Massive security hole in CPU's incoming?Official Meltdown/Spectre Discussion Thread

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Fanatical Meat

Fanatical Meat

Lifer
Feb 4, 2009
34,564
15,777
136
My wife needs a newish PC for facebook and light games.
MicroCenter has some low cost refurb/previous enterprise i3's and i5's.
Is now a bad time to buy a PC?
 
tamz_msc

tamz_msc

Diamond Member
Jan 5, 2017
3,795
3,626
136
Over at r/Intel somebody has posted that the Aida64 GPGPU benchmark shows a big hit for the GPU tests post-Windows update, BIOS and NVIDIA driver fix. It would be interesting to see if other people report the same.
 
M

mattiasnyc

Senior member
Mar 30, 2017
356
337
136
EXCellR8 said:
I warned everyone at the office, especially those with Intel-based laptops, that a windows 7 update is likely to cause them some headaches. What is this new development with AMD, though? Now I gotta worry about the not-so-secure Ryzen processors too or is that some fodder generated by Internet "analysts?"
Click to expand...

I wouldn't worry. The updated that caused problems for Win 7 / AMD CPUs was pulled by Microsoft, so that shouldn't even be available now.
 
coercitiv

coercitiv

Diamond Member
Jan 24, 2014
6,199
11,895
136
Fanatical Meat said:
My wife needs a newish PC for facebook and light games.
MicroCenter has some low cost refurb/previous enterprise i3's and i5's.
Is now a bad time to buy a PC?
Click to expand...
That is a definite yes. If possible, don't buy a new PC right now. Don't even think about past gen refurbs, previous gen products are hit a lot worse by vulnerability patches (performance degradation is considered to be noticeable)
 
zinfamous

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
110,587
29,211
146
EXCellR8 said:
I warned everyone at the office, especially those with Intel-based laptops, that a windows 7 update is likely to cause them some headaches. What is this new development with AMD, though? Now I gotta worry about the not-so-secure Ryzen processors too or is that some fodder generated by Internet "analysts?"
Click to expand...

We have a dual Xeon (I think Broadwell, but I'm not positive) in the lab that is our primary microscopy/imaging system--it runs our big fancy inverted Zeiss scope, running their software on Windows 7. It updated itself the other day and I had a minor heart attack, but it didn't BSOD or lock us out yet. ...It's always had issues because the software is rather janky anyway, but I think I just now decided that I need to put that thing offline and force everyone to transfer their data with good old flash drives until all of this is worked out.
 
moinmoin

moinmoin

Diamond Member
Jun 1, 2017
4,950
7,659
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zinfamous said:
I just now decided that I need to put that thing offline and force everyone to transfer their data with good old flash drives until all of this is worked out.
Click to expand...
That's always a good thing to do with computers dedicated to driving external devices that are bound to outlive all the software used to drive it.
 
zinfamous

zinfamous

No Lifer
Jul 12, 2006
110,587
29,211
146
moinmoin said:
That's always a good thing to do with computers dedicated to driving external devices that are bound to outlive all the software used to drive it.
Click to expand...

that is how I wanted it to be from the beginning, and it worked when I was the only one around. Of course, common sense lost out to lack of understanding and mild convenience when other people showed up and had to weigh in. :\
 
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coercitiv

coercitiv

Diamond Member
Jan 24, 2014
6,199
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dark zero said:
Not only AMD.... Now Apple got a massive hit...

https://m.gsmarena.com/iphone_6_takes_massive_performance_hit_after_spectre_patch-news-29124.php

They are now on ARM A53 levels....
Click to expand...
Take a deep breath, then come back to reality.

dcwobwF.png
 
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T

Thala

Golden Member
Nov 12, 2014
1,355
653
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realibrad said:
Someone will need to verify that, because if its true holy crap.
Click to expand...

I am sure, that this due to the massive down-clocking on older batteries Apple has introduced in iOS 11.2. - so not related to Spectre.
Note, that the original conclusion from gsmarena came from someone who has upgraded from iOS 1.1.x to 1.2.2
 
R

realibrad

Lifer
Oct 18, 2013
12,337
898
126
Thala said:
I am sure, that this due to the massive down-clocking on older batteries Apple has introduced in iOS 11.2. - so not related to Spectre.
Click to expand...

That is what I'm hoping. I just picked up a new iPhone 6 for my GF's little sister for X-mas. Brand new battery so it should be good I'm hoping.
 
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traderjay

traderjay

Senior member
Sep 24, 2015
220
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116
Guys the layers of onion unpeeling has just started. Someone should test the performance impact of network interconnect such as infiniband 40 gbps and the like and these are also heavily CPU IO dependent... I have a feeling it is going to take a hit as well.
 
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T

Topweasel

Diamond Member
Oct 19, 2000
5,436
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EXCellR8 said:
I warned everyone at the office, especially those with Intel-based laptops, that a windows 7 update is likely to cause them some headaches. What is this new development with AMD, though? Now I gotta worry about the not-so-secure Ryzen processors too or is that some fodder generated by Internet "analysts?"
Click to expand...
No still not getting the Meltdown patches, just that AMD CPU's have always been susceptible to Spectre. Spectre #1 poses little security risk at the time and will be mitigated with patches should cause little to no effect on performance. Their CPU's have always been in theory susceptible to Spectre #2, but due to how the exploit works and how AMD's Architecture is designed it is a near zero risk of people being able to take advantage of that. But it's still a flaw that should be patched. We don't know what the performance effect is of that. What we do know is that the biggest performance hit is from patching for Meltdown. AMD is still free of this.
 
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EXCellR8

EXCellR8

Diamond Member
Sep 1, 2010
3,982
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yes, considering a computer that reboots itself randomly is what I would call... "not desirable operation"

but they can't just say that their gear is broke
 
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