My suggestion is that Intel and other processor makers need to start producing another processors for replacement more or less like automakers do with recalls. These patches are constituting more problems rather than a perfect solution. Indeed, I am not going to apply these fixes to any of my systems yet.
On the consumer side, gaming is largely unaffected (I expected Assassin's Creed: Origins to be impacted because of the insane CPU utilization and non-stop streaming of assets - it isn't). However, Cinebench and CPU-Z bench are most definitely affected (this is with Windows patch only, MSI didn't provide microcode update yet). Weirdly enough, the multithreaded benches are looking the same/a bit better on my PC, so within margin of error. Single thread, however, Cinebench fell from around 200 (8700K) to 190 and I tested a few times, it doesn't get better. CPU-Z dropped from 530-ish to 495-500 which basically puts the 8700K on par with their reference 7700K, so it's quite a significant drop. I've even tried to run CPU-Z and Cinebench with real-time prio and no other apps, yet the single thread results stay lower, no doubt about it, this is no "within margin of error", it's basically a generation of single thread performance being lost. I see the max Turbo Boost for 7700K is 4500MHz. 8700K is 4700MHz. Those 200 MHz? Lost, thanks Intel
I reckon it's not a flaw until somebody (good or bad) finds it and exposes it Luckily Google research did find it and it's not going to be a zero day attack, but I'm going to hold for a little while and hopefully they'll get this patch refined by then
I see it differently. I reckon a flaw it's a "dormant" flaw until someone "good" finds it and exposes it. Now I think about the "bad" ones: who knows if a "bad" has taken advantage of it in the past. Scary.
It's about the illusion of infallibility of technical achievements. It's an elementary thing and requires a new generation of processors...on the OS side one can only do patchwork. The guys from TU Graz are neutral and tried different attack vectors...until they found a major hole..
Intel should give up new processors, but we know that ain't going to happen. The airbags are bad on my car because of a defect in manufacturing and I'm getting a new airbag.... Why not with pc's?
Something tells me that Intel was skirting some security in favor of speed to look better than AMD. Now that they are busted on this, they ought to have to pay for their greed
The airbag is a single item to be replaced, not much money relatively involved. To give up a processor it's a different story. It involves to give up a new mobo, new ram, new this and there, hehe.