Massive CPU Security Flaws Revealed

Maybe it means that Intel trusts Chinese companies more than it trusts the US government. Can you blame them?

Yes, but they are also headquartered in the US, and know that the capricious leaders could very likely do something stupid in response.

I mean a very reasonable response to expect in that situation would be to put a rule in place that all government computer purchases use AMD chips now. Both because reduced Meltdown vulnerability, and also because of this action.

Granted we also know that, in the past, companies have buried vulnerabilities at the governments request so… fair play I guess?

The cynical part of me has been thinking exactly this.

Presumably the US Government already knew…

This is a very likely explanation, too.

http://www.securityweek.com/microsoft-disables-spectre-mitigations-due-instability

What do they mean by Chinese companies? Acer, Asus, MSI, etc?

The only two I saw mentioned are Lenovo and Alibaba. In the case of Alibaba, it seems to dubious to call it the Chinese government. Certainly, Jack Ma pays whatever bribes are necessary to do business in China. In the case of Lenovo, I’m sure they are one of Intel’s biggest customers.

I think they should have notified CERT.

They should have notified me. They have my number.

yeah I got the random reboot problem with the spectre/meltdown patch, and I have Skylake not AMD chip. It isn’t happening when I’m actively working on the machine, but sometimes when I’m away for a while it just rebooted by itself. So don’t leave things unsaved when you are away.

And

I doubt it’s been much fun to be a designer at Intel since this first came to light. At least it won’t affect fabrication much, if at all.

So my i5 2500k is SOL

The best part about this? If you have an older, more affected computer, you’re probably not getting legitimate fixes (for example, I’ve seen nothing from my motherboard manufacturer regarding any BIOS changes). At the same time, you cannot really intelligently go buy a new computer to replace it, since all existing chips apparently have this issue, and you would have the pleasure of buying something knowing that you’ll be taking a performance hit (if they can really even fix it without physical changes to the chip).

This sucks.

Yeah, I am just stuck hoping I don’t get hit.

I’m in the same boat. My desktop still seems to play the games I want at reasonable FPS, but it’s old as all hell (I7-920 that is OC’d to 3.6Ghz.) I’m restricting any important internet use where I enter in passwords, etc to my macbook pro or ipad, which can actually get fixes.

Given the state of GPUs, RAM, etc all having elevated prices, along with the need for an architecture fix, it just makes sense to sit and wait, then maybe buy a whole system as soon as the architecture fixes are done.

Yeah. I’ve decided this isn’t worth me losing my hair over. I check in once in awhile to see if things are patched or what’s happening with patching, but that’s it.

No new BIOS for my motherboard since 2016, sadly. :(

https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/A78ME/HelpDesk_BIOS/

Mine is out but I still haven’t installed it. I’m in no hurry to update my BIOS when Intel warns about unexpected reboots. I’m giving it a couple months.

Did patches go out? My home pc has asked me to restart / patch every day this week.