Goodbye Gaming, Or Why I'm Suing Intel

[twowolves80]

https://www.cnet.com/news/chips-exploit-meltdown-spectre-security-flaws-afflict-arm-phones-and-intel-pcs/

 

Bravo! Intel just announced they uncovered a serious security flaw that will slow PCs (dependent upon workload, which means gamers/modders are f*ked) by as much as 30-50%. I dunno know about the rest of you, but I smell a class-action lawsuit resulting from this because in order to address the loss of speed, especially considering that this flaw is a physical one that has been hard-baked into the chips for the last ten years, the only advice from Intel is "users may need to upgrade their RAM and/or mobo."

 

Congrats, Intel, you just pulled a Bethesda. Yeah, the flaw was something you didn't know about, but nonetheless, you just created a great deal of animosity towards you from PC enthusiasts who are now going to consider AMD. You f*king morons. You just lost an entire generation to AMD. Just like Bethesda and their sh*tty Creation Club to sell crappy MMO-style skins that no one will ever see in your Skyrim game because it's not an MMORPG.

 

I'm not updating the software hotfix; Intel can sod off, I'll take my risks considering no one has ever used this flaw before. I don't have $800 to drop on a new CPU, mobo and RAM.

 

Any class-action lawsuit that comes up as a result of this for delivering (for the last ten years, no less) a product so ridiculously flawed that there's no way to fix it on the hardware level I'll be signing. This is begging the FTC to get involved, and I hope they do.

 

Enjoy your 2010-era gaming as the already-glitchy alpha of SKSE64 is sure to take kindly to this.

Edited January 4, 2018 by twowolves80

[TheMastersSon]

This isn't a manufacturing flaw. These chips are performing exactly as they're designed and supposed to. So no grounds for legal action. The vulnerability is due to their speculative execution feature, which predicts the next instructions for a cpu. It's not a manufacturing issue, it's a design limitation. So the "fix" is to simply disable speculative execution.

 

Chip and computer manufacturers cannot be sued for hardware design limitations, e.g. the USB security problem from years ago (which is an infinitely larger security hole in PCs, and was the primary reason for the USB 3.1 Gen 2 hardware update) didn't result in lawsuits against those who designed the earlier and inferior USB standards, or sold USB products that were based on those standards.

 

Nothing is 100% bulletproof, and yet again we're reminded that "computer security" is an oxymoron regardless of anyone's claims. Personally I agree with you: I'll continue taking my chances and enjoying the 30-50% performance gains. An outside hacker shouldn't even get this far on a properly protected system.

Edited January 4, 2018 by TheMastersSon

[JimboUK]

Games are largely GPU dependant these days so the hit might not be that great.

[TheMastersSon]

True but players of older game titles that use older engines (especially Gamebryo, Oblivion etc) will take between more and much more of a hit. I only hope they roll out the fixes as optional updates not a mandatory new OS revision. If you're wondering what the difference is, try e.g. entirely disabling Data Execution Prevention in Windows. The two and only two options are to enable it for all files, or only for Windows system files. The kernel doesn't understand "entirely disable" for DEP. Likewise an OS is free to either entirely enable or disable speculative execution. I don't think partial enabling is an option (like DEP) because nobody has yet suggested it for a possible fix. Edited January 4, 2018 by TheMastersSon

[twowolves80]

I didn't buy an i7-4790K because I was saying, "Oh, my God! I've got to have a four-hundred dollar CPU that only clocks at two-point-eight gigahertz!" No, I bought the damned CPU because it was 4.0, period.

 

If the effective clock is now going to be reduced to 2.8, I'm suing. That is unacceptable. I hope the FTC sues their ass, too. Especially as they haven't offered a way to disable their "patching," which is more akin to the crap Apple pulled with their OS and reducing "spikes" to save battery life. It's false advertising after the fact. We're not talking about two or three-tenths of a point, we're talking about a 30% reduction. That's 1.2GHZ on a 4.0GHz proc.

 

SKSE is heavily dependent upon the kernel working just so, so I can only imagine the nightmare this is going to cause.

 

My kingdom to the first person to come up with a way to block Intel's patching permanently. They have just lost all credibility in my eyes, and I imagine those of a lot of other people, too, and that is why I said, they just lost an entire generation to AMD. And it will be a cold day in hell before I give Intel or AMD (as if they were ever a competitor in the first place) my money. It's high time for a third party chip maker to get into the game and break Intel's monopoly.

[TheMastersSon]

IMO you're overreacting at least at this point. For all we know maybe partial (more likely delayed) enabling of speculative execution is possible, in which case you'll still have your 4.0GHz. Maybe booting will occur at the slower and protected speed etc. Who the hell knows. Wait watch and learn like everybody else.

[JimboUK]

True but players of older game titles that use older engines (especially Gamebryo, Oblivion etc) will take between more and much more of a hit. I only hope they roll out the fixes as optional updates not a mandatory new OS revision. If you're wondering what the difference is, try e.g. entirely disabling Data Execution Prevention in Windows. The two and only two options are to enable it for all files, or only for Windows system files. The kernel doesn't understand "entirely disable" for DEP. Likewise an OS is free to either entirely enable or disable speculative execution. I don't think partial enabling is an option (like DEP) because nobody has yet suggested it for a possible fix.

 

Even with the older games the hit is likely to be minimal, I've checked the CPU usage on New Vegas and FO3 and the CPU is not be being pushed at all, my CPU is almost snoring as I'm playing. A 30 to 50 percent hit is very unlikely, figures I've seen suggest 30 percent at most and maybe even as low as 5 percent which wouldn't even be noticeable.

 

Edit: The patch is out and I have it, I tested New Vegas and Oblivion which are both CPU heavy and noticed no performance difference. (i7-6700k @ 4Ghz)