Better to wait for next gen chips at this point?

[moonbogg]

In all honesty I'd grab an 8700K and feel perfectly comfortable with it. There's no gaming penalty with these stupid bugs. Also, think of it like this; if this bug effects every intel CPU made over the past decade, then what are the chances that YOU'RE cpu would get hacked? Man, its like no chance. Unless there's a big virus. That could be bad, but don't even worry about it. I'd just roll the dice on an 8700K it if were me, seriously. Gambling is fun. Just think of it like a loot box.

 

[DrMrLordX]

If you can hold off 6 months or so, hopefully we'll start seeing memory and SSD prices dropping with better availability/pricing on GPUs as well.

DRAM prices will do nothing but go up, possibly throughout 2018. We aren't out of the woods yet.

GPU prices? Who knows? Right now card availability is near-zero and AMD just (apparently) pulled the plug on 12nm Vega.

what are the chances that YOU'RE cpu would get hacked? Man, its like no chance. Unless there's a big virus. That could be bad, but don't even worry about it.

Once malicious script authors figure out how to craft a suitable payload, I would expect automated javascript attacks to be the #1 threat vector for Meltdown and/or Spectre. Let one of those through and you are finished.

The #1 reason to upgrade is to make sure you'll have appropriate OS and microcode updates to close most obvious holes.

 

[imported_ats]

The real question is: are you running Win7 or Win10? Win7 users are seeing actual performance declines thanks to the MS patches. It's pretty clear that MS is going to use Meltdown as a way to try to move people onto Win10.

Actually it isn't really nefarious. Win10 codebase has much more significant support for PCID AND VPCID that significantly mitigate many of the performance impacts of both Spectre and Meltdown fixes.

 

[Atari2600]

Does anyone know if there will be a new chipset for the next-gen threadripper?

X399 will support TR2, that we know. The question is more whether any improvement is substantial enough to hold the whole platform for.

Indeed, for that matter, could someone bullet point the differences between X370 and X470?

 

[Topweasel]

Does anyone know if there will be a new chipset for the next-gen threadripper?

X399 will support TR2, that we know. The question is more whether any improvement is substantial enough to hold the whole platform for.

Indeed, for that matter, could someone bullet point the differences between X370 and X470?

If there is going to be a 470 then the chances are AMD will use this to offer a x499. Since they are the exact same chipset, the X470 will be a nice opportunity to see if there is anything worth replacing the board for. But honestly outside more USB 3 and 3.1 ports or Sata ports, I doubt it. The one things we would want are just not possible with the architecture. What we could see is more features included this gen to take more advantage of the other 60 PCIe lanes.

 

[JPB]

Have you considered trying to pick up a cheap 8350 on eBay?

Yes, I have. But the Sabertooth 990FX motherboard I am currently using, doesnt have a BIOS update to support Piledriver. I think the Revision 2 motherboard does tho. Mine is Rev 1.

 

[jel01790]

I'd probably wait.

 

[PG]

Yes, I have. But the Sabertooth 990FX motherboard I am currently using, doesnt have a BIOS update to support Piledriver. I think the Revision 2 motherboard does tho. Mine is Rev 1.

I would check again. It looks like the Rev. 1 supports Piledriver in general, but not the high wattage FX-9370 and FX-9590. The Rev. 2 does officially support those monsters.

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_990FX/HelpDesk_CPU/

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_990FX_R20/HelpDesk_CPU/

 

[PeterScott]

Been contemplating an upgrade this year, but it seems maybe not worth it until new chips are released without the latest performance-choking bugs/fixes. Is this the correct approach? I assume this will be corrected by next gen chip release.

I normally never advocate waiting, and Spectre/Meltdown really aren't game changers for me. It will likely be years before we see fixes on the HW side.

But if you are looking to build a PC right now, waiting might make sense because of insane GPU pricing (Mining Madness) and silly RAM prices (Cartel Collusion).

I wanted to upgrade, and my computer is ten years old, but I simply will not pay current obscene prices so I am out.

 

[jpiniero]

I do think there's a very good chance that Icelake and Cascade Lake will include at least a decent performance mitigation for Meltdown. Not an actual fix of course but given that the hit is large enough that it seems worth waiting right now.

 

[PeterScott]

I do think there's a very good chance that Icelake and Cascade Lake will include at least a decent performance mitigation for Meltdown. Not an actual fix of course but given that the hit is large enough that it seems worth waiting right now.

Evidence of this large hit. My system is patched I haven't seen any significant performance hit (Gaming, general usage, and Video Encoding).

The real performance hit is people running multi-user servers with many users. So not typical home computer users.

 

[LTC8K6]

I normally never advocate waiting, and Spectre/Meltdown really aren't game changers for me. It will likely be years before we see fixes on the HW side.

But if you are looking to build a PC right now, waiting might make sense because of insane GPU pricing (Mining Madness) and silly RAM prices (Cartel Collusion).

I wanted to upgrade, and my computer is ten years old, but I simply will not pay current obscene prices so I am out.

I think we will see fixed chips this year.

 

[Spartak]

I think we will see fixed chips this year.

Sorry to burst your bubble but processor designs are locked at least a year before launch and with production lead time from the fabs it will be one and a half year from now the soonest IF they managed to fix the meltdown issue in their branch prediction by now, which I highly doubt. Late '19 / early '20 seems the soonest we can expect chips from Intel with Meltdown fixed.

Spectre will take a lot longer to fix, if ever.

 

[jpiniero]

Sorry to burst your bubble but processor designs are locked at least a year before launch and with production lead time from the fabs it will be one and a half year from now the soonest IF they managed to fix the meltdown issue in their branch prediction by now, which I highly doubt. Late '19 / early '20 seems the soonest we can expect chips from Intel with Meltdown fixed.

I would think so too (Was thinking more about a performance mitigation than a fix), but Intel has put in a way to detect whether the CPU needs KPTI for Meltdown, so chips with an actual fix may not be too far off. This based upon a linux kernel patch recently submitted.

 

[richaron]

Sorry to burst your bubble but processor designs are locked at least a year before launch and with production lead time from the fabs it will be one and a half year from now the soonest IF they managed to fix the meltdown issue in their branch prediction by now, which I highly doubt. Late '19 / early '20 seems the soonest we can expect chips from Intel with Meltdown fixed.

Spectre will take a lot longer to fix, if ever.

Yeah Spectre will most likely take a major redesign to fix.

But intel knew about Meltdown way before they released their most recent chips which suffered from the Meltdown bug. This means they've had quite a while to work on a solution even while they were still releasing buggy products. So intel might be able to have new hardware without the Meltdown bug later this year.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I don't see true fixes in hardware for Spectre or Meltdown from Intel before 2020 e.g. Sapphire Rapids.

 

[scannall]

I don't see true fixes in hardware for Spectre or Meltdown from Intel before 2020 e.g. Sapphire Rapids.

Maybe 2019 if they already had something baking in the lab. Maybe, but that's pushing it.

 

[PeterScott]

Sorry to burst your bubble but processor designs are locked at least a year before launch and with production lead time from the fabs it will be one and a half year from now the soonest IF they managed to fix the meltdown issue in their branch prediction by now, which I highly doubt. Late '19 / early '20 seems the soonest we can expect chips from Intel with Meltdown fixed.

Spectre will take a lot longer to fix, if ever.

Agreed. Meltdown is the easier to understand and fix problem, but Spectre is more like a class of problems, that are much harder to completely understand let alone fix.

 

[Ranulf]

I would check again. It looks like the Rev. 1 supports Piledriver in general, but not the high wattage FX-9370 and FX-9590. The Rev. 2 does officially support those monsters.

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_990FX/HelpDesk_CPU/

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/SABERTOOTH_990FX_R20/HelpDesk_CPU/

Is it really worth the upgrade though? His 8100 is at 4.2ghz. He'd be better off with upgrading that gtx 760 card, even with a 1050 (or ti) since everything else is out of stock or twice the msrp.

 

[LTC8K6]

Sorry to burst your bubble but processor designs are locked at least a year before launch and with production lead time from the fabs it will be one and a half year from now the soonest IF they managed to fix the meltdown issue in their branch prediction by now, which I highly doubt. Late '19 / early '20 seems the soonest we can expect chips from Intel with Meltdown fixed.

Spectre will take a lot longer to fix, if ever.

I don't have a bubble, and you are assuming that Intel found out about this when Google told them...
Spectre is a problem for Zen as well.

 

[richaron]

I don't have a bubble, and you are assuming that Intel found out about this when Google told them...
Spectre is a problem for Zen as well.

Yep intel was informed on July 1st of the problems as far as I can see. Over 3 months before they released coffee lake which also suffers from the Meltdown bug.

Your argument sounds a bit like "Maybe they didn't know about the exploits even though someone reliable told them about it." Lol, good defence I guess..

*edit: sorry my bad, were you implying intel might have known about their buggy CPUs for much longer?

 

[maddie]

I don't have a bubble, and you are assuming that Intel found out about this when Google told them...
Spectre is a problem for Zen as well.

Assuming you are correct about the not living in a bubble accusation, your continual expression of the imminent Intel hardware fix is either extreme naivety or purposeful disinfo.

For Intel's sake, I hope they did NOT know about this problem for a multi year period. If they did and refused to attempt software mitigation as is being done presently will open them to massive lawsuits. The present botched job of providing reliable patches attest to the rush job in progress.

In other words, your arguments are without merit and repetition will not make them stronger.