[Info-vax] Intel junk...Kernel-memory-leaking Intel processor design flaw forces Linux, Windows redesign

[DaveFroble]

Bill Gunshannon wrote:
> On 01/05/2018 04:04 PM, DaveFroble wrote:
>> Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>>> On 01/05/2018 08:50 AM, Alan Browne wrote:
>>>> On 2018-01-04 15:43, DaveFroble wrote:
>>>>> chrisv wrote:
>>>>>> Designed By India H1B Engineers wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> 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.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> This is ugly.  Think of the large computing centers, for example
>>>>>> Google's data centers.  Suddenly, they will need significantly more
>>>>>> CPU time, and thus electricity (and thus carbon), to get the job 
>>>>>> done?
>>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> And once all the spanners are tossed into the works, which will 
>>>>> slow things down, what happens when new CPUs without the issues are 
>>>>> available?  Will computers forever be artificially slowed down?
>>>>>
>>>>> A whole bunch of someones has seriously dropped the ball on this. 
>>>>> Protected memory should be just that, protected, with no way to 
>>>>> avoid the protection.
>>>>
>>>> I presume it's an implementation flaw, not a principle-of-design 
>>>> flaw. So once addressed, it should result in both proper memory 
>>>> protection and increased performance in future cores.  Alas (per the 
>>>> article) this can't be addressed with a microcode patch.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Sounds more like a "principle-of-design" flaw to me.  Hard to
>>> believe all those different companies all made the same mistake
>>> building on a sound design.
>>>
>>> bill
>>>
>>
>> I wonder whether VAX would have these problems?
>>
>> :-)
>>
>>
> 
> VAX didn't have the capabilities that lead to this problem.
> I think Alpha does, however.
> 
> bill
> 

:-)

Yeah, I know that.  No predictive speculation in VAX.

Now, as for Alpha, yes, OoO and such, but, the question would be, does it allow 
"illegal" access to memory?  If Alpha does not allow loading memory it should 
not into cache, then perhaps not a problem.


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David Froble                       Tel: 724-529-0450
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