AMDs Mark Papermaster, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer issued some new info in a security bulletin regarding Spectre. AMD is deploying mitigations and resources for AMD processor... AMD Spectre Mitigation Update
That's a bit surprising they went all the way back to Bulldozer. Heh... it'd be a little funny to see the performance loss that may have taken from this. The last thing that architecture needs is something else slowing it down.
really will be interesting to see if ASUS updates the Bios for my Crosshair V formula Z motherboard for my AMD FX 8350 last bios update i think was 2015/05/07 version 2201
My poor ol Fx 8320e is already slower then a dead horse hehe. I do not care it is time to upgrade soon anyway.
Isn't this only an OS update? I otherwise don't see how AMD could patch these older CPUs. If there are BIOS updates, even if my 8-year-old board gets one, I couldn't get it anyway. My board was never meant to run the FX series, but I'm using a beta BIOS that lets me do so, and this BIOS was never officially released by Gigabyte. Seeing as you live in a state with modestly cold winters, you should do with it that I did with my FX-6300: turn it into a "productive radiator". Overclock it high, run BOINC on it, and use it to warm up a room or two in your home. I personally have electric heat, and my electric bill didn't really change at all from previous years during the winter. It's easy to sleep when your home is warm due to a machine (that otherwise would be collecting dust or end up in a scrap heap) that's helping to find cures for cancer and other diseases. So don't retire it, repurpose it! Thanks to my motherboard being old enough to have ATA, I'm using some ancient 40GB drive to boot from. It's plenty of storage when you're just running 1 program.
Isn't it funny that computer hardware is a much more efficient heat generator than those electric heaters?
Yes, though once you look deeper into it, there's not really another way to look at it. Just about every electrical or mechanical engineer will tell you that any heat generated is wasted energy (though to my understanding, it is physically impossible to have any productive output with 0% energy loss). That being said, electric heaters are, in principle, 100% wasted energy. They only create heat with no other functional purpose. Literally every other electronic device is more efficient than them. EDIT: That being said, a computer that consumes 500W of energy will output roughly the same amount of heat as a 500W electric heater.
