Intel will no longer have the edge?

oopsy

Resonant Serpent
"A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.
 
Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel's virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.
 
Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. "
 
https://www.theregister.c...intel_cpu_design_flaw/

Apparently, we may not have all the facts or the reporting may be inaccurate/overblown...
 
https://www.thurrott.com/hardware/149469/intel-says-recently-reported-security-flaw-overblown
 

Never been happier to still be using a Core2Quad processor that's 10 years old!  My laptop is in trouble though...

Gargamel314
Never been happier to still be using a Core2Quad processor that's 10 years old!  My laptop is in trouble though...

I think that CPU is one of the CPUs that have the security vulnerability. You're not out of the woods as far as I know. I am running a Core 2 Duo E6850 and I'm virtually certain it is affected by the problem. Any Intel CPU with the word 'Core' in it is affected. Again, to my knowledge...

That sux. I'm feeling pretty good about my AMD processor right now.

http://www.businessinside...-chip-flaw-2018-1?IR=T

I think Martha Stewart got 5 months in a federal prison and a $195,000 fine for a $285,000 illegal sale of stock. I wonder if he's nervous.

According to an article I read, some AMD's are also affected, not widespread like the Intel's but AMD is not completely out of the woods.
 

It's pretty much all CPU's, Intel, AMD, and ARM...
 
https://www.theverge.com/...sor-bug-windows-10-fix

Jim Roseberry
The patch is out.
Backup your machine before installing.
You can compare an audio stress-test pre/post patch.
We're seeing extremely minimal to no performance difference.

I don't have any good benchmark for audio performance, but I tested gaming, DPC latency, and disk IO and found no difference. Well to be completely accurate I found a slight increase in gaming performance post-patch, but it was well within the margin of error.
 
Now this is the OS level patch, I do not have the updated microcode yet (doesn't seem like any vendors have released it) but so far, I'm seeing no change for user type workloads. VM servers may be another thing, I'll be testing those this weekend, but not really relevant to people on this forum.
 
It is really nothing to worry about performance wise so far as I can see for the general public.
 

tunedeaf
"He sold after the announcement, pretty quickly after the announcement. Not sure they can touch him."
 
If he put his sell plan in place after the issue was made public he is okay. I honestly don't know when the public was made aware that this is a significant issue (one that could very well affect stock prices).

It looks like that's what he did. I mean this was discovered last June, I don't know when Intel was brought in on it but it was early in the process. They've known for a long time. Presumably he planned to sell, and waited until the earliest he could legally do it.

Long term it isn't likely to be a big drop for four reasons:
 
1)  This isn't some kind of negligence on their part. This is a completely unforeseen consequence of speculative execution. That is a technology, widely used, that has been around for decades. It isn't like this was something they were ignoring, this is something security researchers only recently figured out. So while they will get sued, since everyone sues over everything these days, it isn't that likely to succeed.
 
2) This is not an Intel only problem. Despite early reports, this is something that affects basically all modern chips. The Specter attack (reading in-process memory) is something that is probable to work on every processor. That it hasn't been demonstrated yet on every CPU is a matter of what the researchers focused on, not that the others are invulnerable. It'll happen in time. MalwareJake is pretty confident this is only the beginning.
 
3) The performance impact is not near the big deal it was made out to be. On normal systems, it is tiny if even present. Even on big I/O systems, it doesn't seem to be as bad as first made out. So while there is lots of nerd rage, it is hard to legitimately get that mad about it. Couple that with the fact that Intel never made any specific performance claims on their CPUs guaranteeing a level of performance.
 
4) It isn't that big a security hole. It is not the cataclysmic event that some people were (and still are) making it out to be. It is a covert data ex-filtration channel. That sucks, but we have been dealing with that in security forever, and they don't go away. You just have to work to make them difficult to use and to monitor for it happening.
 
So while it will cost them some money, it isn't likely to be an amount such as to hurt stock price.

DrLumen
Plus, if I'm not mistaken, the machine still has to be infected and the code executed. I can understand and glad they are patching the problem but wouldn't an anti-virus prevent the exploits as well?

As with Malware, you're not going to be exposed/exploited running DAW software.  
It wouldn't surprise me if this "design flaw" was at some level intentional.

gbowling

Sycraft
VM servers may be another thing, I'll be testing those this weekend, but not really relevant to people on this forum.
 

 
Actually in a round about way, it is totally relevant to me. I wanted to keep my DAW pristine, no installation of other software/drivers/etc. that might impact my DAW operation.  But I also didn't want two machines.
 
So I have a virtualbox machine on top of my DAW. My hardware machine has all my audio software and drivers and virtualbox installed on it, nothing else. My virtual machine has all my other software installed on it. 
 
I love the way it operates, when I want to do a session I just shut down the virtual machine and my box is pretty much a dedicated DAW. The only issue I have is that audio in the virtual machine isn't very good (actually almost unusable), so listening to spotify, itunes, or youtube on my virtual doesn't really work well. But I'm not about to install them on my base machine, sans youtube which runs in a browser. 
 
gabo

I've been considering doing something similar but slightly more drastic - also putting my DAWs in a virtual machine.
So only having the base operating system on the machine and everything on separate virtual machines - one for my DAWs, one for my programming apps, one for 'normal' PC usage (email, etc.).
 
In the past 2 years for reasons beyond my control (motherboard failure, OS corruption, etc) I've had to 3 times setup & reconfigure my system from scratch.  My audio setup takes the most time. Each time it's a long drawn out process of getting everything installed, activated and configured.
I haven't run a proof of concept yet (putting Sonar on a virtual machine and checking it out) but hoping that on a decent i7 processor, with ample RAM and SSDs that it proves viable.