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

[jpiniero]

Sniping here, havent read all of the preceding 46 pages!
Question : Is the next iteration from intel (cannonlake?) shielded from this bug - as in no performance penality?

I suspect Icelake and Cascade Lake will have a performance mitigation but there have been no real rumors of the sort yet.

 

[Markfw]

Sniping here, havent read all of the preceding 46 pages!
Question : Is the next iteration from intel (cannonlake?) shielded from this bug - as in no performance penality?

Most likely not. It takes quite a while to change CPU design. Not betting the farm on that with this big thing though.

 

[cytg111]

Most likely not. It takes quite a while to change CPU design. Not betting the farm on that with this big thing though.

I understand this question I am about to ask have been a firestarter in the past, and I really dont want to start a fire! Anyway here goes.. (we can always delete it later).
Question : With the information available for us today on this subject, should I be switching my new builds towards an AMD plaform rather than Intel? Thinking a gaming rig and ~8 to 16 core server rigs.
We know that gaming is largely not affected by the bug(so intel single threaded wins here) and server IO is hit the most right? How about virtual appliances/hypervisors? Any benches out on those yet?

 

[Markfw]

I understand this question I am about to ask have been a firestarter in the past, and I really dont want to start a fire! Anyway here goes.. (we can always delete it later).
Question : With the information available for us today on this subject, should I be switching my new builds towards an AMD plaform rather than Intel? Thinking a gaming rig and ~8 to 16 core server rigs.
We know that gaming is largely not affected by the bug(so intel single threaded wins here) and server IO is hit the most right? How about virtual appliances/hypervisors? Any benches out on those yet?

Well, I don't know about all those gaming benches. My new systems are all NVME boot and EVERYTHING and the hit on SSDs is very high. I am sure this could start a fire, but based on everything I know, and the time it will most likely take Intel to (hardware-wise) fix their chips, I would go all AMD,, now that they have a decent product. The amount they lost benches in the past MIGHT be vaporized by all these performance hits. Regardless, I don;t have to reply on MS to make a correct patch.

 

[elpokor]

https://solaceattack.com/

https://skyfallattack.com/

oh boy

 

[Markfw]

https://solaceattack.com/

https://skyfallattack.com/

oh boy

They are just variants of Spectre, not a big deal IMO.

 

[IEC]

https://solaceattack.com/

https://skyfallattack.com/

oh boy

Their WHOIS lookup reveals the domain was registered on tucows...
https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=solaceattack.com

Compare to the Meltdown/Spectre lookups:
https://whois.icann.org/en/lookup?name=meltdownattack.com

Might be a hoax. We'll see.

 

[wahdangun]

I understand this question I am about to ask have been a firestarter in the past, and I really dont want to start a fire! Anyway here goes.. (we can always delete it later).
Question : With the information available for us today on this subject, should I be switching my new builds towards an AMD plaform rather than Intel? Thinking a gaming rig and ~8 to 16 core server rigs.
We know that gaming is largely not affected by the bug(so intel single threaded wins here) and server IO is hit the most right? How about virtual appliances/hypervisors? Any benches out on those yet?

It will hit quite hard with VM, I have several VM and even tough the VM was used only for Remote desktop instances, it's feel slower before patch, and my user since the patch always complaining about some occasional slowdown, even when the CPU utilization was low (80%).

I'm using dell power edge server with Intel kabylake xeon, and windows server 2012 r2. And for VM we used hyper-v.

 

[elpokor]

Might be a hoax. We'll see.

Definitely, I forgot to check domain info

 

[DrMrLordX]

I understand this question I am about to ask have been a firestarter in the past, and I really dont want to start a fire! Anyway here goes.. (we can always delete it later).
Question : With the information available for us today on this subject, should I be switching my new builds towards an AMD plaform rather than Intel? Thinking a gaming rig and ~8 to 16 core server rigs.
We know that gaming is largely not affected by the bug(so intel single threaded wins here) and server IO is hit the most right? How about virtual appliances/hypervisors? Any benches out on those yet?

You might actually want to start your own thread on that. How much longer can you wait?

 

[Zucker2k]

Most likely not. It takes quite a while to change CPU design. Not betting the farm on that with this big thing though.

How up to date are you on Intel tech, or news coming out of Intel? Or, perhaps you have turned a blind eye to every positive news coming out of Intel so that you can continue recklessly swinging that Intel-bashing 30% hammer every opportunity you get? You have been trolling this thread enough with your one-sided answers. Something needs to be done about you.


Personally attacking members is not allowed.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

 

[cytg111]

It will hit quite hard with VM, I have several VM and even tough the VM was used only for Remote desktop instances, it's feel slower before patch, and my user since the patch always complaining about some occasional slowdown, even when the CPU utilization was low (80%).

I'm using dell power edge server with Intel kabylake xeon, and windows server 2012 r2. And for VM we used hyper-v.

Damn that is what I dont want to hear! Is that quantifiable by any means?

 

[cytg111]

How up to date are you on Intel tech, or news coming out of Intel? Or, perhaps you have turned a blind eye to every positive news coming out of Intel so that you can continue recklessly swinging that Intel-bashing 30% hammer every opportunity you get? You have been trolling this thread enough with your one-sided answers. Something needs to be done about you.


Personally attacking members is not allowed.


esquared
Anandtech Forum Director

You have been around since 2006 that means you know what trolling looks like, its been bad and this is not it.

 

[cytg111]

You might actually want to start your own thread on that. How much longer can you wait?

Actually I am fine with not drawing the attention of a new thread. I can wait a while cause I am allready looking at a dual 2670v2(sandy) rig right now but based on this info I am contemplating to get rid of it and get something else before getting heavily invested, timewise, on the platform.
edit : the appliances I need IS heavy on the IO side, not random IO though, we are talking massive amounts of video/audio feeds, from a home cooked surveillance system, fed into a postgresql database.

 

[Topweasel]

How up to date are you on Intel tech, or news coming out of Intel? Or, perhaps you have turned a blind eye to every positive news coming out of Intel so that you can continue recklessly swinging that Intel-bashing 30% hammer every opportunity you get? You have been trolling this thread enough with your one-sided answers. Something needs to be done about you.

You obviously haven't been paying much attention to the kind of work Mark does with his systems. He has 10's of thousands invested into Intel server products. But those machines workloads are the exact kind of workloads that see these 20%-30% drops. Which is why he brings it up a lot, all of a sudden he has several systems that are now performing like they are 8 years older than they are.

 

[DrMrLordX]

postgresql database.

Hmm.

https://blog.2ndquadrant.com/postgresql-meltdown/

I have read that PostgreSQL suffers from Meltdown patches to a great extent. This blogger seems to disagree; nevertheless, you could avoid the whole issue with AMD hardware. Though if you go that route, I don't think anything cheaper than Threadripper would work for you. And Epyc is new + very expensive.

 

[Atari2600]

How up to date are you on Intel tech, or news coming out of Intel? Or, perhaps you have turned a blind eye to every positive news coming out of Intel so that you can continue recklessly swinging that Intel-bashing 30% hammer every opportunity you get? You have been trolling this thread enough with your one-sided answers. Something needs to be done about you.

Awww, are your poor wee shares down a bit sucker2k?

If you'd even the slightest clue about the steps of hardware design, build and validation, then you'd realise 12 months to change pretty fundamental principles is extremely racey.

Personal attacks are NOT allowed in the tech forums.

Daveybrat
AT Moderator

 

[cytg111]

Hmm.

https://blog.2ndquadrant.com/postgresql-meltdown/

I have read that PostgreSQL suffers from Meltdown patches to a great extent. This blogger seems to disagree; nevertheless, you could avoid the whole issue with AMD hardware. Though if you go that route, I don't think anything cheaper than Threadripper would work for you. And Epyc is new + very expensive.

Good points, yea I am not that brave.. sticking with the 2670s and degraded performance until there there is a threadripper v2 around.

 

[wahdangun]

Damn that is what I dont want to hear! Is that quantifiable by any means?

It's hard to track, and sometimes it's frustrating especially Ms decided to automatically patch my server before I have a chance to benchmark, maybe the sudden slowdown is affected because random io getting hit, if you want me to benchmark in VM let me know.

And if you use postgresql database it will hit quite hard after the patch (we used odoo openerp). And we don't apply patch to that system yet, and if Intel not getting the patch right the in March we will replace all Intel server with AMD thread ripper.

Btw how much IP camera you have ? That needs dual Sandy xeon ?

We have 24 IP camera and we just need Sandy xeon with just 4 thread and we using blue iris.

 

[Stuka87]

Sniping here, havent read all of the preceding 46 pages!
Question : Is the next iteration from intel (cannonlake?) shielded from this bug - as in no performance penality?

I doubt it. That chip is done from a design standpoint. Unless they really delay it.

 

[Markfw]

Good points, yea I am not that brave.. sticking with the 2670s and degraded performance until there there is a threadripper v2 around.

I am curious as to why waiting on the TRv2. I just resreached, and found that yes, you can get a dual socket 2011 motherboard for $300, and 2 of those chips on ebay for $350, and get 20 cores and 40 threads, but at only 2.5 ghz, and loosing 20-30% on IO for your application, so a TR would be considerably faster at 3.5, even at stock ! And TRv2 would fit in the same motherboard.

Not to mention the power draw (in case you care about the electric bill)

 

[cytg111]

I am curious as to why waiting on the TRv2. I just resreached, and found that yes, you can get a dual socket 2011 motherboard for $300, and 2 of those chips on ebay for $350, and get 20 cores and 40 threads, but at only 2.5 ghz, and loosing 20-30% on IO for your application, so a TR would be considerably faster at 3.5, even at stock ! And TRv2 would fit in the same motherboard.

Not to mention the power draw (in case you care about the electric bill)

For the sole reason of not jumping on anything version 1.0 thats all.

It's hard to track, and sometimes it's frustrating especially Ms decided to automatically patch my server before I have a chance to benchmark, maybe the sudden slowdown is affected because random io getting hit, if you want me to benchmark in VM let me know.

And if you use postgresql database it will hit quite hard after the patch (we used odoo openerp). And we don't apply patch to that system yet, and if Intel not getting the patch right the in March we will replace all Intel server with AMD thread ripper.

Btw how much IP camera you have ? That needs dual Sandy xeon ?

We have 24 IP camera and we just need Sandy xeon with just 4 thread and we using blue iris.

For the moment I actually only have one cam - and its giving me grief in terms of c++/ffmpeg but as it turns out it may not be coding skills that fails me but a not quite reliable qihan camera. If you got recommendations in terms of quality IP cams Id like to hear it!
I am putting 1080p 30fps h264 binary video into the database, segments of 10-15 minutes each and on a frame to frame basis storing a variety of metadata, I am coding instant access to replay functionality ie. select another area of interest for motion detection and rerun the last 24 hours, retrain a neural net and rerun the last 48 hours etc(some of this might benefit from GPU offload). That being said the dual 2670 will also be serving websites and mercurial repositories and all the other small experiments I have running on old laptops right now..

 

[wahdangun]

For the sole reason of not jumping on anything version 1.0 thats all.



For the moment I actually only have one cam - and its giving me grief in terms of c++/ffmpeg but as it turns out it may not be coding skills that fails me but a not quite reliable qihan camera. If you got recommendations in terms of quality IP cams Id like to hear it!
I am putting 1080p 30fps h264 binary video into the database, segments of 10-15 minutes each and on a frame to frame basis storing a variety of metadata, I am coding instant access to replay functionality ie. select another area of interest for motion detection and rerun the last 24 hours, retrain a neural net and rerun the last 48 hours etc(some of this might benefit from GPU offload). That being said the dual 2670 will also be serving websites and mercurial repositories and all the other small experiments I have running on old laptops right now..

So you're using in house CCTV software ? I'm using commercial software blue iris, it's just $ 35, one time only.

If you're on Budget I recommend using xiomi ip cam, it's cheap and quite reliable, but the downside is you need to flash it with custom firmware because the default one is quite restricted with encrypted stream, but if you don't want all of that then just buy D-Link, it's still cheap but without any nonsense.

 

[moinmoin]

Linus is not happy about the patches by Intel so far. Money quote:

The whole IBRS_ALL feature to me very clearly says "Intel is not serious about this, we'll have a ugly hack that will be so expensive that we don't want to enable it by default, because that would look bad in benchmarks".

So instead they try to push the garbage down to us. And they are doing it entirely wrong, even from a technical standpoint.

The whole mail is a good read.

 

[bauerbrazil2014]

Linus is not happy about the patches by Intel so far. Money quote:

The whole IBRS_ALL feature to me very clearly says "Intel is not serious about this, we'll have a ugly hack that will be so expensive that we don't want to enable it by default, because that would look bad in benchmarks".

So instead they try to push the garbage down to us. And they are doing it entirely wrong, even from a technical standpoint.

The whole mail is a good read.

Maybe they are doing this expensive crappy so people do not enable it and stay vulnerable, thats cool...