hardware bug found in Hawell - TSX to be disabled

[HalloweenJack]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/8376/i...eep-broadwelly

News coming from Intel’s briefings in Portland last week boil down to an erratum found with the TSX instructions. Tech Report and David Kanter of Real World Technologies are stating that a software developer outside of Intel discovered the erratum through testing, and subsequently Intel has confirmed its existence. While errata are not new (Intel’s E3-1200 v3 Xeon CPUs already have 140 of them), what is interesting is Intel’s response: to push through new microcode to disable TSX entirely. Normally a microcode update would suggest a workaround, but it would seem that this a fundamental silicon issue that cannot be designed around, or intercepted at an OS or firmware/BIOS level.

one of the BIG selling points and its a total mess (according to non intel press) - its as big as the sata 2 bug , and bigger than the video playback bug (which took 3 generations to be fixed)

[kalniel]

one of the BIG selling points and its a total mess (according to non intel press) - its as big as the sata 2 bug , and bigger than the video playback bug (which took 3 generations to be fixed)

But most people use Sata 2, and lots of people use video playback. Virtually no-one uses TSX instructions.

[HalloweenJack]

But most people use Sata 2, and lots of people use video playback. Virtually no-one uses TSX instructions.

if you have haswell - your already using it.... the updates were rolled out nearly 2 years ago for the software side.

[Mark@SCAN]

if you have haswell - your already using it.... the updates were rolled out nearly 2 years ago for the software side.

What consumer software currently available makes use of this feature?

[kalniel]

if you have haswell - your already using it.... the updates were rolled out nearly 2 years ago for the software side.

And nothing calls it, so no-one - at least on the consumer side - is using it.

[kompukare]

Well, yet more new instruction which Intel immediately used to segment their products. Ok, TSX is hardly likely to get much mainstream support either way but that AVX2 is being fused off in lower end CPUs means that it too is likely to not reach its potential (not helped by the fact that running AVX2 code tends to throttle Haswell). Of course fusing AVX2 off is far easier than figuring out a way for their lower-end CPUs to run AVX2 at half speed.

Still, over a year for this to be discovered. And TSX was one of the hyped features of Haswell (although why? since it has such limited use). Wonder if Intel spend more time fusing of parts and segmenting their market than QA? And if their fusing and segmentation shenanigans will end up causing them harm at some point?

[Spreadie]

Given that it was supposed to be a major feature, now absent, you could argue that Haswell CPUs should see a price reduction.