MDS / Zombieload Mitigations Come At A Real Cost, Even If Keeping Hyper Threading On

[HadrienG]

So my question is this really Intel taking shortcuts and producing less secure architectures than AMD? Or is it just that AMD is getting less hammered by researchers and hackers looking for vulnerabilities?

I cannot speak about hardware, but in my experience, Intel certainly take an unhealthy lot of performance shortcuts in their software work:

• Their compilers enable numerically unstable floating-point optimizations by default, in violation of language standards
• They also tend to inordinately favor hardcoded loop optimizations for popular benchmarks over providing a high-quality optimizers for real code
• A while ago, they used to actively pessimize output code when targeting AMD CPUs.
• SVT-AV1, which was recently lauded on this website, achieves its high performance by sacrificing video quality down to sub-h264 levels...

This is not unlike the lengths to which GPU drivers will go in order to fix/optimize games for their specific hardware (excluding others) by live-patching their shaders. And in my opinion, it shows that hardware people just have a hard time dealing with the conflict of interest that inevitably emerges when they write software, and that therefore the two activities of building hardware and software are best kept separate.

I don't know if AMD is better or worse. I certainly deal with their software less, because unlike Intel I can easily avoid using their compilers. But I never caught them with their pants down doing this kind of things so far.

[Michael]

Would be good to see cumulative performance hit since before Spectre/Meltdown/etc and after these new issues.

I thought I mentioned it in the article, but yes it's coming.

[Guest]

The sad part is that more mitigations are inevitable, and CPUs will get even slower. It's just a matter of time.

Now, imagine the possibility that this is Intel's attempt at planned obsolescence, and that they're paying people to scrutinize their current chips so they can release expensive chips which are supposed to be "secure". Sprinkle in some FUD about AMD, and you have a perfect recipe to bump the prices up and get ahead of the competition. This is just my attempt to consider the wildest possible conspiracy theory, but I wouldn't be surprised if that turned out to be true, just like that landfill of E.T. cartridges in New Mexico.

[maxmasou]

I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of time before a class action against the company occurs. Maybe lawer are just waiting to see if other mitigations are underway to have the final picture of this mess.

[flower]

The sad part is that more mitigations are inevitable, and CPUs will get even slower. It's just a matter of time.

Now, imagine the possibility that this is Intel's attempt at planned obsolescence, and that they're paying people to scrutinize their current chips so they can release expensive chips which are supposed to be "secure". Sprinkle in some FUD about AMD, and you have a perfect recipe to bump the prices up and get ahead of the competition. This is just my attempt to consider the wildest possible conspiracy theory, but I wouldn't be surprised if that turned out to be true, just like that landfill of E.T. cartridges in New Mexico.

possible but i dont think thats the case.
if intel has planned this they would have cpu's available which dont suffer from this problem. and their current problems to get their 7nm working doesnt fit too.

good times for amd imho

[EarthMind]

Intel customers have already lost so much performance due to the solutions for all these security issues. Let's also remind ourselves that the impact could have been much less if Intel wasn't such a greedy monopolist who refused to innovate their CPUs for a long time due to their dominant market share. If Intel had really done effort by innovating instead of release minimal change refreshes of their CPU architectures every year, the results of these mitigations could have not been so noticeable.

[k1e0x]

I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of time before a class action against the company occurs. Maybe lawer are just waiting to see if other mitigations are underway to have the final picture of this mess.

And it couldn't have happened to a nicer company. (well...... maybe Oracle is worse. lol)

[ThoreauHD]

Well, at least Intel is releasing 7nm soon. And by soon, I mean never.

[aphysically]

If SkyLake doesn't contain hardware mitigations for most Spectre/Meltdown/MDS/whatever vulnerabilities, I will stop buying Intel CPUs.

According to the detailed Intel breakdown my 8th gen Skylake is vulnerable to all of the above. Some specific 8th gen processors have mitigations for specific types of MDS, but not mine. My laptop is a new model that was released 3 months ago.

[chithanh]

Some people keep raising the possibility that with Intel having much more market share they are the ones primarily being targeted by research institutes for vulnerabilities.

So my question is this really Intel taking shortcuts and producing less secure architectures than AMD? Or is it just that AMD is getting less hammered by researchers and hackers looking for vulnerabilities?

At least one group wrote that they tried to run the attack against non-Intel CPUs but were unsuccessful:

We were unable to reproduce this behavior on non-Intel CPUs and consider it likely that this is an implementation issue affecting only Intel CPUs.

https://www.cyberus-technology.de/posts/2019-05-14-zombieload.html