Intel processor security flaw requires OS kernel level fix

[Corky34]

As I've already said, and it seems to be backed up by research done by Allyn Malventano on PCPer, benchmarks are not telling the whole story and are hitting the very thing that these mitigations have restricted. Some benchmarks, depending on how or what they're testing, are literally showing worst case scenarios as much of what they do involves thousands of small random accesses, something that most normal workloads don't do.

[kompukare]

I'm quite worried that their older motherboards will be left without BIOS level updates - I have a five year old Asus P8Z77-V motherboard, and I can't see Asus providing a BIOS update for that.

Well, the BIOS updates are all for that Spectre variant for which there is an easy (but at the cost of performance) fix. But there are indications that at least one fix is only required for the Skylake architecture CPUs (so Skylake, Kabylake and Coffelake), as I posted on the other thread:

Seems one one of the methods the Linux kernel guys want to use is pretty useless on Skylake+ (Skylake, Kabylake, Coffeelake etc.) as it gets optimised?
Retpoline as a mitigation strategy swaps indirect branches for returns,
to avoid using predictions which come from the BTB, as they can be
poisoned by an attacker.

The problem with Skylake+ is that an RSB underflow falls back to using a
BTB prediction, which allows the attacker to take control of speculation.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/1/4/724

So, 'minimal' real world impact as long as you're not running any of those loads.

[watercooled]

I'm not using any but neither am I running any AMDs.

Here are some reports, though it looks like MS have dropped pushing that patch.

Ah I misunderstood, I though you were having problems personally. I've a couple of friends with Win 10 Ryzen which are unaffected, and one AMD laptop on Win7 unaffected so far. Hopefully MS have stopped it until they actually test it and figure out what they broke...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I love how everyone is just looking at the results for the latest CPUs. Who gives a monkies bum about the latest when most PC owners are on older CPUs. Every test with actual games based on older CPUs and a reasonably newish card so far with older CPUs shows regressions on gaming performance. FO4 is notorious for constant drive access especially heavily nodded to the extant it is unplayable for me without an SSD.
It's the same with many games which are open world and require constant streaming of assets.

[kalniel]

Every test with actual games based on older CPUs and a reasonably newish card so far with older CPUs shows regressions on gaming performance.

That's not true - see my earlier post in this thread with a i7 950 and gtx 1060, my gaming performance wasn't touched, only SSD benchmarks (unless you are discounting user tests). I can back that up with subjective feel in other games too - SSD streaming for me under games like FO4 etc. seems to be almost entirely sequential.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

That's not true - see my earlier post in this thread with a i7 950 and gtx 1060, my gaming performance wasn't touched, only SSD benchmarks (unless you are discounting user tests). I can back that up with subjective feel in other games too - SSD streaming for me under games like FO4 etc. seems to be almost entirely sequential.

Apart from the benchmarks which I posted earlier and also the ROTTR benchmark is a GPU test not a CPU test. I should know having done physical timeruns in the game in certain places and they were not chosen at random.





The first with a Haswell Core i5 and an RX580 and the second is with 6c SB CPU and a GTX1080TI.

I have also had 1000+ hours of playing FO4 which massive settlements and nearing the 255 mod limit in the game.

It hammers normal HDDs in settlements especially with certain classes of mods.

It's a different beast from from Skyrim which tend to do less drive accessing but in larger chunks. FO4 seems to hammer SSDs.

It gets progressively worse and worse the more and more larger settlements and more and more NPCs you have in any cell.

Even with an IB Core i7 my minimums can dip to under 30fps at qHD with a GTX1080. Even unmodded with big settlements the same dips I had with a GTX960 I had at 1680X1050 I could see with a GTX1080 at qHD.

It's the singular reason why I want a new CPU and why Ryzen is not on the radar for me yet. It's why I am worried once this issue is fully patched whether it will start lopping off even more FPS off the minimums.

All the review sites will just test the new CPUs not the old ones in any detail and probably won't even use intensive areas of games too since they are harder to benchmark.

[watercooled]

I've seen quite a few articles with headlines to the tune of 'is it really that bad'. Funnily enough I don't recall them having similar articles like 290X thermals - is it really that bad with a proper cooler?

Lots of sites seem happy to jump to the defence of Intel (which is fair enough provided it's based in fact), but will happily ignore counter-evidence to nonsense posted about some other brands, and fail to update articles with highly important updated information.

[Xlucine]

I have also had 1000+ hours of playing FO4 which massive settlements and nearing the 255 mod limit in the game.

It hammers normal HDDs in settlements especially with certain classes of mods.

It's a different beast from from Skyrim which tend to do less drive accessing but in larger chunks. FO4 seems to hammer SSDs.

It gets progressively worse and worse the more and more larger settlements and more and more NPCs you have in any cell.

Even with an IB Core i7 my minimums can dip to under 30fps at qHD with a GTX1080. Even unmodded with big settlements the same dips I had with a GTX960 I had at 1680X1050 I could see with a GTX1080 at qHD.

It's the singular reason why I want a new CPU and why Ryzen is not on the radar for me yet. It's why I am worried once this issue is fully patched whether it will start lopping off even more FPS off the minimums.

All the review sites will just test the new CPUs not the old ones in any detail and probably won't even use intensive areas of games too since they are harder to benchmark.

Could you try and benchmark your settlements, and then roll back the update and benchmark again?

[scaryjim]

I'm not using any but neither am I running any AMDs.

Here are some reports, though it looks like MS have dropped pushing that patch.

Had a quick check of that just now as I'm about to reboot my laptop for updates ... looks like the problem is not only Win 7 specific, but Athlon 64 X2 specific as well. Given that the first gen Phenoms landed more than 10 years ago...

EDIT: and ... I'm back All good here

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Could you try and benchmark your settlements, and then roll back the update and benchmark again?

I think my main concern is once all the patches are rolled out,what will happen as I get the impression this is only the first of many patches and some of those initial results don't seem very reassuring.

I will try and see if I can get around to benchmarking it,but the issue is what about the other games I run?? Will I be getting lower framerates,or more pokey performance in them??

The other issue is there seems to be a lot of confusion about the need for BIOS updates - apparently Skylake and newer CPUs will need motherboard BIOS updates,but is this because they are newer and hence still supported or because Skylake and newer CPUs are the worst affected??

I honestly wish Ryzen wasn't so meh in the game - I do wonder whether Ryzen+ or Ryzen 2 will be better. I remember BD had a similar bug with one of the DIRT games,and PD ended up having a massive uplift in performance over it. Having said that I can see it more Bethesda being fail.

[satrow]

Had a quick check of that just now as I'm about to reboot my laptop for updates ... looks like the problem is not only Win 7 specific, but Athlon 64 X2 specific as well.

I don't think the issue had been narrowed down to Athlon 64 x2 only when I'd checked that topic sometime prior to my initial mention of it.

Glad you're back without incident

[scaryjim]

I don't think the issue had been narrowed down to Athlon 64 x2 only when I'd checked that topic ...

I'm not sure it conclusively has, even now, but that seems to be the trend in the reports. I don't think I have an Athlon X2 left in my box of bits, so I can't test the theory...!

[Tabbykatze]

Microsoft have just made an announcement and have tried absolving themselves of the issue blaming AMD: https://overclock3d.net/news/softwar...e_unbootable/1

I haven't yet seen an affected chipset list yet but i have seen a few people complain about 990FX being affected (which I have) so no update for me!

[satrow]

Günter Born has listed the affected AMD CPUs that have been reported to him, and from the sites he frequents (primarily in DE): https://borncity.com/win/2018/01/08/...or-0x800f0845/

Snippet:

Browsing German forums, I found that only AMD CPUs are affected. Here is a list of AMD processors mentioned:

AMD Athlon 64 X2
Athlon 64 X2 4200+
AMD Athlon ™ 64 3800+
AMD Athlon 64×2 Dual Core 4400+
AMD Athlon Dual Core 4850e
AMD 4850e
AMD-Athlon 64×2 5200+
HexaCore AMD Phenom II X6 Black Edition 1090T
DualCore AMD Athlon 64 X2, 2000 MHz (10 x 200) 3800+
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 6000+

Edit: I recall seeing at least 2x reports of a Sempron being affected.

[peterb]

Apple rolled out a security patch today. Installed with any problems or apparent adverse effects.

[ik9000]

I love how everyone is just looking at the results for the latest CPUs. Who gives a monkies bum about the latest when most PC owners are on older CPUs. Every test with actual games based on older CPUs and a reasonably newish card so far with older CPUs shows regressions on gaming performance. FO4 is notorious for constant drive access especially heavily nodded to the extant it is unplayable for me without an SSD.
It's the same with many games which are open world and require constant streaming of assets.

That's not true - see my earlier post in this thread with a i7 950 and gtx 1060, my gaming performance wasn't touched, only SSD benchmarks (unless you are discounting user tests). I can back that up with subjective feel in other games too - SSD streaming for me under games like FO4 etc. seems to be almost entirely sequential.

I'll be running tests on an i7-870 and i3-540 once I've shifted this work deadline. Luckily I have an OS that let's me decide if and when I want to install an update. It's nice to have that flexibility. Ah, the days when MS were user-focussed... Only got a 1GB-GTX460 however so I appreciate that's not old CPU with modern card. I can't afford the modern card pricing and the ones I can afford don't really offer me much improvement on the older titles I tend to play.

I also have an old 17" 1920x1200 Inspiron 9300 pentium M with a current win-7 32 bit licence and an old 256MB Geforce 6800Go in it. Happy to run any tests on that. What do you want to see? It's only a 7200rpm PATA HDD however so won't be able to show up SSD performance hits.

My P4 and Core Duo are both stuck on XP so can't do much with those.