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All your Intel processors slowing down by 30% soon! — Parallax Forums

All your Intel processors slowing down by 30% soon!

Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
edited 2018-01-03 07:59 in General Discussion
Seems there is a major security bug in Intel processors that is getting a software work around in Windows, Linux and Mac very soon.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/

Looks like the work around makes a big performance hit. Like 30% !

AMD not affected.

Makes me giggle. Back in the day, when I worked for Northern Telecom, our team got a huge thick document from Intel, under NDA, detailing all the know bugs in then new 286 processor. Most of them were holes in it's memory protections. Seems the tradition continues.





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Comments

  • TorTor Posts: 2,010
    edited 2018-01-03 08:43
    I think I'll just keep running my own kernel on my own machine where I know where the software I'm running comes from.

    Apparently Intel's CEO sold off as many shares as he was allowed to, recently.
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,244
    Dang. Intel and AMD stock both jumped already.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    As of an hour ago Intel is down on reports of their buggy chips.

    AMD up almost 7% as they don't have this particular bug.

    This is kind of huge if you are a Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft kind of cloud service provider and suddenly find you need 20% or 30% more data center to serve the same capacity. Not to mention the electric bills...

    And what if consumers get into a class action over having been sold 30% less performance than they were offered?







  • ercoerco Posts: 20,244
    I've never sold short on a stock. When I first read this, I was tempted to grab some Intel before it dropped. It's down a bit, may drop more. Very risky move... https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-you-should-never-short-sell-stocks-2015-11-19
    Tor wrote: »
    Apparently Intel's CEO sold off as many shares as he was allowed to, recently.

    That's just plain wrong. Insider trading. The CEO should def take a bath on this one. Of course it could all be a carefully choreographed scam, if the stock drops, he buys a LOT, then a workaround is found in a week and the stock pops up higher than ever.

  • This should be a boost for ARM's IP as well.

    Looks like old BK has been on a sales spree since October cashing in over $60mil in stock and stock options. He may be looking, or rather have to leave soon.

    From the report, this is a design flaw in their processors that has existed for a decade and was known by internal security folks but where to keep silent until a fix was established. Intel can not fix this on their own so it requires a software patch as a workaround. That sucks.
  • That's a significant hit. While the "average Joe" checking his morning email might not notice much, a third of processing power is huge on a data center, etc. I crunch distributed computing (BOINC) projects on all my i7 3930K rigs, and I would definitely notice a 30% decrease in output.
  • JonM, ARM may not be out of the woods on this issue. See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/whats-behind-the-intel-design-flaw-forcing-numerous-patches/ towards the end.
  • From an Intel news release, Jan 3, 2018

    "Recent reports that these exploits are caused by a “bug” or a “flaw” and are unique to Intel products are incorrect. Based on the analysis to date, many types of computing devices — with many different vendors’ processors and operating systems — are susceptible to these exploits.

    Intel is committed to product and customer security and is working closely with many other technology companies, including AMD, ARM Holdings and several operating system vendors, to develop an industry-wide approach to resolve this issue promptly and constructively. Intel has begun providing software and firmware updates to mitigate these exploits. Contrary to some reports, any performance impacts are workload-dependent, and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time."

    Nothing to see here, move along. :swear: :swear: :swear: :swear:
  • luckily, you can disable such nonsense with a boot parameter (in linux at least...) if you need performance in a single-user setup.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    RickB,
    Nothing to see here, move along
    Not so fast there.

    Intel is famous for declaring that things are not bugs. And/or that they have little impact. See FOOF bug, FDIV bug etc.

    Back in 1980 or so I was amused to find a bug in the Intel 8059 interrupt controller chip referred to as a "feature". Actually in the datasheet. Complete with example code required to work around it.

    This "it's not a bug it's a feature" has been a running joke for many years. Not sure if it started with that 8059 datasheet though.

    Admittedly other processors may suffer from versions of this particular exploit. There are similar architectures involved. We shall see. But that does not make it less of a flaw in my eyes.

    If you want to make a more informed judgement on the situation try watching this presentation by one of the exploit developers:

  • We own some Nvidia :)

    How serious is this issue? How long will it take them to fix?

    Kicking myself for not seeing the news that Intel CEO sold stock Dec 19 we could have bought more.
  • jmgjmg Posts: 15,140
    Heater. wrote: »
    Admittedly other processors may suffer from versions of this particular exploit. There are similar architectures involved. We shall see. But that does not make it less of a flaw in my eyes.

    21 other architectures also suffer, as the link you gave said all 22 tested suffer from this effect.

    Interesting that precision is a problem here...
    How serious is this issue? How long will it take them to fix?
    Sounds like a 'fix' is already in the pipeline, which is why this is going wider-public now.
    Serious ? I guess that depends on your level of paranoia, but if it has motivated Microsoft and Linux to move, I'd say someone, somewhere, is quite concerned...
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    Intel cannot fix it.

    Operating systems need a kernel patch to work around it.

    I read that Microsoft is planning on pushing an update on January 9th.

    See video above to judge how serious you think it might be.
  • Heater: you completely misunderstood my post. The last sentence in my post refers to Intel's non-answer, not the bug.
  • Speaking from ignorance. Can't they design new chips that side step this problem? If all the processors they make this year will be 30% slower they're going to have a big issue with AMD.

    What will Amazon etc do? Buy 30% more Intel chips or look at AMD/Nvidia/other?
  • Obviously they'll be facing class action lawsuits about 'old' chips. But how long until they can make new chips that aren't getting throttled like this?
  • jmgjmg Posts: 15,140
    Speaking from ignorance. Can't they design new chips that side step this problem? If all the processors they make this year will be 30% slower they're going to have a big issue with AMD.

    What will Amazon etc do? Buy 30% more Intel chips or look at AMD/Nvidia/other?

    The video talks about browser code, so the focus seems to be consumer desktops.
    I doubt that server farms are going to be too impacted, as they are not running unknown javascript.


    It is not JUST intel, either, this from ARM :

    "I can confirm that Arm have been working together with Intel and AMD to address a side-channel analysis method which exploits speculative execution techniques used in certain high-end processors, including some of our Cortex-A processors," says ARM public relations director Phil Hughes. "This method requires malware running locally and could result in data being accessed from privileged memory."
  • pmrobert wrote: »
    JonM, ARM may not be out of the woods on this issue. See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/01/whats-behind-the-intel-design-flaw-forcing-numerous-patches/ towards the end.

    Ah, yeah. I guess it does affect some ARM processors such as the A series so it might affect Phones, Tablets and such.
    https://axios.com/massive-chip-flaw-not-limited-to-intel-2522178225.html

    This also might explain why Intel came out with a reply to the reports but only to state that it is not just an Intel issue and other processors are affected as well.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    jmg,
    The video talks about browser code, so the focus seems to be consumer desktops.

    I doubt that server farms are going to be too impacted, as they are not running unknown javascript.
    No.

    Firstly this is nothing specific to Javascript or Javascript in the browser. Everything you see in that video could be done in C++ or a ton of other languages.

    Server farms certainly do run a lot of unknown Javascript. In the form of node.js servers. They also run a lot of unknown code in every other language. I'm talking here about the cloud servers you or I can rent from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and many other such cloud providers. All of this infrastructure is now as vulnerable as our PC's running a browser.

    Certainly the JS in the browser is the focus for the public at large.


  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,066
    Isn't this bug just like some of the cars?

    scenario...

    Thieves have found that they can turn the car on by shoving a screwdriver into the ignition lock and forcing it to rotate to engage the engine. Did the car manufacturers have to install a gadget to protect the ignition lock from having a screwdriver inserted? No! There were no remedies, no speculation about class actions, etc.

    Isn't this the same thing? Without thieves, this bug isn't a bug because clearly it works as designed. It is only a bug when a thief forces the CPU to run malicious code specifically designed to break the CPU in a way that can be used to steal something.

    I think it's high time that the law caught up with reality, and prosecuted these villians who write viruses of any kind. But, there is no way this will happen, because the lawyers make a living scamming the honest people who get caught up in legal messes.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2018-01-04 03:52
    Interesting point.

    Analogies are always flawed and analogies between cars and computers are especially terrible but let's go with this one.

    So the car maker finds out that there is a dead easy way to get into your car and drive it away. Without breaking anything. Then after your next service you find they have thoughtfully fixed that issue. But in the process knocked your top speed down by 25% and doubled your 0 to 60 time.

    I think car owners would have a case to complain about here.
    Without thieves, this bug isn't a bug...
    Well, there are thieves and there always will be.

    Given that Intel has known about this possibility for many years and let it slide I think they have some responsibility.
    I think it's high time that the law caught up with reality, and prosecuted these villians who write viruses of any kind.
    Personally I don't think writing any kind of code should be criminalized. It's just code. No different from anything you or I write.

    There are no thieves involved in the current fiasco. The exploint has been demonstrated by security researchers. Academics in a respected university. Should they now be arrested for creating such code?

    Such a law would halt all such security research. Except by the bad guys of course. It would make the work of penetration testers impossible. We would be far worse situation than we are now.

    Now, of course if one uses such code for criminal purposes, theft, damage, ransom, whatever then one should expect to be punished for those crimes. As normal.

    Finding the bad guys that do that sort of thing is next to impossible. And expensive. Better to not give them the chance in the first place. Fix the damn bug!



  • jmgjmg Posts: 15,140
    Heater. wrote: »
    ... Fix the damn bug!
    Given it is not strictly a bug, what do you propose as the silicon level 'fix' ?
    At what level of snooping should intel ( & AMD and ARM and Apple and Samsung.... ) stop ?
    If someone monitors Icc and can deduce some internal actions from that, should intel modify the silicon again ?


  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2018-01-04 04:16
    Since the likes of the Intel 286, micro-processors have supported protected memory, multiple levels of privilege for execution and data access and so on.

    All this so that my program running on a machine cannot access the data of your program running on the same machine. An important feature for multi-users systems, sand boxing untrusted code, running virtual machines, security systems, etc, etc.

    So, when it is found that there is a hole in all that protection mechanism it's certainly a flaw that needs to be addressed. I'd call it a "bug". You may not. Makes no odds what we call it. Given that this possibility has been known about for many years I think "bug" is appropriate.

    Obviously I have no idea what a silicon level fix would be. Not being a processor designer myself. But clearly whatever work around the MS, Apple, Linux and other guys are working on to paper over this problem in software could as well be done in silicon.

    I don't think monitoring Icc is of relevance here. That is not something that can be done from software. And it requires physical access to the machine.











  • TorTor Posts: 2,010
    It's still not confirmed if this can allow a VM to break out of its hypervisor. If it can, it's the worst case scenario.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    I think we are pretty much there already. As The Register put it:

    "On vulnerable systems, Meltdown allows user programs to read from private and sensitive kernel address spaces, including kernel-sharing sandboxes like Docker or Xen in paravirtualization mode. And when you've stolen the keys to the kingdom, such as cryptographic secrets, you'll probably find you can indeed corrupt, modify or delete data..."

  • TorTor Posts: 2,010
    If this affects KVM and wmware too, then the internet will literally have to be shut down for a time, for real. That's never happened before.
  • Brian FairchildBrian Fairchild Posts: 549
    edited 2018-01-04 09:31
    Heater. wrote: »
    Then after your next service you find they have thoughtfully fixed that issue. But in the process knocked your top speed down by 25% and doubled your 0 to 60 time.

    I think car owners would have a case to complain about here.

    Sounds like VW and their emissions fix.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    So I was thinking....

    For decades computers have been following Moore's Law. Which most people translate from being about transistors per chip to speed.

    It has been suggested for a few years now that Moore's law has come to and end, or at least approaching it. Processor speeds have not be rising as fast recently.

    Well...if the dire predictions of significant processor slow down due to implementing the work around for this bug are true, then Moore's law will have ended with a big thud. The first year ever that processors have gotten slower!
  • TorTor Posts: 2,010
    edited 2018-01-04 10:28
    To be fair, as Moore's law is only about the number of transistors it doesn't really matter if the speed goes up or down. It's more relevant for RAM, and I guess that's where Moore's law was first applied (Intel was a RAM producer back then)
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    That's why I mentioned the part about "...most people translate from being about transistors per chip to speed." Which, as you point out, does not necessarily follow.

    Moore made his observation about the doubling of integration density of chips in 1965. Before there was an Intel, before anyone even put RAM on a chip.

    Actually I think it's amazing. The first integrated circuits had two transistors, soon they got to 4 then 8.... Even with these few, tiny, numbers Moore drew a plot of progress over time on a log scale, stuck a straight line through it and could see where all this was heading already.

    With than insight he could set out raising money and planning for the integration density he could see coming down the pipe. Hence Intel.



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