Intel security flaw

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Message 1913908 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 3:29:41 UTC - in response to Message 1913907.  

True, but they didn't let that stop innovation in the 60's/70's/80's.

But there was much less to deal with.
Again true. However, how many here have upgraded their systems to the latest components & software only to find that once done, their peripherals no longer worked? Perfectly working equipment but no longer have device drivers.
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Message 1913909 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 3:31:40 UTC

I was kind of thinking the same thing, the reach of technology today vs. when the trash 80 was king, it's huge. Not saying it can't be done, but the ROI, well, it had best be a quantum improvement for that much disruption. Or else if this turns out to be the tip of the x86 bug iceberg, that would certainly drive it forward at a more brisk pace. But still, it would be a massive undertaking.

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Message 1913912 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 3:56:30 UTC - in response to Message 1913909.  

Totally agree Al. However perception is king along with cash. For example, here anyway, an Intel i7 6900K is 0.01p short of £928. I know that people like us know the issues but many do not especially your average home user. Will they spend that amount on a cpu that suffers that much of a performance hit.

Then there is 2 versions like you stated. But isn't that already being done & has so for a number of years? Take Windows 10 sttill providing 2 versions 32 & 64 bit. :-) Another example is one I recently came across. A family member upgraded their home office printer & gave me the old one. A HP OfficePro only 6 years old & in perfect condition, only problem is that the printhead gave up the ghost.

Researched for replacement only to find that HP no longer provide them but still avaialble online. Cheapest I found was for pennies shy of £154 & instructions are provided to install it. Why go to all that bother when for an extra £4 a new one can be bought which also takes the same cartridges. There's too much waste & all for the sake of profit.

Of course end of line/life has to be taken into consideration, but...
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Message 1913917 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 4:15:22 UTC - in response to Message 1913901.  

Now _That_ would be a tectonic paradigm shift I'd have to think. Flush the x86? Maybe a new path while still doing upgrades on the old one, as to not obsolete millions of pieces of hardware and software. But then everyone having to write and support 2 versions of all new programs for who knows how long, it boggles the mind.

Well that is what ARM has done. A modern architecture for modern times. They just released a server chip so you can't just think of them as a phone/tablet architecture.

We been developing in 2 software environments since the Apple/Mac debuted, so nothing new here.
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Message 1913918 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 4:16:11 UTC - in response to Message 1913912.  

Totally agree Al. However perception is king along with cash. For example, here anyway, an Intel i7 6900K is 0.01p short of £928. I know that people like us know the issues but many do not especially your average home user. Will they spend that amount on a cpu that suffers that much of a performance hit.

For current hardware, running WIn10, on desktops, the performance impact of these exploit patches is negligible to bugger all.
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Message 1913919 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 4:20:33 UTC - in response to Message 1913912.  

HP and printer cartridges are the worst examples of the "Gillete shaving" marketing methodology. Give the printer away for pennies and make your profit on the consumables or engineered obsolescence products. Companies know they can sell you a new product for a price that makes repairing or repurposing an older product less amenable.
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Message 1913920 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 4:21:48 UTC

Windows, Apple and Linux have ALL dropped support for 32 bit operating systems this year.
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Message 1913921 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 4:23:56 UTC - in response to Message 1913918.  

Totally agree Al. However perception is king along with cash. For example, here anyway, an Intel i7 6900K is 0.01p short of £928. I know that people like us know the issues but many do not especially your average home user. Will they spend that amount on a cpu that suffers that much of a performance hit.

For current hardware, running WIn10, on desktops, the performance impact of these exploit patches is negligible to bugger all.

I'm still waiting on Microsoft to release the Spectre patch for AMD processors. I haven't noticed any performance loss on the Linux Ryzen.
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Message 1913923 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 4:28:40 UTC - in response to Message 1913918.  

Totally agree Al. However perception is king along with cash. For example, here anyway, an Intel i7 6900K is 0.01p short of £928. I know that people like us know the issues but many do not especially your average home user. Will they spend that amount on a cpu that suffers that much of a performance hit.

For current hardware, running WIn10, on desktops, the performance impact of these exploit patches is negligible to bugger all.
Which is why I stated the underlined. How many home users have the latest & greatest hardware?
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Message 1913925 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 4:34:24 UTC - in response to Message 1913923.  

Which is why I stated the underlined. How many home users have the latest & greatest hardware?

The majority of home users need a computer only for browsing and sending email. Not much hardware horsepower needed. The scale ramps up when the typical gamer gets involved. The scale ramps again for the power or content creator user. The scale ramps again for the hardware enthusiast who is determined to "live on the bleeding edge" of technology.
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Message 1913926 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 4:39:42 UTC - in response to Message 1913923.  

Totally agree Al. However perception is king along with cash. For example, here anyway, an Intel i7 6900K is 0.01p short of £928. I know that people like us know the issues but many do not especially your average home user. Will they spend that amount on a cpu that suffers that much of a performance hit.

For current hardware, running WIn10, on desktops, the performance impact of these exploit patches is negligible to bugger all.
Which is why I stated the underlined. How many home users have the latest & greatest hardware?

I thought you were talking about people buying new hardware?

Will they spend that amount on a cpu that suffers that much of a performance hit.

That's what it looked like to me; and it doesn't have to be the greatest.
Even the most basic i3s and the current Pentium brand CPUs aren't as affected by the exploit patches as older generation CPUs are because of the architectural changes made over the years they do less Kernel switching for a given task compared to older CPUs.
And even if they do get the greatest, as I said, for general use the performance hit is negligible to bugger all (ie not noticeable).
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Message 1913931 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 4:53:05 UTC - in response to Message 1913926.  
Last modified: 19 Jan 2018, 5:04:56 UTC

Fair point. However I did mention perception.

Example, a home user with an old system wants to upgrade, does some basic research themselves & see this Intel issue. Then does some more research & sees that an Intel i7 8 core/16 thread is £928 whereas an AMD Ryzen 16 core/32 thread is £790.

Their perception will be that not only is that AMD better value but AMD does not suffer the performance hit.

If their perception is wrong, then the massive hit that Intel took over this needs explaining :-)
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Message 1913935 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 5:15:50 UTC - in response to Message 1913909.  
Last modified: 19 Jan 2018, 5:18:33 UTC

I was kind of thinking the same thing, the reach of technology today vs. when the trash 80 was king, it's huge. Not saying it can't be done, but the ROI, well, it had best be a quantum improvement for that much disruption. Or else if this turns out to be the tip of the x86 bug iceberg, that would certainly drive it forward at a more brisk pace. But still, it would be a massive undertaking.

Not. But I understand few people realize how easy it is, except perhaps for M$ closed system. All that is the hard part is writing the new code generating phase for the GNU compiler collection*. Then the easy for the rest of the world part is changing the -arch option flag in their make files. That gets most software running on a new chip. The O/S itself and device drivers would require some surgery because they likely have some processor dependencies in them related to running in supervisory mode.

Realize you can run Debian on an ARM or an x86 or an x64 today, may even be a port for 68k and PowerPC.


*Only has to be done once.
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Message 1913937 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 5:26:12 UTC

Like most undertakings, just requires some thought to set the ball rolling :-)
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Message 1914016 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 15:20:19 UTC

Intel has admitted that their firmware updates for Meltdown and Spectre might not be as good as they had hoped and can cause certain computers to reboot frequently or even on occasions give you a nice blue screen - the chip families affected are Broadwell, Haswell, Kaby Lake, Skylake, Ivy Bridge and Sandy bridge. The problem does not affect all systems but Intel is reviewing reports and will release further firmware updates in the coming weeks to hopefully solve the problems.

On the legal side, problems are increasing for both Intel and AMD, particularly with sales made since June/July last year when they were made aware of the flaws but continued to sell without telling customers.

Intel has a new security group to make sure it won't happen again. Problem is that nearly all chips in the roadmap on which the R & D has been spent has the flaws. One option apparently being considered is to keep the flaw and either stick with the software and firmware fixes (because they don't really have a choice in the short term) or offer users the option to switch it on or off knowing the risks. So you can choose faster or secure?

Main problem is that they don't so far seem to have any solution to the slowdown on the high i/o servers and even the new chips on the roadmap won't make up the 25% to 30%.
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Message 1914030 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 16:59:08 UTC - in response to Message 1913935.  

I was kind of thinking the same thing, the reach of technology today vs. when the trash 80 was king, it's huge. Not saying it can't be done, but the ROI, well, it had best be a quantum improvement for that much disruption. Or else if this turns out to be the tip of the x86 bug iceberg, that would certainly drive it forward at a more brisk pace. But still, it would be a massive undertaking.

Not. But I understand few people realize how easy it is, except perhaps for M$ closed system.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this 85-90% of the computing world today? That is what I was thinking of when I said that. I'd have to think that the transition would not be a speedy one. I certainly do get what you say about the HP shenanigans, absolutely, they piss me off to no end, in fact I am in the same situation. I got an perfectly functional HP personal laser printer from my dad when he became unable to use his computer any more, it is actually a USB printer, and the last drivers that worked were for XP, not even Vista. So, if I want to use it, I need to set up a XP box over next to it, to get it connected to the network. Not worth the hassle, even though it works perfectly fine. Planned obsolescence. Such a damn waste.

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Message 1914034 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 17:37:30 UTC - in response to Message 1914030.  

No need for a seperate XP box :-) Can be done in Win 7.

This came up in the past & these 2 files are still available. I use these to use my HP Laserjet & several programs which run brilliantly in XP but terrible in Vista & Win 7.

Windows VirtualPC

Win 7 XP Mode

If these are any help to you, install VPC 1st then XP Mode, then install printer driver in XP Mode not win 7.
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Message 1914056 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 19:17:41 UTC

Ahh, interesting. I think I haven't pitched it yet, maybe I will put it out there next to my CNC machine in the shop, it'd be nice to be able to print things out there instead of having to run back up to the office. Thanks, I'll look into it!

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Message 1914065 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 19:54:59 UTC - in response to Message 1914030.  

I was kind of thinking the same thing, the reach of technology today vs. when the trash 80 was king, it's huge. Not saying it can't be done, but the ROI, well, it had best be a quantum improvement for that much disruption. Or else if this turns out to be the tip of the x86 bug iceberg, that would certainly drive it forward at a more brisk pace. But still, it would be a massive undertaking.

Not. But I understand few people realize how easy it is, except perhaps for M$ closed system.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this 85-90% of the computing world today?
Most of the computing world today is some variant of Unix. Most of the computing world today isn't a desktop computer. Most of it is some Internet of Things device or a smartphone.
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Message 1914079 - Posted: 19 Jan 2018, 20:37:36 UTC - in response to Message 1914065.  

Guess my age is showing.. ;-) Though I don't really consider a phone a computer in the traditional sense, even though it is pretty powerful nowadays. My suggestion would be for those much younger than I to make some shrewd investments into Lasik or eye care companies in the next 10-20 years to beef up their retirement accounts, because all these kids squinting at all these tiny screens for hours upon hours, year after year, well, after years of almost perfect vision, I finally needed to get glasses and gave in when I hit about 50. I am going to guess that they will be needing them a bit younger than I. lol

But yes, I agree in sheer numbers, you are absolutely correct, though in terms of computers that can actually get any serious work done, those items you mentioned fall down a bit. Browsing, texting, emailing, chatting, posting all those super critical messages every 3-5 minutes to Facebook/Twitter, sure. I suppose you can create a document on phone, but I can't imagine wanting to. Ugh.

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Message boards : Number crunching : Intel security flaw


 
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