6 ms·

I work in CPU security and it's the same with microarchitecture. You wanna know if a machine is vulnerable to a certain issue? - The technical experts (includi

by bjackman 10mo ago

I work in CPU security and it's the same with microarchitecture. You wanna know if a machine is vulnerable to a certain issue? - The technical experts (including Intel engineers) will say something like "it affects Blizzard Creek and Windy Bluff models' - Intel's technical docs will say "if CPUID leaf 0x3aa asserts bit 63 then the CPU is affected". (There is no database for this you can only find it out by actually booting one up). - The spec sheet for the hardware calls it a "Xeon Osmiridium X36667-IA" Absolutely none of these forms of naming have any way to correlate between them. They also have different names for the same shit depending on whether it's a consumer or server chip. Meanwhile, AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year but is off-by-one with regard to the "Zen" brand version. Usually I just ask the LLM and accept that it's wrong 20% of the time.

andrewf 10mo ago
>"it affects Blizzard Creek and Windy Bluff models' "Products formerly Blizzard Creek" WTF does that even mean?
- 7bees 10mo ago
  Intel doesn't like to officially use codenames for products once they have shipped, but those codenames are used widely to delineate different families (even by them!), so they compromise with the awkward "products formerly x" wording. Have done for a long time.
  - orthoxerox 10mo ago
    I wouldn't mind them coming up with better codenames anyway. "Some lower-end SKUs branded as Raptor Lake are based on Alder Lake, with Golden Cove P-cores and Alder Lake-equivalent cache and memory configurations." How can anyone memorize this endless churn of lakes, coves and monts? They could've at least named them in the alphabetical order.
    - tormeh 10mo ago
      The entire point of code names is that you can delay coming up with a marketing name. If the end user sees the code name then what is even the point? Using the code name in external communication is really really dumb. They need to decide if it should be printed on the box or if it's only for internal use, and don't do anything in between.
      - adrian_b 10mo ago
        The problem, especially at Intel, but also at AMD, is that they sell very different CPUs under approximately identical names. In a very distant past, AMD was publishing what the CPUID instruction will return for each CPU model that they were selling. Now this is no longer true, so you have to either buy a CPU to discover what it really is, or to hope that a charitable soul who has bought such a CPU will publish on the Internet the result. Without having access to the CPUID information, the next best is to find on the Intel Ark site, whether the CPU model you see listed by some shop is described for instance as belonging to 'Products formerly Arrow Lake S", as that will at least identify the product microarchitecture. This is still not foolproof, because the products listed as "formerly ..." may still be packaged in several variants and they may have various features disabled during production, so you can still have surprises when you test them for the first time.
        tormeh 10mo ago
        So they should put it on the box. In small font on the back if necessary, but make it an official part of the spec sheet - don't pretend it's irrelevant.
    - jorvi 10mo ago
      AMD does this subterfuge as well. Put Zen 2 cores from 2019 (!) in some new chip packaging and sell it as Ryzen 10 / 100. Suddenly these chips seem as fresh as Zen 5. It's fraud, plain and simple.
- baq 10mo ago
  Product lines are in design and development for years, two years is lightning fast, code names can be found for things five or more years before they were released, so everyone who works with them knows them better (much better) than the retail names.
- numpad0 10mo ago
  It means Intel M14 and M15 base designs. Except they don't use numbers.
7bees 10mo ago
You can correlate microarchitecture to product SKUs using the Intel site that the article links. AMD has a similar site with similar functionality (except that AFAIK it won't let you easily get a list of products with a given uarch). These both have their faults, but I'd certainly pick them over an LLM. But you're correct that for anything buried in the guts of CPUID, your life is pain. And Intel's product branding has been a disaster for years.
- masklinn 10mo ago
  > You can correlate microarchitecture to product SKUs using the Intel site that the article links. Intel removed most things older than SB late 2024 (a few xeons remain but afaik anything consumer was wiped with no warning). It’s virtually guaranteed that Intel will remove more stuff in the future.
josephg 10mo ago
> - Intel's technical docs will say "if CPUID leaf 0x3aa asserts bit 63 then the CPU is affected". (There is no database for this you can only find it out by actually booting one up). I’m doing some OS work at the moment and running into this. I’m really surprised there’s no caniuse.com for cpu features. I’m planning on requiring support for all the features that have been in every cpu that shipped in the last 10+ years. But it’s basically impossible to figure that out. Especially across Intel and amd. Can I assume apic? Iommu stuff? Is acpi 2 actually available on all CPUs or do I need to have to have support for the old version as well? It’s very annoying.
- baq 10mo ago
  I’m pretty sure the number of people at Intel who can tell you offhandedly the answer to your questions about only Intel processors is approximately zero give or take couple. Digging would be required. If you were willing to accept only the relatively high power variants it’d be easier.
  - josephg 10mo ago
    I'd be happy to support the low power variants as well, but without spending a bunch of money, I have no idea what features they have and what they're missing. Its very annoying. For anyone not familiar with caniuse, its indispensable for modern web development. Say you want to put images on a web page. You've heard of webp. Can you use it? https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp At a glance you see the answer. 95% of global web users use a web browser with webp support. Its available in all the major browsers, and has been for several years. You can query basically any browser feature like this to see its support status.
    - jdiff 10mo ago
      That initial percentage is a little misleading. It includes everything that caniuse isn't sure about. Really it should be something like 97.5±2.5 but the issue's been stalled for years. Even the absolute most basic features that have been well supported for 30 years, like the HTML "div" element, cap out at 96%. Change the drop-down from "all users" to "all tracked" and you'll get a more representative answer.
7bit 10mo ago
I have three Ubuntu servers and the naming pisses me off so much. Why can't they just stick with their YY.MM. naming scheme everywhere. Instead, they mostly use code names and I never know what codename I am currently using and what is the latest code name. When I have to upgrade or find a specific Python ppa for whatever OS I am running, I need to research 30 minutes to correlate all these dumb codenames to the actual version numbers. Same with Intel. STOP USING CODENAMES. USE NUMBERS!
- kalleboo 10mo ago
  As an Apple user, the macOS code names stopped being cute once they ran out of felines, and now I can't remember which of Sonoma or Sequoia was first. Android have done this right: when they used codenames they did them in alphabetical order, and at version 10 they just stopped being clever and went to numbers.
  - black3r 10mo ago
    Ubuntu has alphabetical order too, but that's only useful if you want to know if "noble" is newer than "jammy", and useless if you know you have 24.04 but have no idea what its codename is and Android also sucks for developers because they have the public facing numbers and then API versions which are different and not always scaling linearly (sometimes there is something like "Android 8.1" or "Android 12L" with a newer API), and as developers you always deal with the API numbers (you specify minimum API version, not the minimum "OS version" your code runs in your code), and have to map that back to version numbers the users and managers know to present it to them when you're upping the minimum requirements...
    - happymellon 10mo ago
      > Ubuntu has alphabetical order too, but that's only useful if you want to know if "noble" is newer than "jammy" Well, it was until they looped. Xenial Xerus is older than Questing Quokka. As someone out of the Ubuntu loop for a very long time, I wouldn't know what either of those mean anyway and would have guessed the age wrong.
    - deleted 10mo ago
countWSS 10mo ago
I've also found the same thing a decade ago, apparently lots of features(e.g. specific instruction, igpu) are broadly advertised as belonging to specific arch, but pentium/celeron(or for premium stuff non-xeon) models often lack them entirely and the only way to detect is lscpu/feature bits/digging in UEFI settings.
ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
I feel like it's a cultural thing with the designers. Ceragon were the exact same when I used to do microwave links. Happy to provide demo kit, happy to provide sales support, happy to actually come up and go through their product range. But if you want any deep and complex technical info out of them, like oh maybe how to configure it to fit UK/EU regulatory domain RF rules? Haha no chance. We ended up hiring a guy fluent in Hebrew just to talk to their support guys. Super nice kit, but I guess no-one was prepared to pay for an interface layer between the developers and the outside world.
automatic6131 10mo ago
> AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year Aha, but which digit? Sure, that's easy for server, HEDT and desktop (it's the first one) but if you look at their line of laptop chips then it all breaks down.
- pezezin 10mo ago
  Lol no, for servers (Epyc) it is the last digit. Why? Who knows, to make it more confusing I guess.
  - zamadatix 10mo ago
    I admit it took me until the 4th gen Epyc to realize this. I laughed out loud at myself/the numbering scheme.
  - adamsb6 10mo ago
    Well yeah Epyc is little endian
numpad0 10mo ago
- sSpec S0ABC = "Blizzard Creek" Xeon type 8 version 5 grade 6 getConfig(HT=off, NX=off, ECC=on, VT-x=off, VT-d=on)=4X Stepping B0 - "Blizzard Creek" Xeon type 8 -> V3 of Socket FCBGA12345 -> chipset "Pleiades Mounds" - CPUID leaf 0x3aa = Model specific feature set checks for "Blizzard Creek" and "Windy Bluff(aka Blizzard Creek V2)" - asserts bit 63 = that buggy VT-d circuit is not off - "Xeon Osmiridium X36667-IA" = marketing name to confuse specifically you(but also IA-36-667 = (S0ABC|S9DFG|S9QWE|QA45P)) disclaimer: above is all made up and I don't work at any of relevant companies
greggsy 10mo ago
Do you just have banks of old CPUs from every generation to test against?
- bjackman 10mo ago
  Nope. Recently I had to use my company card to buy an ancient mini-PC from eBay just so I could get access to a certain Skylake model
zrm 10mo ago
These have been my go-to for a while now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_processors It doesn't have the CPUID but it's a pretty good mapping of model numbers to code names and on top of that has the rest of the specs.
TiredOfLife 10mo ago
> Meanwhile, AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year but is off-by-one with regard to the "Zen" brand version. Under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen#Mobile_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen#Mobile_6 Ryzen 7000 series you could get zen2, zen3, zen3+, zen4
balou23 10mo ago
I hear you. Coincidentally, if anyone knows how to figure out which Intel CPUs actually support 5-level paging / the CPUID flag known as la57, please tell me.
wyldfire 10mo ago
> Absolutely none of these forms of naming have any way to correlate between them. I've found that -- as of a ~decade ago, at least, ark.intel.com had a really good way to cross-reference among codenames / SKUs / part numbers / feature set/specs. I've never seen errata there but they might be. Also, I haven't used it in a long time so it could've gotten worse.
- bjackman 10mo ago
  Intel do have a website where you can look up SKUs. If you wait long enough and exploit certain bugs in the JS you can get it to give you a bunch of CSV files. Now the only issue you have is that there is no consistent schema between those files so it's not really any use.
mastax 10mo ago
Also technically the code names are only for unreleased products so on ark it’ll say “products formerly Ice Lake” but the intel will continue to calm them Ice Lake.
duxup 10mo ago
That's been the case with hardware at several companies I was at. I was convinced that the process was encouraged by folks who used it as a sort of weird gatekeeping by folks who only used the magic code names. Even better I worked at a place where they swapped code names between two products at one time... it wasn't without any reason, but it mean that a lot of product documentation suddenly conflicted. I eventually only refereed to exact part numbers and model numbers and refused to play the code name game. This turned into an amusing situation where some managers who only used code names were suddenly silent as they clearly didn't know the product / part to code name convention.
hedgehog 10mo ago
Oh, the Xeons are with the vX vs vY nonsense, where the same number but a different version is an entirely different CPU (like the 2620 v1 and v2 are different microarchitecture generations and core counts). But, not to leave AMD out, they do things like the Ryzen 7000 series which are Zen 4 except for the models that are Zen 2 (!). (yes if you read the middle digits there's some indication but that's not that helpful for normal customers).
RealStickman_ 10mo ago
AMD distributed a decoding wheel for their laptop chip naming this year.

andrewf 10mo ago

>"it affects Blizzard Creek and Windy Bluff models' "Products formerly Blizzard Creek" WTF does that even mean?

7bees 10mo ago
Intel doesn't like to officially use codenames for products once they have shipped, but those codenames are used widely to delineate different families (even by them!), so they compromise with the awkward "products formerly x" wording. Have done for a long time.
- orthoxerox 10mo ago
  I wouldn't mind them coming up with better codenames anyway. "Some lower-end SKUs branded as Raptor Lake are based on Alder Lake, with Golden Cove P-cores and Alder Lake-equivalent cache and memory configurations." How can anyone memorize this endless churn of lakes, coves and monts? They could've at least named them in the alphabetical order.
  - tormeh 10mo ago
    The entire point of code names is that you can delay coming up with a marketing name. If the end user sees the code name then what is even the point? Using the code name in external communication is really really dumb. They need to decide if it should be printed on the box or if it's only for internal use, and don't do anything in between.
    - adrian_b 10mo ago
      The problem, especially at Intel, but also at AMD, is that they sell very different CPUs under approximately identical names. In a very distant past, AMD was publishing what the CPUID instruction will return for each CPU model that they were selling. Now this is no longer true, so you have to either buy a CPU to discover what it really is, or to hope that a charitable soul who has bought such a CPU will publish on the Internet the result. Without having access to the CPUID information, the next best is to find on the Intel Ark site, whether the CPU model you see listed by some shop is described for instance as belonging to 'Products formerly Arrow Lake S", as that will at least identify the product microarchitecture. This is still not foolproof, because the products listed as "formerly ..." may still be packaged in several variants and they may have various features disabled during production, so you can still have surprises when you test them for the first time.
      - tormeh 10mo ago
        So they should put it on the box. In small font on the back if necessary, but make it an official part of the spec sheet - don't pretend it's irrelevant.
  - jorvi 10mo ago
    AMD does this subterfuge as well. Put Zen 2 cores from 2019 (!) in some new chip packaging and sell it as Ryzen 10 / 100. Suddenly these chips seem as fresh as Zen 5. It's fraud, plain and simple.
baq 10mo ago
Product lines are in design and development for years, two years is lightning fast, code names can be found for things five or more years before they were released, so everyone who works with them knows them better (much better) than the retail names.
numpad0 10mo ago
It means Intel M14 and M15 base designs. Except they don't use numbers.

7bees 10mo ago

You can correlate microarchitecture to product SKUs using the Intel site that the article links. AMD has a similar site with similar functionality (except that AFAIK it won't let you easily get a list of products with a given uarch). These both have their faults, but I'd certainly pick them over an LLM. But you're correct that for anything buried in the guts of CPUID, your life is pain. And Intel's product branding has been a disaster for years.

masklinn 10mo ago
> You can correlate microarchitecture to product SKUs using the Intel site that the article links. Intel removed most things older than SB late 2024 (a few xeons remain but afaik anything consumer was wiped with no warning). It’s virtually guaranteed that Intel will remove more stuff in the future.

josephg 10mo ago

> - Intel's technical docs will say "if CPUID leaf 0x3aa asserts bit 63 then the CPU is affected". (There is no database for this you can only find it out by actually booting one up). I’m doing some OS work at the moment and running into this. I’m really surprised there’s no caniuse.com for cpu features. I’m planning on requiring support for all the features that have been in every cpu that shipped in the last 10+ years. But it’s basically impossible to figure that out. Especially across Intel and amd. Can I assume apic? Iommu stuff? Is acpi 2 actually available on all CPUs or do I need to have to have support for the old version as well? It’s very annoying.

baq 10mo ago
I’m pretty sure the number of people at Intel who can tell you offhandedly the answer to your questions about only Intel processors is approximately zero give or take couple. Digging would be required. If you were willing to accept only the relatively high power variants it’d be easier.
- josephg 10mo ago
  I'd be happy to support the low power variants as well, but without spending a bunch of money, I have no idea what features they have and what they're missing. Its very annoying. For anyone not familiar with caniuse, its indispensable for modern web development. Say you want to put images on a web page. You've heard of webp. Can you use it? https://caniuse.com/webp https://caniuse.com/webp At a glance you see the answer. 95% of global web users use a web browser with webp support. Its available in all the major browsers, and has been for several years. You can query basically any browser feature like this to see its support status.
  - jdiff 10mo ago
    That initial percentage is a little misleading. It includes everything that caniuse isn't sure about. Really it should be something like 97.5±2.5 but the issue's been stalled for years. Even the absolute most basic features that have been well supported for 30 years, like the HTML "div" element, cap out at 96%. Change the drop-down from "all users" to "all tracked" and you'll get a more representative answer.

7bit 10mo ago

I have three Ubuntu servers and the naming pisses me off so much. Why can't they just stick with their YY.MM. naming scheme everywhere. Instead, they mostly use code names and I never know what codename I am currently using and what is the latest code name. When I have to upgrade or find a specific Python ppa for whatever OS I am running, I need to research 30 minutes to correlate all these dumb codenames to the actual version numbers. Same with Intel. STOP USING CODENAMES. USE NUMBERS!

kalleboo 10mo ago
As an Apple user, the macOS code names stopped being cute once they ran out of felines, and now I can't remember which of Sonoma or Sequoia was first. Android have done this right: when they used codenames they did them in alphabetical order, and at version 10 they just stopped being clever and went to numbers.
- black3r 10mo ago
  Ubuntu has alphabetical order too, but that's only useful if you want to know if "noble" is newer than "jammy", and useless if you know you have 24.04 but have no idea what its codename is and Android also sucks for developers because they have the public facing numbers and then API versions which are different and not always scaling linearly (sometimes there is something like "Android 8.1" or "Android 12L" with a newer API), and as developers you always deal with the API numbers (you specify minimum API version, not the minimum "OS version" your code runs in your code), and have to map that back to version numbers the users and managers know to present it to them when you're upping the minimum requirements...
  - happymellon 10mo ago
    > Ubuntu has alphabetical order too, but that's only useful if you want to know if "noble" is newer than "jammy" Well, it was until they looped. Xenial Xerus is older than Questing Quokka. As someone out of the Ubuntu loop for a very long time, I wouldn't know what either of those mean anyway and would have guessed the age wrong.
  - deleted 10mo ago

countWSS 10mo ago

I've also found the same thing a decade ago, apparently lots of features(e.g. specific instruction, igpu) are broadly advertised as belonging to specific arch, but pentium/celeron(or for premium stuff non-xeon) models often lack them entirely and the only way to detect is lscpu/feature bits/digging in UEFI settings.

ErroneousBosh 10mo ago

I feel like it's a cultural thing with the designers. Ceragon were the exact same when I used to do microwave links. Happy to provide demo kit, happy to provide sales support, happy to actually come up and go through their product range. But if you want any deep and complex technical info out of them, like oh maybe how to configure it to fit UK/EU regulatory domain RF rules? Haha no chance. We ended up hiring a guy fluent in Hebrew just to talk to their support guys. Super nice kit, but I guess no-one was prepared to pay for an interface layer between the developers and the outside world.

automatic6131 10mo ago

> AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year Aha, but which digit? Sure, that's easy for server, HEDT and desktop (it's the first one) but if you look at their line of laptop chips then it all breaks down.

pezezin 10mo ago
Lol no, for servers (Epyc) it is the last digit. Why? Who knows, to make it more confusing I guess.
- zamadatix 10mo ago
  I admit it took me until the 4th gen Epyc to realize this. I laughed out loud at myself/the numbering scheme.
- adamsb6 10mo ago
  Well yeah Epyc is little endian

numpad0 10mo ago

- sSpec S0ABC = "Blizzard Creek" Xeon type 8 version 5 grade 6 getConfig(HT=off, NX=off, ECC=on, VT-x=off, VT-d=on)=4X Stepping B0 - "Blizzard Creek" Xeon type 8 -> V3 of Socket FCBGA12345 -> chipset "Pleiades Mounds" - CPUID leaf 0x3aa = Model specific feature set checks for "Blizzard Creek" and "Windy Bluff(aka Blizzard Creek V2)" - asserts bit 63 = that buggy VT-d circuit is not off - "Xeon Osmiridium X36667-IA" = marketing name to confuse specifically you(but also IA-36-667 = (S0ABC|S9DFG|S9QWE|QA45P)) disclaimer: above is all made up and I don't work at any of relevant companies

greggsy 10mo ago

Do you just have banks of old CPUs from every generation to test against?

bjackman 10mo ago
Nope. Recently I had to use my company card to buy an ancient mini-PC from eBay just so I could get access to a certain Skylake model

zrm 10mo ago

These have been my go-to for a while now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_processors It doesn't have the CPUID but it's a pretty good mapping of model numbers to code names and on top of that has the rest of the specs.

TiredOfLife 10mo ago

> Meanwhile, AMD's part numbers contain a digit that increments with each year but is off-by-one with regard to the "Zen" brand version. Under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen#Mobile_6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen#Mobile_6 Ryzen 7000 series you could get zen2, zen3, zen3+, zen4

balou23 10mo ago

I hear you. Coincidentally, if anyone knows how to figure out which Intel CPUs actually support 5-level paging / the CPUID flag known as la57, please tell me.

wyldfire 10mo ago

> Absolutely none of these forms of naming have any way to correlate between them. I've found that -- as of a ~decade ago, at least, ark.intel.com had a really good way to cross-reference among codenames / SKUs / part numbers / feature set/specs. I've never seen errata there but they might be. Also, I haven't used it in a long time so it could've gotten worse.

bjackman 10mo ago
Intel do have a website where you can look up SKUs. If you wait long enough and exploit certain bugs in the JS you can get it to give you a bunch of CSV files. Now the only issue you have is that there is no consistent schema between those files so it's not really any use.

mastax 10mo ago

Also technically the code names are only for unreleased products so on ark it’ll say “products formerly Ice Lake” but the intel will continue to calm them Ice Lake.

duxup 10mo ago

That's been the case with hardware at several companies I was at. I was convinced that the process was encouraged by folks who used it as a sort of weird gatekeeping by folks who only used the magic code names. Even better I worked at a place where they swapped code names between two products at one time... it wasn't without any reason, but it mean that a lot of product documentation suddenly conflicted. I eventually only refereed to exact part numbers and model numbers and refused to play the code name game. This turned into an amusing situation where some managers who only used code names were suddenly silent as they clearly didn't know the product / part to code name convention.

hedgehog 10mo ago

Oh, the Xeons are with the vX vs vY nonsense, where the same number but a different version is an entirely different CPU (like the 2620 v1 and v2 are different microarchitecture generations and core counts). But, not to leave AMD out, they do things like the Ryzen 7000 series which are Zen 4 except for the models that are Zen 2 (!). (yes if you read the middle digits there's some indication but that's not that helpful for normal customers).

RealStickman_ 10mo ago

AMD distributed a decoding wheel for their laptop chip naming this year.