Intel processors have a problem with memory mapping

[John T Smith]

This is WAY too technical for me to understand

What’s behind the Intel design flaw forcing numerous patches? | Ars Technica

[cvid01]

Basically, my reference is the same: Are Intel chips at risk? Is this real?

Like you, I am not knowledgeable enough to understand what is happening, but it appears certain types of Intel chip memories are at risk and can be hacked. There's supposed to be a Windows fix next Tuesday.

[John T Smith]

Let's just hope that the Windows patch doesn't do what I read in the article I found... slow operations as much as 50%

[John T Smith]

Meltdown, Spectre: Understanding Intel, AMD, ARM Chip Flaws | Fortune

Everyone is working on operating system patches to work around the hardware flaw... this article says as much as a 30% slowdown

[cvid01]

There may be some hope:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/4/16851132/meltdown-spectre-google-cpu-patch-performance-slowdown

[John T Smith]

As well as comments from the first author of Linux, this article mentions that Intel is already being sued

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[getho]

January 2018 patch applied yesterday - windows 10.  Editing today: 4k footage with no effects will not play back in realtime.

I'd love it if someone could do some proper metrics

[thomask49286771]

I'm on a Mac. Before security update, no problems editing Sony 4K footage with LUTs and effects. After, render times almost doubled. Real time playback was horrible. Ended up having to transcode everything because it became impossible to work. This is absolutely killing me.

[John T Smith]

Since this is a "baked in" flaw in the chips, it will take a redesign by the chip makers... so far, I have not seen any articles discussion how long it will take for new chips to be issued without the design flaw

When that does happen, it MAY also mean a new motherboard will be required

I don't know how much the chip designers are paid... but they need to have their pay cut over this

[KeelerJ]

Would this be a bad time to purchase a new computer for use with Adobe software -- should I be waiting to see how this plays out?

[John T Smith]

I have NO idea when Intel (or Amd) will come out with new chips that don't have the hardware flaw

Microsoft tests show Spectre patches drag down performance on older PCs | PCWorld

[Trevor.Dennis]

Toms put up two articles on the issue today.

One said older chips are suffering the greatest performance loss from the patches, which is a double gut punch as they are going to have the least performance headway in the first place.

Meltdown, Spectre Patch Is Making Some Old AMD PCs Unbootable

The other is worse saying that older AMD based systems might not even be able to boot after installing the patches.  I'm now waiting for my wife's ten year old Q9550 system to crash and burn. 

Meltdown, Spectre Patch Is Making Some Old AMD PCs Unbootable

[John T Smith]

Two articles?

Both links you posted go to the same article

[getho]

from: ars technica (Here’s how, and why, the Spectre and Meltdown patches will hurt performance | Ars Technica )

The overhead of a few percent assumes that workloads are standard desktop workloads; browsers, games, productivity applications, and so on. These workloads don't actually call into the kernel very often, spending most of their time in the application itself (or idle, waiting for the person at the keyboard to actually do something). Tasks that use the disk or network a lot will see rather more overhead. This is very visible in TechSpot's benchmarks. Compute-intensive workloads such as Geekbench and Cinebench show no meaningful change at all. Nor do a wide range of games.

But fire up a disk benchmark and the story is rather different. Both CrystalDiskMark and ATTO Disk Benchmark show some significant performance drop-offs under high levels of disk activity, with data transfer rates declining by as much as 30 percent. That's because these benchmarks do virtually nothing other than issue back-to-back calls into the kernel.

Phoronix found similar results in Linux: around a 12-percent drop in an I/O intensive benchmark such as the PostgreSQL database's pgbench but negligible differences in compute-intensive workloads such as video encoding or software compilation.

[Alan_Craven]

Had to apply this update manually as it has not showed up in Windows update in any of my four Intel Windows systems.  The updater ran smoothly and was remarkably quick.

A 4k timeline plays back as before, complete with effects.  It still shows as yellow.

Could it be because my media is on a very fast 6x1TB SSD RAID 3 with an 8 core i7, so I have more performance than the minimum required?

[getho]

yep