Should I hold off on buying new computer that uses intel?

Worztron

Hi.

I was recently considering buying a new laptop with an intel cpu + intel graphics. Should I hold off for a while until intel fix the issues at the moment?

I presume all new cpus from here on will not have the current intel vulnerabilities?

NLC1072

Worztron wrote: »

Hi.

I was recently considering buying a new laptop with an intel cpu + intel graphics. Should I hold off for a while until intel fix the issues at the moment?

I presume all new cpus from here on will not have the current intel vulnerabilities?

The 8th generation is still vulnerable, and that's just been released so that product cycle should last a year at least.

Worztron

NLC1072 wrote: »

The 8th generation is still vulnerable, and that's just been released so that product cycle should last a year at least.

Damn, so I may leave any new computer until 2019.

NLC1072

Or, if the short term performance issue isn't a bother to you, buy intel. Or go AMD, I'm not an AMD fan but their new processors look quite tasty!

TerrorFirmer

For the average user it's a non issue. It's blown way out of proportion as to its effects on day to day users.

Riesen_Meal

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

For the average user it's a non issue. It's blown way out of proportion as to its effects on day to day users.

Would I be right in saying it only really effects servers and cloud server type setups where the processor is always in a high usage type mode?

ED E

Fieldog wrote: »

Would I be right in saying it only really effects servers and cloud server type setups where the processor is always in a high usage type mode?

It affects everyone, but your workload makes the problem really show up or not.

So on your desktop having one user run one hard task (a game) then its impact is low. But on a server with 200 users doing 200 light tasks, the impact is very high.

Worztron

How can intel make such gaffes?

BigEejit

They implemented speculative execution to improve cpu performance, it is used with branch prediction and dataflow analysis to allow out-of-order execution. So a program needing a set of instructions processed can have those instructions done in an optimal manner which is often different from the order they were given to the processor. This gave a dramatic processor performance increase, without a huge increase in clock speed. So a Pentium 200 was about 35 - 40% slower than a Pentium Pro 200 (i think the only differenence between the two chips was out-of-order execution).

Intels implementation of speculative execution does not check whether memory it is accessing is in privileged memory, it only does that after it has run its instructions, so a nefarious individual can craft a set of instructions to read kernel space memory and read data there. This could be a web page reading your passwords.

Modern intel processors will have a low performance dip, games and 3d rendering for example. However if they are doing a lot of IO writes, I have seen websites showing current/last gen mobile i7's lose ~20 - 40% 4k read/write performance, getting worse as the queue depth rises (think copying your pictures or similar).

As mentioned, this will be unlikely to be fixed until the next set of processor releases.

/edit Current intel chips use the Skylake architecture, as far as we know the next scheduled processor release is 'cannon lake' which is still a Skylake architecture chip, manufactured at 10nm instead of the current 14nm for coffee lake, should be released some time in 2018. The next architecture is Ice Lake, also a 10nm chip and if intel keep up with its normal release plan, would be due in 2019. This may of course all change now as intel tries to remove that egg from its face.