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Intel Kabylake and Skylake CPUs have microcode bug - disable hyperthreading now!

Soldato
Joined
2 Dec 2005
Posts
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Location
Herts
Another one from Joris Giovannangeli's perspective (Ahrefs.com):

Skylake bug: a detective story
https://tech.ahrefs.com/skylake-bug-a-detective-story-ab1ad2beddcd

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It's hard to overstate how bad this is (was) for Intel. They seriously understated the issue when they described it as requiring a "complex set of micro-architectural conditions" - as Leroy wrote in the previous link, the necessary assembly is actually very innocuous. For example:
Code:
movq    (%rdi), %rax
[...]
andb    $252, %ah
movq    %rax, (%rdi)
i.e. just a binary AND on part of the register (the full register doesn't do it). As long as the right registers are used and this happens in a loop with both hyperthreads you get random crashes. Absolutely horrible!

It might be hard to impress this on general computer users who take crashes as a (fairly) common occurrence, but CPUs should never have bugs like this. Accepting a CPU bug is a bit like accepting that 2 + 2 sometimes equals 5. It's literally incorrect.
 
Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
33,188
As always it's the usual, PR wipes the problem away. They own much of the media with huge ad buys for major tech sites. When AMD has a minor bug they have those sites talk it up like a monumental issue, when they have a major problem the sites talk it down.

They had that chipset issue with sata, then had like two generations where virtualisation didn't work as promised while they still sold it and advertised it as a fully working feature, they had a big usb security issue, this. Meanwhile AMD had one major bug with Phenom which they both fixed and announced before launch, let all reviews come out with the fix in place which reduced performance and in that case if you ran without the fix.... you'd almost never have the problem yet AMD got destroyed over that. You can't win now, when you have money you get to control the message.

With EPYC release AMD couldn't publish proper results using the GCC compiler because specint contract you to only publish Intel compiler results.

Look at the compubench results thing going on now, using a virtual machine people are spoofing an Intel ID on the CPU and getting vastly higher results because the compiler thinks it's an Intel CPU and optimises. Intel does this absolutely everywhere, buys up or pays heavily into well used benchmarks, tie them to Intel compiler, disable optimisation for AMD and proclaim way higher wins in benchmarks than they get in real world performance in many many applications. Until AMD has billions in cash on hand to fight back and fight as dirty as Intel then problems for Intel will get brushed under the rug and downplayed by the media.
 
Associate
Joined
31 Dec 2010
Posts
2,438
Location
Sussex
Until AMD has billions in cash on hand to fight back and fight as dirty as Intel then problems for Intel will get brushed under the rug and downplayed by the media.
Or if the various national or trans-national competition regulators actually were willing and able to their job... In the US such practices are barely even illegal. But then again, bribing politicians is all above board there too, although I believe they call it lobbying.
 
Caporegime
Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
33,188
Or if the various national or trans-national competition regulators actually were willing and able to their job... In the US such practices are barely even illegal. But then again, bribing politicians is all above board there too, although I believe they call it lobbying.

America is the most corrupt place on earth, they've monetised war to the point they've had perpetual conflicts throughout the world for the past 60 years for mostly made up reasons because the guys who pay politicians only continue to make massive profit if their equipment is being constantly upgraded and replaced. What Intel does barely registers. Hell even what they did get caught for during the Ath 64 years, paying companies not to take AMD chips, they used the bent stupid legal system to screw them out of a real payment. They caused AMD to go into so much debt with their initial actions so when it came to the court case AMD couldn't afford to fight Intel. They could have probably got 5x the cash awarded to them but Intel would appeal, then appeal again, then appeal again, spending 100's of millions each time, money AMD didn't have, so AMD would simply be bankrupt before they would have to pay them. Creative did that to Aureal back in the day, straight up stole their tech, sold it, bankrupted them in court and bought the remains of the company so they owned the tech anyway.

Then look at Trump being elected, just every single speech he made was lie after lie after lie after lie and the guy becomes president. The world is corrupt as hell and pretty much everyone who got on the ladder early enough now has the cash reserves to maintain their position via further corruption.
 
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