you a loaf of bread a million dollars will buy you a real fancy house, but a billion goes even beyond that. For example if you live to be 85 years old and from the moment you are born until the moment you pass away you do a thousand calculations per hour, every hour of the day, every day of every year, you will have done 750 million calculations. That's less than a quarter of what that ancient budget CPU does _per second_. Unfortunately some people, when given access to such power, have a tendency to abuse it. And that's what leads us to things like a chat app taking 9 seconds to launch.
BlueTemplar 3y ago
Can't these security mitigations be disabled if you are willing to endure the increased security risk ? (Though an hardware switch would be better for these.)
beebeepka 3y ago
It was only part of what made them fast and they should absolutely have told their clients what the price for that performance increase was. Choice is fine but it has to be a an informed one.

TerrifiedMouse 3y ago

Every modern CPU by Intel’s rivals have had speculative execution vulnerabilities too. The OG transient execution CPU vulnerability, Spectre, works on Intel, AMD, modern ARM-based, and IBM processors.