[UPDATE 5: Intel's Spectre-focused BIOS updates causing crashes] Intel CPUs vulnerable

I've heard mixed reports as to whether or not AMD is effected or not, and to what extent, and which CPUs in particular. Is the worst of this mostly on Intel CPUs, and AMD to a much lesser extent?

AMD might want to wait on releasing Zen 2, so they can market Zen 2 as not being vulnerable. They might have to delay the release a few months to implement the fix, but if they do this, Intel is gonna lose a big market share if AMD is first to provide the security fix. Intel isn't even close to ready to drop a new CPU. And if Intel loses thier class action suit, they might be giving free CPUs to people via recalls. Bankruptcy might be on the horizon for Intel if they lose a class action lawsuit, and have to recall CPUs!

"

MrSmiley21 wrote:

I've heard mixed reports as to whether or not AMD is effected or not, and to what extent, and which CPUs in particular. Is the worst of this mostly on Intel CPUs, and AMD to a much lesser extent?

AMD are immune to the Meltdown vulnerability.

Spectre is basically a whole new category of attack. Currently there's two known attacks based on it. One has been successfully used against AMD's CPUs, the other hasn't. AMD has said that there is a "near zero" chance of the other one being used against their products.

Ever seen soap advertised as killing "99.9% of bacteria" ? That doesn't mean the company knows the soap doesn't always work. It means they're very confident in its effectiveness, but they don't want to be sued into oblivion if they're proven wrong in the future.

"

MrSmiley21 wrote:

AMD might want to wait on releasing Zen 2, so they can market Zen 2 as not being vulnerable. They might have to delay the release a few months to implement the fix

I doubt Zen (or Core) would ever be wholly immune to Spectre.

It's too fundamental a flaw.

Been looking at some benchmarks.

tl;dr: Expect to see a 3-4% FPS drop in games, and maybe worse stuttering than before. SSD performance has taken a hit - sometimes a very severe one.

Sources;

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbhKUjPRk5Q
• https://www.techspot.com/article/1556-meltdown-and-spectre-cpu-performance-windows/

(Same tests & results by the same person; just a choice of watching or reading.)

"

Been looking at some benchmarks.

tl;dr: Expect to see a 3-4% FPS drop in games, and maybe worse stuttering than before. SSD performance has taken a hit - sometimes a very severe one.

Sources;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbhKUjPRk5Q
https://www.techspot.com/article/1556-meltdown-and-spectre-cpu-performance-windows/

(Same tests & results by the same person; just a choice of watching or reading.)

do you have a chart of affected cpus? i want to know what the patch would do to my i3 3240

"

S0ULSH0CK wrote:

do you have a chart of affected cpus? i want to know what the patch would do to my i3 3240

I haven't personally done any testing - I don't have access to many CPUs, and my rig at home is an AMD Ryzen set-up so largely won't be affected from a security or performance standpoint. The links you quote primarily test an i3-8100. It's a quad-core whereas your CPU is a dual-core with HyperThreading, so I'd say look at those and expect your own performance to be impacted a bit more. I'm not aware of any dual-core benchmarks just yet.

The bugs aren't responsible for degraded performance - they've always been there. The updated versions of software (primarily BIOS & Operating Systems) are implementing various workarounds, and those include additional security checks which means more work and less efficiency for the CPU. There might be more updates coming, so nobody knows how much testing to do right now. There's a lot of uncertainty at the moment, unfortunately.

I have seen some steam topics on certain games where people are reporting performance hits on Intel CPUs. Especially those really CPU intensive games. But this is still speculation at this point. I haven't seen any actual before and after benchmarks on the same games and setups.

I'm guessing my old I5 2500k CPU would see a noticeable performance hit in gaming. It's still good enough for most games, but there are some of those very CPU intensive games where it doesn't quite hack it.

I'm guessing my old I5 2500k CPU will see some noticeable losses in gaming. The CPU is still decent enough for 60hz, but there are some games where it'll bottleneck @ 100% usage on 4 cores and be under 60fps in spots. This CPU didn't perform all that great in PoE. Lots of stuttering when splashing into large packs. Lots of really spikey CPU usage. Now, this was back in Perandus League, and I don't know if or by how much PoE's performance/optimization has improved since then. It might be better now, or not. But I can't comment on how it runs currently. My internet is too potato to play PoE, even if I wanted to. I wish somebody would just tell me how many people I need to murder in the most grissly fashion, to get google fiber ran out to my house (not serious).

I know how to fix this entire problem.

"

Sarno wrote:

It gets worse: Microsoft’s Spectre-fixer bricks some AMD PCs

Do you think they will buy them new pc:s?

Win 10 I swear to god.

"

GraydingEarJames wrote:

Do you think they will buy them new pc:s?

Microsoft care about the consequences of their actions?

That'll be the day...