[DISCUSSION] Meltdown and Spectre

Discussion in 'PC Hardware' started by scaramonga, Jan 3, 2018.

  1. Enthousiast

    Enthousiast MDL Tester

    Oct 30, 2009
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  2. toyo

    toyo MDL Senior Member

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    #382 toyo, Jun 18, 2018
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2018
    Battle of advertising. Customers obviously (always) lose.

    Anyway the 8086K is a waste of money. I even have some doubts it can run AVX on all 12 threads (like prime95) and remain at the base advertised 4GHz whilestaying within TDP. My 8700K is dropping to 3.8GHz or so, which is fine cause it has an advertised 3.7GHz, but 4? I'd have to see it with my own eyes.

    PS: it's only for the people that won the 8086K from Intel, bought ones don't qualify. This trade is a very bad choice for the future, as keeping a 8086K as a collector's item would buy you a full PC in 10 years. The 1950X is soon to be superseded by their Ryzen 2 Threadripper lineup, with a 32 core CPU at the top. It's valuable, but it's more of a choice for the present.

    Regardless, it's most probable that nobody in these forums would win a 8086K :)
     
  3. WindowsGeek

    WindowsGeek MDL Expert

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    MS claims they have already send a few updates to address this problem, but when I look at my install updates I don't see anything or is it included in CU package:confused:
     
  4. MookieADR

    MookieADR MDL Novice

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    MS issued a software update in January 2018 (part of their Monthly updates) to address the Meltdown bug. The Spectre bug can only be fixed via a BIOS update to the motherboard but having said that, security researchers are still coming up with ways to exploit the Spectre issue and I'm starting to think there's no true way they'll ever fix that issue on existing hardware.

    Try running GRC's InSpectre tool to check if your system is protected, I can't provide a url link as I've not enough posts (need 5) to do it. Google is your friend.
     
  5. WindowsGeek

    WindowsGeek MDL Expert

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    I just ran the tool looks like im safe but it takes a performance hit.

    upload_2018-8-6_18-2-53.png
     
  6. toyo

    toyo MDL Senior Member

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    That's because your CPU looks to be a 3770 i7 or something similar, and the required INVPCID instruction was introduced with Haswell.

    It would be nice if you could run some benchmarks with protections enabled/disabled. I'm really curious what the performance impact is on good, yet a bit older CPUs.
     
  7. MS_User

    MS_User MDL Guru

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    if your running SSD with 8 gig of ram or more with I5 or I7 impact is barely noticeable .
     
  8. VDev

    VDev MDL Member

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    Its noticeable under heavy load example Cinebench or any compute intensive workloads. Simple ML data set or similar.
    I recommend turning spectre protection in Win 10 to OFF if you have BIOS microcode fixes. Otherwise enable it.
     
  9. toyo

    toyo MDL Senior Member

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    Barely any Cinebench impact on 8700K. It depends on the CPU.
    Also having the microcode doesn't do much on its own, it also needs the OS patch, if I understand things correctly. This should be easy to confirm with the Powershell script.
     
  10. Enthousiast

    Enthousiast MDL Tester

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    Isn't the microcode kb update the actual OS patch? Maybe you meant bios update?
     
  11. VDev

    VDev MDL Member

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    Hahaa. 8700K can barely feel the slowdown unlike 6700HQ. 8700K destroys 6700HQ in plain sight like automatic machine gun.
    The microcode w/ spectre fixes are loaded early by OS. You might see a second or two increase in boot time be it HDD/SSD/Optane based solutions.
     
  12. Hadron-Curious

    Hadron-Curious MDL Guru

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    There are still other three vulnerabilities found in Intel after these patches, the various L1 Terminal Fault (L1TF) which are more serious than the Meltdown and Specters. Isn't it time to say Intel needs to redesign processors to mitigate these vulnerabilities? It is clear that is the best way out rather than going after microcode patches, etc.
     
  13. toyo

    toyo MDL Senior Member

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    #395 toyo, Aug 14, 2018
    Last edited: Aug 14, 2018
    They already said that hardware fixes are upcoming, probably with 10nm CPUs in (late?) 2019. As for the people who bought into Coffee Lake and earlier, like me, it's not like we really have a real good choice, it's either security with performance impact or big security hole with normal performance. I'm personally not gonna activate further fixes that degrade performance unless I hear of attacks. Already took steps to move any financial/sensitive stuff to another PC. The Coffee Lake I write from now is gaming and browsing. Luckily I don't have much to lose if I get hacked.

    ----

    Oh some good news:

    ---------------

    More good news:
    KB4343909 is fixing these, so all good, at least if you have the microcode. It's unclear from Intel if the Speculative Store Bypass revision is this microcode or we need another, I'll try and run the Powershell script after I update to see if anything in it changed.

    ----------------

    Nothing new in the Powershell script after the hotfix. I think the module requires updating as well, tried that too, still nothing changed. Will see in the upcoming days, quite curious if I need yet another microcode update.
     
  14. Hadron-Curious

    Hadron-Curious MDL Guru

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    The issue here is that Intel isn't proactive when dealing with vulnerabilities found in its hardware. The long time it takes to admit the previous problems before even dishing out the patches speaks volume of neglect. We are talking about over 10 years here and that is not encouraging at all.

    The tech giant is not restricted to small sector in the society but widespread. I can see how damaging the slow performance will likely be for most people as they patch their system around the world. The average person who browses the internet and uses social media may not be impacted but those of us who cannot do without running one or more resource-consuming applications will be.

    Having said that, there's really nobody claiming to have exploited these loopholes in Intel hardware though. We need to be watchful for any exploit in Intel hardware before the planned hardware fixes come in due course.
     
  15. toyo

    toyo MDL Senior Member

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  16. TooN0ble

    TooN0ble MDL Novice

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    I like that Inpsectre can easily disable/enable the Meltdown fix. Is a new release likely incoming with the ability to enable/disable the L1TF fix ?
     
  17. rayleigh_otter

    rayleigh_otter MDL Expert

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    Not forgetting users who are having big performance hits from these updates too, 20% plus so i have heard. Pay extra for intel, get a performance hit and the gap between ryzen and intel is even smaller, neck and neck and possibly ryzen ahead. I would be very annoyed.
     
  18. toyo

    toyo MDL Senior Member

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    If you want a personal opinion from somebody that bought a 8700K, well before these vulnerabilities were a thing:

    - in my country, the 1800x was pricier than the 8700k (at least in the one, single store that accepted bitcoin, which happened to be like 18.000USD in December). In fact, both the 1700x and the 1800x costed more, and the 1700 was exactly the same price.
    - for what I do on the PC, all these patches didn't mean anything at all. I doubt I lost one single framerate (1070ti, 1080p). Tried turning off all protections and it means squat, even for benchmarks like Cinebench. I can get a worse score in that just because Windows 10 wants to notify me of whatever during the bench than for applying each and every Spectre/Meltdown patch
    - I kinda like the frequent BIOS updates. It forces vendors to update stuff they are usually very lazy to update, like Intel RST EFI module and so one. None were unstable for me.
    - the gap between the 2700x and 8700k is actually favoring the Ryzen overall because of the extra cores and architectural improvements since the first Ryzen. At this point a 8700K (and Coffee Lake) is a niche CPU family for games, especially at high refresh, and Adobe Premiere because of Quicksync/iGPU acceleration (on top of CUDA).

    Even with knowing this, I'm unsure I'd buy Ryzen. My experience with the FX8350 was pretty miserable, exacerbated by the fact I used to play MMOs that depended on single core power. It didn't mean much when I had lower end/older GPUs like a HD4890, but when I bought a GTX970 the bottlenecking was striking - and incredibly frustrating. It wasn't that type of "oh, but you're already having 80 fps" type of bottleneck - it was the type of "OMG 15 fps, frame drops when the boss summoned adds, freeze when there was a huge 40vs40 battle". I'm just so reluctant to return to AMD after 5 years of FX, although if the 2700x would have been out when i got my new PC, I guess I would have bought one instead, considering it's cheaper, which was not the case with the 1800x.