Intel has announced it is releasing the first series of Xeon processors under the name cascade lake in the second half of this year. The new processors will be hardware protected against the second va... Intel Cascade Lake Processors To Get Hardware Protections Against Spectre
Now I'm curious if they'll be able to push the rudimentary 5% improvement even though their patches cost them 5% of power right now. Upgrade to get last year's performance at the time when last year's CPU was released doesn't sound very tempting at all...
How about Meltdown? Can it be fixed via hardware without needing firmware level protection or would that need redesigning the architecture? Not implying anything, just curious.
I love how "we're fixing our broken crap" turns into "it's protected against" in marketing. It's like shipping a car that randomly explodes, and then in the new model you're saying "we're so awesome, the new car is even better than the old one, it's protected against randomly exploding."
Yeah, nothing has changed my opinion about Intel as much as how they treated the whole Meltdown / Spectre topic, along with their lackluster support combined with that all too clearly noobish PR along...
And of course the "NEW" cpus will have this protection built-in, so run out and grab you one. I am still hopeful for a proper fix for my 4790k.
Why are all of the comments here negative while all of the comments in the thread where AMD announced the same thing (they are fixing it in their next cpu uarch release) positive?
A proper fix is updated hardware, which clearly is not something they can do for old CPUs. Fixed microcode is available for the 4790k already, so either wait for your BIOS to get an update, or Microsoft to include the Microcode in their update (they only do Skylake to Coffee Lake so far, but plan to extend the update to include many more).
Because people favour the underdog. And to be honest, Intel lost lots of it's credibility with the whole Spectre Meltdown thing and how they treated it.... I'm quite upset with them too.
When Intel downplays quite serious flaw (no admin rights needed to gain protected information of other processes). And does it 6 months after they get awareness of it, It does not give good PR. Especially since they did not deliver fixes withing those 6 months and after public got informed most of their clients are still waiting. (9 months gone and counting) On other hand, you have Day-1 release of AMD's flaws with clearly malicious intent. And those Flaws are blown out of proportion. (Needs admin rights to do Sh*t which is pretty complicated to pull out and needs different development of hack for each specific MB it is supposed to hack. => High failure rate, more likely bricked Mobo than successful infection of BIOS.) Secondly they demonstrated that they did modify string in BIOS which booted. Sorry, people do that daily. They did not demonstrate ability to run custom code. I mean, people modified/removed parts of intel's IME firmware. That means they successfully pulled very thing those guys blamed AMD for having somewhat possible. But in contrast did not show that they were able to do it. So, why the hell would someone be kind to intel and bash AMD at same time? If I would like to bash AMD, I would have to declare war on intel to keep it proportional.