CacheOut Intel CPU vulnerability detailed

[LSG501]

Your 4790k isn't even affected by this vulnerability

Will be nice if that is the case but it doesn't mean I won't get a nerf in performance if there is a patch... Intel's got to sell them new cpu's somehow.

Also they say 'probably' isn't affected on the official site so I'm expecting more variants in the 'near' future which can affect them.

[3dcandy]

I'm in a similar position. I've noticed a severe drop in responsiveness since Spectre and Meltdown patching. Outright oomph seems mostly preserved but it's definitely an issue.

I think I may well just go and get Ryzen 3. My only real reservation was the price of the chipset and also the heat generated by the chipset. I buy for the long term and so I'd definitely want PCI-e 4 but I can't be dealing with chipsets which need active cooling. Seems like a recipe for premature failure.

At the moment I've been considering a bundle from OCUK. I suspect in a few years the many many cores will be made use of so I'm looking at 12 core Ryzen. Because I have absolutely no use for that kind of power. At all. Nothing. But I crave it.

It's like water-cooling. Put the money into a decent air cooling system and it'll be better...... buuuuuut....... "my PC has a radiator".

Phil - built a system for someone with an X570 and couldn't get the fan to spin at all....
However I didn't install a gen4 nvme ssd or multiple ssds and it wasn't pushed that hard storage wise.
Re: water cooling most of my pc's now have got Corsair AIO coolers as they are so much quieter and I use them in my studio to record stuff. Just can't afford to have the fans spinning up and down etc. when recording. Doubt very much that I'd go back to non water cooling now. Also allows my live rig to have a pc in it that doesn't toast itself

[DanceswithUnix]

However I didn't install a gen4 nvme ssd or multiple ssds and it wasn't pushed that hard storage wise.

Thanks, it's nice to hear these snippets.

Idle PCIe lanes shouldn't pull much power, and if one of those top end SSDs can pull 3.5GB/s, so for me that is my entire ram contents reloaded in under 5 seconds. My usual workload moves several GB around in a minute and I think I push my machine quite hard. So, to keep those lanes active enough to spin the fan you need to be streaming data through the CPU in vast quantity. Maybe video encoding could do it.

I'm hoping to build a 570 box for the office, and from all I've heard my initial worry about the fans is gone. For our workloads, if the fan became active it is probably a good warning that you need more ram

[3dcandy]

Thanks, it's nice to hear these snippets.

Idle PCIe lanes shouldn't pull much power, and if one of those top end SSDs can pull 3.5GB/s, so for me that is my entire ram contents reloaded in under 5 seconds. My usual workload moves several GB around in a minute and I think I push my machine quite hard. So, to keep those lanes active enough to spin the fan you need to be streaming data through the CPU in vast quantity. Maybe video encoding could do it.

I'm hoping to build a 570 box for the office, and from all I've heard my initial worry about the fans is gone. For our workloads, if the fan became active it is probably a good warning that you need more ram

I'd expect 5 GB/s from gen4 to be fair.... and also it appears that the fan is only needed when really really pushing the chipset ie. 3 ssds chuntering away and a meaty gfx card etc. pushing loads of data. Again - if you case/cooling setup is pretty decent then I can't see it being an issue

[DanceswithUnix]

I'd expect 5 GB/s from gen4 to be fair.... and also it appears that the fan is only needed when really really pushing the chipset ie. 3 ssds chuntering away and a meaty gfx card etc. pushing loads of data.

You only get 4 lanes to the chipset, so there is a limit as to how hard you can push it. Hitting NVMe hard is the obvious one, that drives 4 lanes into the chipset and 4 lanes from chipset into the ssd so that's a fair bit of heat. But a lot of stuff is hanging directly off the CPU including a possible NVMe port. So if you find SSD access is spinning up the chipset fan you might find you can move the SSD to another slot.

Graphics card is off the CPU lanes not the chipset, so its only part is heating the inside of the case if your case ventilation isn't good enough.

[3dcandy]

You only get 4 lanes to the chipset, so there is a limit as to how hard you can push it. Hitting NVMe hard is the obvious one, that drives 4 lanes into the chipset and 4 lanes from chipset into the ssd so that's a fair bit of heat. But a lot of stuff is hanging directly off the CPU including a possible NVMe port. So if you find SSD access is spinning up the chipset fan you might find you can move the SSD to another slot.

Graphics card is off the CPU lanes not the chipset, so its only part is heating the inside of the case if your case ventilation isn't good enough.

yeah I was kinda generalising... seems heat, in general, is only an issue if you are hammering the system

[Corky34]

Idle PCIe lanes shouldn't pull much power, and if one of those top end SSDs can pull 3.5GB/s, so for me that is my entire ram contents reloaded in under 5 seconds. My usual workload moves several GB around in a minute and I think I push my machine quite hard. So, to keep those lanes active enough to spin the fan you need to be streaming data through the CPU in vast quantity. Maybe video encoding could do it.

Even then you'd need to be pushing the data through something other than the primary (GPU) PCIe slot or the two NVMe slots as (iirc) those are direct to the CPU, i think the PCH only has 4xPCIe Gen 4 lanes connecting it to the CPU so depending on how the motherboard manufacture wired things up maybe you could heat it up by maxing out a 10G LAN while reading/writing to a USB drive and some HDD/SSD on the sata ports.

I suspect they put a fan on it for the same reason they stick to using blowers on their GPUs, some people may use them in cases with really bad airflow.

[3dcandy]

Even then you'd need to be pushing the data through something other than the primary (GPU) PCIe slot or the two NVMe slots as (iirc) those are direct to the CPU, i think the PCH only has 4xPCIe Gen 4 lanes connecting it to the CPU so depending on how the motherboard manufacture wired things up maybe you could heat it up by maxing out a 10G LAN while reading/writing to a USB drive and some HDD/SSD on the sata ports.

I suspect they put a fan on it for the same reason they stick to using blowers on their GPUs, some people may use them in cases with really bad airflow.

AMD have said it's fine 99% of the time....
In my experience most people will never see the fan spinning

[nobodyspecial]

So when is someone going to test some chips fixed vs. old to see how fixes killed perf? You surely don't get faster here and we have seen losses before which are adding up. At this point shouldn't we be seeing a class action suit or something about perf losses? You certainly don't have the same perf today you bought a few years ago if you are a patcher (which you should be right? LOL). My 8700k isn't worth what they charged me. It doesn't perform as expected now. They should owe us all money until there is a hardware fix for all current issues. Any NEW chips with old problems should be discounted as BROKEN. The box didn't say, "by the way, expect perf drops as we fix our security deficient chips". I would not have bought it if it said it was broke on the box or "may not perform as expected" etc

[EN1R0PY]

Yay... more performance nerfs incoming, assuming I even get the patch on my 4790k....

I'd already started saving for an upgrade but was hoping to hold off till desktop 'ryzen 4' but at this rate I might need to bite the bullet and get ryzen 3.

I'm in a similar position. I've noticed a severe drop in responsiveness since Spectre and Meltdown patching. Outright oomph seems mostly preserved but it's definitely an issue.

I think I may well just go and get Ryzen 3. My only real reservation was the price of the chipset and also the heat generated by the chipset. I buy for the long term and so I'd definitely want PCI-e 4 but I can't be dealing with chipsets which need active cooling. Seems like a recipe for premature failure.

At the moment I've been considering a bundle from OCUK. I suspect in a few years the many many cores will be made use of so I'm looking at 12 core Ryzen. Because I have absolutely no use for that kind of power. At all. Nothing. But I crave it.

It's like water-cooling. Put the money into a decent air cooling system and it'll be better...... buuuuuut....... "my PC has a radiator".

It's not an issue, only comes on very occasionally, I assume, I never notice. In any case dau8 said the cooler's are overkill, the chipsets literally use a few more watts than last generation. If AMD and intel swapped places would the new intel chipset fan and higher price bother you or would you assume it just meant the new chipset was even better? Intel doesn't deserve the benefit of the doubt any more than AMD deserves the suspicion.

[EN1R0PY]

Thanks, it's nice to hear these snippets.

Idle PCIe lanes shouldn't pull much power, and if one of those top end SSDs can pull 3.5GB/s, so for me that is my entire ram contents reloaded in under 5 seconds. My usual workload moves several GB around in a minute and I think I push my machine quite hard. So, to keep those lanes active enough to spin the fan you need to be streaming data through the CPU in vast quantity. Maybe video encoding could do it.

I'm hoping to build a 570 box for the office, and from all I've heard my initial worry about the fans is gone. For our workloads, if the fan became active it is probably a good warning that you need more ram

I'd expect 5 GB/s from gen4 to be fair.... and also it appears that the fan is only needed when really really pushing the chipset ie. 3 ssds chuntering away and a meaty gfx card etc. pushing loads of data. Again - if you case/cooling setup is pretty decent then I can't see it being an issue

Would have to be a gfx card on the 3rd or 4th pcie port, otherwise it's not routed through the chipset. But if you have that then you'll probably be doing a lot anyway.

[EN1R0PY]

So when is someone going to test some chips fixed vs. old to see how fixes killed perf? You surely don't get faster here and we have seen losses before which are adding up. At this point shouldn't we be seeing a class action suit or something about perf losses? You certainly don't have the same perf today you bought a few years ago if you are a patcher (which you should be right? LOL). My 8700k isn't worth what they charged me. It doesn't perform as expected now. They should owe us all money until there is a hardware fix for all current issues. Any NEW chips with old problems should be discounted as BROKEN. The box didn't say, "by the way, expect perf drops as we fix our security deficient chips". I would not have bought it if it said it was broke on the box or "may not perform as expected" etc

You might get somewhere with that given that AMD lost the bulldozer case, and with that there was only a difference between what people thought they would get, not a real terms drop in performance after purchase.

[3dcandy]

For those out there I snagged a cheap Asus B450-Plus and have just got myself a Ryzen 7 2700 for £137 new from Amazon. That's a nice 8c16t cpu that will clock around 3.8ghz for me on my system. I'll cinebench it later as it's arriving any time soon. My 2600 scores 2947 so we can see the comparison in a bit