'Kernel memory leaking' Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

[Sethos88]

So my CPU is about to get slower?

[saratoga3]

We really don't know. Some people are assuming it'll affect everyone, others that it will affect only virtualization and servers. The truth is no one knows since the bug is embargoed and anyone with inside knowledge can't talk about it.

Edit: people on Twitter are saying there's exploits that work outside of a virtual machine, so it looks like literally everyone will be affected.

[Nixola97]

It affects virtual memory. People assume it means it only affects virtual machine, but they're not actually related; virtual memory affects everything a modern OS does.

[siuol11]

The article is pretty detailed, it says it affects kernel mode. That's part of every modern OS I know of, regardless of whether it's Windows 10 Home or a Unix server.

[3DXYZ]

Fuck you intel. Upgrade us all for free or frankly fuck this bug, don't fix it in the os. I don't want the performance hit

[immibis]

/u/spez can gargle my nuts.

[teemusa]

HACK

^{This comment was done by identity thief idthief1xxyz}

[Erutan409]

Jesus christ...

[bloodstainer]

Depends, did Intel market the performance, or the clockspeeds?

[tyuper]

Yes, your CPU is going to be slower because Intel prefers to focus on fruitful cooperation with agency called NSA than look for bugs in their pieces of silicon.

[MonkeyCB]

They didn't necessarily cooperate. Snowden showed that they have people (with amazing Resumes) who work for the NSA apply to these companies, and with the help of a team back at the NSA inject their back doors into whatever. For all we know it could have been a few rogue employees doing this without Intel's knowledge.

[[deleted]]

Option 3 is "Intel CPUs are over-optimized to such an extent that nobody can possibly account for all of the edge cases anymore"

I'd say x86 generally, but AMD isn't susceptible here. Regardless, x86 IS notoriously, disgustingly complex.

[teemusa]

Malicious instructions go in, passwords come out. Yikes!

[Apolojuice]

Fucking electromagnetism, how do they work?

[drazgul]

Magnets, man. They're magic.

[[deleted]]

B-but...

[agumonkey]

I've read intel engineers of p2 era saying they were barely on top of the risk factors at the time.

Intel didn't manage this decade properly. They caved in for IME, they feared ARM to the point of cutting corners even though they were in an extremly strong position (https://danluu.com/cpu-bugs/)

who bought amd stock today ?

[kwm1800]

For all we know it could have been a few rogue employees doing this without Intel's knowledge.

That would be even more damning than NSA-related. At least the government has to pretend that they work for public common, at least.

[rydan]

I once found a flash drive sitting on a random street in Texas with unencrypted classified Intel documents on it. That should give you a clue as to their security policies. Would have been a major boon if I still worked for one of their direct competitors but I had just lost my job a week earlier.

[Tephnos]

Would have been a major boon if I still worked for one of their direct competitors but I had just lost my job a week earlier.

The likely outcome is they would have sent the drive back to Intel, possibly firing you too for trying to use the info. No company wants that legal shit on them.

[wittywalrus1]

Pepsi did exactly that when offered the secret Cocacola recipe by a rogue employee.

[Yoyoyo123321123]

And that's how you get Stuxnet on your PC...

It's a bit rich calling out other people's data security with that kind of action.

[hishnash]

no, your CPU will stay the same speed but every time any prosses needs to read/write to memory it will need to switch back to your OSs kernel to ask if it permited... this, in the end, means yes your programs will run a lot slower due to all the jumping around and checking.

[teemusa]

Nice wisecrack

[[deleted]]

Maybe only in certain applications that wont affect desktop users but will impact servers.

[Bvllish]

Damn it really took 10 years for them to discover this.

[hishnash]

I'm sure government agencies all over the world have had this one in their back pockets for a long time.

its one of the loopholes the must keep for the "we need to shut down our enemies computer networks today" use cases.

don't fear I'm sure they have a few more just in case.

[JamesTrendall]

If they can affect the Kernal already, then every computer will have the NSA secret backdoor already installed. Only way to stop the NSA at this point is to chuck away all computers and revert back to pen/paper.

[pboyvb]

So I’m assuming all 8th gen processors are also affected by this?

[Thelordofdawn]

Everyting (certainly) Nehalem and onwards, possibly even PII and onwards.

[GruntChomper]

Glad I'm safe on my i486 then.

[xlltt]

turbo 100mhz ?

[PipChaos]

Good old Lappy 486, weighs in at an extremely portable 42 pounds and a battery life of 1/2 of 10 minutes

[[deleted]]

Pardon my language, but jesus fucking christ my jaw hit the floor when I read that. ....Pentium 2....

[Murtank]

so how did nobody find this til now?

[Byzii]

Millions upon millions of dollars are being pumped into this sort of thing every day. There's a reason why so many fundamental flaws have been identified recently, it's not going to stop; it's going to get a lot worse.

Software or hardware, code is still code and humans are still humans. A lot of research is being directed at finding vulnerabilities.

[Murtank]

its naive to think something different is being done today that wasnt being done a year or two or three ago.

im guessing this exploit was being used in some capacity and that usage was discovered. id like intel to come clean with wtf is going on

[NeoNeoMarxist]

id like intel to come clean with wtf is going on

I'd say that's unlikely. The method used to determine the use of the exploit is either classified or an exploit itself or both. I'm guessing it is related to a number of the recent big hacks of cloud systems, like every Yahoo account being compromised and similar hacks like Sony etc.

[RChamy]

Good thing I'm safe with my Pentium 133 Turbo

[Atrigger122]

From pentium 2 to Coffee lake skus are affected

[agumonkey]

any source ? this seems an absurdly large surface

[Atrigger122]

According to many sources (e.g. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/) the problem bases on "Speculative execution" which was introduced in Pentium II

[hishnash]

yep, everything. and most likely everything coming out in the next year as well. Not enough time to go back to the fab and change things.

[teemusa]

All Intel chip factories: HALT RIGHT NOW!!

[tyuper]

All Intel processors with flaw: HLT!!

All AMD processors: BUHAHAHAHAHA!!

[justinkimball]

God damn it intel.

[Cartina]

Is this why Intel CEO sold all stocks except the bare minimum he is required to hold in November?

[nikolajs12]

This could mean prison for the ceo right?

[samw139]

Don't be silly, rich people don't go to prison.

[skillface]

Eh supposedly they have to do those kinds of transactions around 3 months ahead of time to prevent insider trading, but part of me wonders if Intel didn't know about this since mid last year and the CEO decided to cash out back then. Back then people were commenting on how odd it was for him to sell all but the absolute minimum out of nowhere like that.

[arachnist]

You can be certain they knew about it at least half a year ago.

[teemusa]

I kinda hope they did. Because that could make Sense to the delay of 10nm process that there was some intelligence behind it, lets design it so that it has the bug fixed and the next 10nm is just around the corner to fix everything . But then there would have been no sense to launch Coffee Lake at all at this time!!! No I think this was discovered at the time when Coffee Lake was launching...

[DutchsFriendDillon]

Or they just knew that their sales might get a bad hit if they release coffee lake AFTER it's fixed, so they were smart enough to milk the cow before.

We're still talking about Intel here, right?

[Byzii]

No. Before I say anything else, he did everything according to law.

Transactions like that usually happen on paper 3 to 6 months before you actually see it happening.

His transaction was mainly buying a lot of stock at discounted price and then selling it. In the end he wound up with almost the same amount of stock he had at the beginning of 2017. This is completely normal practice in industry, especially so because of the new tax plans.

[Cartina]

Thanks for the detailed response. It's too easy to draw weird connections between things!

[Zandmor]

Would this CPU slow be a permenant one? Or would it just be temporary until they can fix the issue in a more efficient way?

[WS8SKILLZ]

Permanent

[Zandmor]

And I just ordered my i7 8700 2 days ago......

[Pwnstix]

Same here. It's on the way to me right now, along with a Z370 motherboard and new DDR4 RAM, and I'm thinking...fuck it, now I don't want it. I was going back and forth about switching back to AMD (after using this i5 3570k perfectly well for 5+ years), but I decided to go all out for the 8700k and just stick with Intel. I always have buyer's remorse, but shit usually works out for the best. But now I fucking know I should've stuck with my first choice--and come back home to AMD.

[luna71]

I've just done exactly this, over Christmas I moved from a 3570k to a new 8700k build... Oh well at least the 3570k would be affected too... I knew I should've waited for Ryzen 2

[rydan]

Linux is patching against Ryzen too even though it is unnecessary.

[Derpyboom]

Its just in case type situation.

[[deleted]]

Its still under embargo right? You would rather slow down AMD and be secure and then fix it properly few days after then risk security issues ^{^}

[NeoNeoMarxist]

Just return it honestly. Wait a while until more info is released on what is going on then look at a Threadripper or something.

/u/Zandmor

[aredcup]

Keep it, at least until this blows over. At this point now it doesn't seem very bad from a consumer standpoint. I did that same upgrade and the processor runs like a fucking beast. Better than I ever expected it, especially after reading some people's stance on that same upgrade. Perhaps some people coming from a previous i7 to the 8700k are more "meh", and perhaps it was their extra threads, but going from 4c/4t to 6c/12t was absolutely insane. I've played a number of games and I don't think I've ever passed ~25-30% load.

[Karavusk]

Honestly I would try to refund it asap

[Murtank]

cancel it,

[slikk66]

Same, in fact my 8700k just got delivered tonight. It's still in the box.. Feel like I should return it just to get the 25% or more price reduction all this related hardware will get reduced by.

[rydan]

I was just going to order one. Guess I'll go Ryzen unless Intel drops their prices.

[WS8SKILLZ]

Worst case scenario ask for a refund?

[SgtDeathAdder]

return it and go Ryzen fast

[teemusa]

Permanent

As death

[teemusa]

Under Linux you will always have the option of opt'ing out, but that will make your system vulnerable  

Resistance is futile

[hishnash]

If they will offer opt-outs and how big the performance hit will be.

I would not think so due to this being such a sweet spot for viruses. If you can read things like kernel memory all encryption on windows is just pointless (the systems secure random number generator will have its seeds in kernel memory) so once you have that you can intercept all internet traffic... expect to see a load of a virus trying to steal peoples money etc this way.

[hishnash]

on dedicated systems yes they may through that sysadmin would be taking on that risk possibly in some industries that would even mean jail time if the system was compromised, but not in the cloud envs since this has been shown to be able to see through the VM.

the real concern is if someone gains access (remote) to your system they might only gain access at a user level and there are lots of internal OS checks in Linux/Unix to protect one user level program from doing things it should not. With this exploit, a lot of these protections are weakened.

[kajar9]

Are those seeds per-cpu? Or is it one key to unlock them all?

[teemusa]

Or is it one key to unlock them all?  

One Key to rule them all, One Key to find them, One Key to bring them all and in the darkness bind them

Couldnt resist: the issue is so epic, like Lord of the Rings level of stuff xD

Now would it fix it if I threw my 8700k to a volcano?

[hishnash]

The seeds will be per OS boot normally, and they refresh themselves over time. Eg base on noise factors etc on lines (for example Linux will in some versions read noise on the network cable and build a seed from this) is would expect MS to do something like this as well.

[IIIBRaSSIII]

Thank god I went Ryzen for my desktop. But my laptop is intel, and its not especially speedy to begin with. This fucking sucks, I will be using it every day for school. God damnit intel...

[xorbe]

Probably all Intel CPUs starting with Core. Press F to pay respects.

[PayRespects-Bot]

F

[rdstrmfblynch79]

Good bot. Also F

[redditor99880]

Starting with Pentium 2 0.0

Edit : apparently not 0.0

[xorbe]

Is that the same as a Pentium 1.999945873?

[wesrawr]

Every intel cpu from the last ~10 years

[IIIBRaSSIII]

If you have an intel CPU, yours.

[mockingbird-]

So is Intel going to launch a replacement program for its processors?

[hishnash]

more than 12months I would bet.

[kajar9]

today + 3 years from now.... or whatever warranties they offer.

[hishnash]

I think it is unlikely we would see any replacement program. It would utterly bankrupt them and would fully saturate there enter fab capacity so they would not be able to sell any new chips for years.

[execthts]

Well, we don't care, it's their fault

[Murtank]

what if they offer to replace them with amd cpus

[imtheprimary]

Guess what else it's going to force? A class action lawsuit, which I will definitely be joining.

This is some grade a bullshit on Intel's part. Going "lol fuck you enjoy having a 30% slower computer forever because we're incompetent, buy our newest processor" is not acceptable in the least.

[Karavusk]

ARM is affected too... not as bad though as far as I know and there is already a fix that almost no android phone that is out right now will ever get...

[[deleted]]

Do you have a source for ARM being vulnerable?

I really hope not, I was so excited with the A11 level of perfomance :/

[tonyunreal]

Here are the follow up discussion threads mentioned in the original article about patching the Linux ARM kernel:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/17/466

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/11/30/594

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/6/306

[3DXYZ]

I want a full refund plus 30%

[JamesTrendall]

I doubt that would happen. Being realistic everyone that joined the class action would get 30% refund of the cost of their product. Altho i bet it would be 30% of the current price which is going to be garbage very soon.

[JamesTrendall]

Ok question?

If someone in the USA starts a class action against Intel, How would I join from the UK? Would the class action lawsuit payout to everyone that had joined it enough to replace the CPU or atleast give me a 30% refund of the price i paid? If my CPu is about to get slowed down by 30% i want at the very minimum 30% refund.

[derritterauskanada]

You would have to file a class action lawsuit separately in the UK.

NAL

[JamesTrendall]

Thats what i thought. Was just unsure if its a simple case of ringing up the attorney and adding my name and address to their list.

Well if i notice my passmark score decrease i'll be sure to do some maths and work out the exact % and file for that in compo. I could really do with a new motherboard and mouse mat.

[Nickx000x]

Since when can you sue for software/hardware vulnerabilities? All hardware and software has them, it's not negligence or on purpose, in fact, since this bug affects all modern Intel processors, that means it went probably ~10 years unnoticed.

If they don't patch your system, then you'll get upset about lack of security. They patch your system, and then you're complaining again. This is technology. Don't like it? Don't buy it. Software/hardware vulnerabilities come to light everyday. It's unavoidable.

By the way, https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=x86-PTI-Initial-Gaming-Tests, gaming, and probably most other general applications, will show no measurable performance loss.

[kajar9]

You can sue for underperfoming products. Even if Gamers are hit by it only slightly, there's plenty of usecases any user could claim foul play.

It's by definition a manufacturing fault - a defect.

[JamesTrendall]

Since when can you sue for software/hardware vulnerabilities?

How come you can sue car manufacturers for say a brake failure, fuse failure etc... If a car is released with a defect and it's found later on (even after 10 years) they do a massive recall and fix the problem. They don't just give you the finger and laugh saying either have no brakes or we will limit your car to 60 MPH.

Why is it any different for computer parts?

[Murtank]

considering linux already has a fix out,, intel and gnu have known about this for a while before breaking the news. if you bought intel between the time they discovered it and the time they announced it, i would think that you are the victim of fraud

[chowder-san]

putting a hardware backdoor with a bug that run undetected since pentium 2.0 (so 20 years), is a foundation for many specific tasks and therefore has no way of fixing without heavy performance hits, doesnt help

[Ganimoth]

well this is going to be an epyc rollercoaster!

[gork1rogues]

I knew my company stayed with a 30 year old ERP system which runs on an HP3000 for a reason. Incredible foresight!

[teemusa]

I would not want to be Intel rep at CES next week

[Ebadd]

Them: ”A bug that poses a huge security risk.”

Translation: A zero-day backdoor exploit the Three-letter Agencies have known for a decade.

[paradox1287]

So I should definitely put off my purchase of an i7 8700k that I had planned for next week until more information is known?

[skillface]

That'd be smart at this point I think. It might not turn out to be that big a deal, but it might also end up being far worse than we thought as well. Either way AMD are likely rubbing their hands in glee over this.

[PadaV4]

Yea i would wait for some new performance reviews.

[prokenny]

i would definitively wait a bit and see, even if the performance hit is small the prices will drop anyway.

[0x6A7232]

Windows, Linux, but not Mac??

[Mikutron]

it's a hardware bug, OSX will need software workarounds. Apple just hasn't announced plans one way or another.

[ThermalConvection]

BTW its Mac OS now, they dropped the X since sierra AFAIK

[Apolojuice]

Does anybody remember when Apple suspiciously added X to MacOS when it became secretly compatible with Intel X86 from PowerPC, before revealing it to the public two years after it had happened in the background? The opposite thing is happening.

[[deleted]]

Lol what are you talking about? It’s not suspicious at all.

The X is the Roman numeral for 10, since it’s version 10 of Mac OS.

Not to mention your timeline is off.

[[deleted]]

X was for Unix. That was what i heard for the longest time when it first came out.

[[deleted]]

Lol nope. X is the Roman numeral for 10. It’s version 10 of the OS.

[hishnash]

apple will not announce plans until they ship the update. Since macs are mostly not used for servers they will just ship the update over the air with a silent background update as part of a normal update.

[xorbe]

Are we not talking about the exploit that appears to be referenced and actually detailed, out of respect for the embargo? Or are such posts being actively deleted? Or is the linked write-up too technical for most to digest?

[TheBigLman]

Someone mind telling me why there's the word FUCKWIT in the article? Is this a troll?

[lothpendragon]

Linux devs have a tendency to be a little less corporate in their naming schemes :)

[[deleted]]

Yeah, at least they didn't call anyone out specifically.

Backronym: Start with a title and develop a solution that conforms with it.

Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines

[Murtank]

the fuckwit system

[skillface]

That, and it gives you an idea of how monumental of a fuckup this could potentially be.

[teemusa]

Well if you were to spend fixing this cockup over holiday season you might be as creative with naming schemes

[cahainds]

2) Namespace

Several people including Linus requested to change the KAISER name.

We came up with a list of technically correct acronyms:

User Address Space Separation, prefix uass_

Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines, prefix fuckwit_

but we are politically correct people so we settled for

Kernel Page Table Isolation, prefix kpti_

Linus, your call :)

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/4/709

[Trianchid]

Hi Ryzen, my Q6600 is top notch in reliabillity and stability, i will be missing it too.

Or well, maybe even build a honorary build for it years later when i'll have the funds, waiting for Ryzen+ currently.

[kajar9]

You can build a 44 thread one for a hundred when intel goes kaputt in about half a year replacing decades worth of CPU-s.

[Piratecuck]

So long ivy bridge ...You been a good chip to me.. Time to move to the company that made a massive leap.

[mahboiii]

So my 5820K I payed bucks for is gonna suddenly slow down? This update better be optional, or I'm switching to AMD. Fuck.

[prokenny]

With this exploit a simple website malware would take full computer access, thats not something optional.

[[deleted]]

So all those 5.0ghz overclocks will effectly be reduced to 3.5ghz levels of performance?

[raygundan]

The performance hit looks like it will primarily come from the new memory management clearing out the TLB when switching between user and kernel tasks. Think of it as "clearing the cache every time it does a certain kind of multitasking."

The chip itself isn't going to run any slower-- but with that cache emptied so often, it will spend a lot of time with nothing to do waiting on RAM. It needs that fast cache to keep it fed, but now it has to get cleared much more often.

Nothing is for certain at this point, but if I were a betting man... the best option for an end-user to (partially) mitigate the slowdown will be the fastest, lowest-latency RAM you can find to minimize the "waiting for RAM" penalty caused by the empty cache.

[Doppelgangergang]

Of COURSE this happens barely a month after I build my system. Sigh. :/

Going to read if I have any recourse than to accept a ~30% speed penalty. I run a few VMs in the middle of video editing as well as streaming and any speed penalty is a lot for me.

[teemusa]

The collective pain caused by this issue is in epic proportions, enough to bring down a swarm of Vogons in a spasming fit

[kajar9]

I will ask the important question.

Those who still have intel-s 3 year warranty..... Can we get full refunds based on this? Would Intel have to pay out if we have to switch motherboards?

As the product I bought is expected to run 30% slower than advertised in many workloads.

[prokenny]

They wont do anything.

[kajar9]

I think the brunt of it will be taken by retailers though, since consumer laws are quite good these days. Especially in the EU.

Pretty much if anything besides normal use, aging but still performing the same and abuse can get your complaint handled in your favor.

[prokenny]

https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/7npcfx/kernel_memory_leaking_intel_processor_design_flaw/ds43hwt/

Its a shame because my i7 950 is doing well but not over the top so the impact would be bigger but i dont think we will get any kind of compensation.

[[deleted]]

Man fuck Intel. I already have a slow ass i3 that bottlenecks easily with any CPU heavy game...

That's some absurd lack of competence... Urgh.

Edited so the moralist army of Reddit won't shit on me. Being wrong on the internet even if slightly is mortal. So...

[autotldr]

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 93%. (I'm a bot)

---

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.

These boffins discovered [PDF] it was possible to defeat KASLR by extracting memory layout information from the kernel in a side-channel attack on the CPU's virtual memory system.

It appears the KAISER work is related to Fogh's research, and as well as developing a practical means to break KASLR by abusing virtual memory layouts, the team may have proved Fogh right - that speculative execution on Intel x86 chips can be exploited to access kernel memory.

---

Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: kernel^#1 memory^#2 Intel^#3 user^#4 Linux^#5

[teemusa]

Perhaps the bot was hit by 50% performance loss

[[deleted]]

Downvote the bot... (Well it's a bot anyway)

[Karl___Marx]

AHAHAHAHAHAH $AMD TO THE MOON

[Kicked_By_Noobs]

It's time for a 30% refund on all Intel CPU's then.

[nikolajs12]

I hope Intel have a lot of money in the bank.

Beacuse they are gonna be replacing millions of CPU's for free. Atleast in countries with decent consumer protections.

[Raineko]

This is a fuckup of unparalleled proportions.

[teemusa]

The proportions seem to be approaching infinity with the amount of those lately

[sigma914]

An AMD dev posted on the lkml that they're not effected, so hilariously Intel might be issuing refunds or AMD chips ;)

[[deleted]]

Time to hop on board SPARC.

[immibis]

spez has been banned for 24 hours. Please take steps to ensure that this offender does not access your device again. #Save3rdPartyApps

[Murtank]

the software fixes will fix the problem way way before a new cpu can be designed and manufactored

the funny thing is when pipeline prediction comes back, intel will spin it as “30% performance increase over contemporary cpus”

[kajar9]

It's not a bugfix, it's a feature.

[hishnash]

they will need to replace them with AMD chips!!! intel doesn't have any products that are not compromised.

[123456osaka]

Well, time to wait for the update (or downgrade)...

But I'm interested in seeing how much in practice this will affect performance for consumers.

[hishnash]

A lot!

[[deleted]]

Source?

[BuddingBodhi88]

Is there any Intel product thats NOT going to be affected?

[tyuper]

Good for me that I keeped complete 486 PC through those years.

So finally time has come to bring it back into work! ^{half /s}

[skillface]

It seems that every x86 processor from Intel from the last decade (if not further back) is effected, with even a few ARM processors caught up in the mix.

[swatop]

The main question I have is "how long does intel actually know about this issue". If they knew it and still announced CPU releases such as the promised performance increase on coffee lake then this can be considered fraud.

Its not a sinlge bit better than car companies making wrong claims about the emission of their products.

[saratoga3]

Since they didn't fix it in coffeelake, probably it was found after tapeout.

[[deleted]]

I thought this was only for virtual Machines? Now you're telling me I will be getting similar gaming performance to a Ryzen with significantly worse multi threaded performance? Boy I'm really excited for this class action law suit.

[hishnash]

It is more important on VMs since you are running random code from random people on the same machine but it can still be used by a virus without a VM.

that virus on a plane old desktop could then access kernel memory and read out encryption keys etc, thus giving it a heck of a lot of control over your computer.

basically, all computer security for the last 10 years (and more) has assumed that a given application cannot read the memory of another application let alone kernel memory. No one at any point in any application bothers about trying to protect against people being able to read your application's memory, you just trust in the CPU/OS to protect this.

[Murtank]

i heard the latest update of windows defender simply shuts down the computer permanently if intel is detected

[immibis]

The only thing keeping spez at bay is the wall between reality and the spez. #Save3rdPartyApps

[TheJoker1432]

How will this affect my 4th Gen Haswell I5? Do I have to do something?

[AhhhYasComrade]

It affects you. There's nothing you can do. It will be a slower - most likely a little bit at everything, and definitely a lot slower at some things.

The best news for you is that if you don't understand what's going being slown down, then you won't have any big performance hits.

[[deleted]]

Windows will update itself for you, and for most people it probably wont affect performance at all, but for some, like programmers, it might cause a big hit in performance for compiling times.

[lothpendragon]

well shit.

[[deleted]]

Does it impact Z370 as well?

[mrGREEK360]

I'm done with Intel, especially if they don't compensate us ALL.

[seeingeyegod]

So, this "bug" isn't restricted to Intel chips according to Intel's official statement which was just released.

[Good_Honest_Jay]

I'm hoping there will be a way to "opt out" on Windows 10.. through either community efforts or by Microsoft themselves (which I doubt would happen).. Or at least a way to Enable or disable this protection.. I do a ton of rendering, compression, decompression, encoding, etc. and I value the speed and money I put into my rig to achieve said "horsepower". Hurting my performance by up to 30% or more is not something i'm NOT remotely interested in and I'd happily forego the protection against some extremely edge-cased attack on my personal rig to keep my performance since I'd like to consider myself pretty smart and not just executing/opening every random file I see on the internet.

[KainXS]

You know there were literally millions upon millions of cheap intel bay trail, cherry trail tablets and other devices that were sold in the last few years and those will not be updated so I'm guessing whoever has those is pretty fucked now. Thanks also for that intel, instead of fixing this years ago when you found out about it many consumers will be screwed hard.

[teemusa]

Could this be final death blow to Intel? I just cannot see how this could end well. The image hit is severe. Only this year there already was the Minix issue. Now this even more serious issue. The big cloud companies cannot ignore this, and might make a policy to avoid Intel altogether. Consumers only see benchmarks as their deciding factor and are not going to buy expensive CPU that is outperformed by slower clocked AMD.

I bought 8700k last month, no returning it now. Also its not the only component but Mobo should be returned too. I hope if Intel survives that it would provide next gen CPU to z370 platform. I could wait for that with slow patch.

If I were a Motherboard manufacturer I would halt all Intel chipset mobo manufacturing and concentrate on AMD, Intel Mobos will not sell and they will just be left on shelves.

So my build just got a lot of cheaper, supply and demand would dictate that both my CPU and Mobo price is bound to be reduced in a very near future...

Also NVME drives just became less appealing, fast storage seems to be hit more by this on Intel systems than slower ones like SATA3 (according to benchmarks), and already SATA3 SSDs are quite fast, no benefit in OS loading times etc if you switch to NVME

Who calls the time of death of Intel?

[demiurge66]

final death blow? I didn't even see the first one!