Wednesday, 3 January 2018
quote [ A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug. Other OSes will need an update, performance hits loom. ]
This could turn into a Volkswagen-level fuckup:
https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/19/intels-ceo-just-sold-a-lot-of-stock.aspx
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Affects pretty much all Intel CPUs going back a decade (Coffee Lake appears to be the only exception). MacOS will need a patch too, it's a hardware problem so I'm not sure why they called out Windows and Linux. This looks to be worse than the Pentium floating-point bug - there's no hardware fix, and the software fix will impose a 5-30% performance hit. And I just bought a new computer with a 10-core Xeon CPU. Think I'm going to keep it off the internet and avoid the patch, I need maximum horsepower.