Work on Kernel rewrites is being done since early November already - at least early Novembre. Intel must have known about this when they launched sales of the 8th generation chips in early Novembre. Pure gaming likely will not be too affected, if there is any effect at all. The more modern the CPU, the smaller the to be expected hit. 7th and 8th generaiton probnaly only will suffer losses in the low one digit range - and in according tasks being run. It is important to understand that the problem is a most important and dangerous one, it cannot be just ognored. It could compromise VM to VM communication, read out data from VMs, could compromise cloud computing. This is really an absolutely big, evil bad bug of the worst category. Its not just an annoyance. If Intel released 8th generation CPU while knowing it is affected by this as well, i am all for sueing them to hell and then all way back over it, like they do with Diesel-fraudsters in the car industry.
I apologize for my last reply to you, I probably rang your alarm and made you nervous too early. While your processor seems to be heavily affected in according tasks that are vulnerable to the porblem and need PTI, as a gaming rig your system is unlikely to suffer a perceivable damage in performance. Sorry if I made you jumping up.
Cannot say, I will see. Its not about whether the CPU is used in a task - it always is, in any task. Graphics boards under gaming conditionsseem to take no loss. But SSDs could lose some. Google delivers a statement saying that CPUs not just by Intel but also AMD and ARM are affected. https://security.googleblog.com/2018/01/todays-cpu-vulnerability-what-you-need.html
To drastically oversimplify... There is a bug in Intel processors dating back a decade, where applications potentially have access to things they should never have access to. Potentially allowing passwords, log in credentials, and anything else that is private to be revealed. Apparently this is a hardware bug, and cannot simply be fixed with a firmware update to the processors by Intel, and instead needs to have a workaround fix in every operating system to get around it, which would be why there is a potential performance loss. The specifics are far more complicated and take some understanding of how operating systems function, which is beyond me. But Im sure better explanations will come out once the embargo's discussing these attacks lift. Has it been exploited? Tough to say given that the people who would try to exploit it would be doing so silently and never discuss it, so it never gets fixed. Since this has apparently been a problem for ~10 yrs in every Intel processor... We would have heard about this before now if it had been happening. Apparently it had been discovered by a team of people who's purpose was to look for exploits, and then discussed in the proper channels to keep it silent until a fix was possible.
Thanks for the reply...by the sounds of the fix they may be closing off a section of the processor to eliminate the issue . Hope this fix doesn' t effect some of the games or tweaks I've done and goes smoothly. Edit. I read the report and man it sounds complicated. Someone really screwed the pooch here. Hopefully they will offer disounts on new chips etc.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16846540/intel-processor-security-flaw-bug-response https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16846784/microsoft-processor-bug-windows-10-fix Windows patches for ARM, AMD and Intel CPUs are now in the wild. In fact a whole armada of patches is reported by some admins to come in, outside the usual timeline of Microsoft. It also gets vrpeported by some people that if AV is not compatible with these patches, they will not install automatically. Woody Leonhard's well-known blog is at Defcon 2, so status and quality of these patches also currently is unknown and unconfirmed. Its all a damn nasty and confused mess. Currently. Companies start to point fingers at each other, maybe breaking communication embargos to save themselves.
Like they indicated already that this wouldn't have been(or shouldn't have ) been released unless there was a fix ready to be rolled out. Now the cyber criminals know what to look for.
Here's a link to the official information about the attacks from the people who discovered them. So, without any PR nonsense from companies trying to pass blame... https://meltdownattack.com/ edit: also similar information by Google's Project Zero team, who helped discover the exploits: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.html It's briefly summarized on that main page, and then there are also some academic papers detailing the much more in depth points. The academic papers likely wont make a whole lot of sense unless you are familiar with that sort of stuff to begin with. Basically, at this time Meltdown affects Intel processors going back a decade and is a hardware issue. Workaround fixes are incoming, and may decrease your system performance in certain scenarios. Gaming likely minimally affected, professional work loads such as cloud computing, virtual machines, etc will be more so affected. Might be a few generations before Intel redesigns their architecture to no longer have this issue. Spectre is the other attack that affects 'everything.' Intel, AMD, ARM (so, basically any smartphone of recent years). At this time, there is no outright fix for it since this is also a hardware issue, however it is much more difficult to exploit. Security updates are coming though to mitigate the potential problems from what I have read elsewhere. Likely will be a few generations before this will be weeded out on a hardware level. That's a hell of a lot of devices affected by these exploits.
The attacks exist already, they've just discovered them. Usually it is like this, there are the so-called "zero-day" exploits, these are unknown for the public yet and therefore those are great value for attackers, there are companies specializing in discovering these and sell them to criminal organizations. Once an exploit is discovered and becomes public, its value and success rate will decrease significantly so hackers will probably no longer use it.
Depends on the tasks running, but desktop users may have little reason to be too worried. Server centres however could be more heavily affected, seeing a noticable drop in net performance. Intel really got the artistic trick done to kick themselvves into their own family jewels. I want Intel getting sued deep, deep way down into a black hole for having released the 8th generation processors in Novembre although knowing since many months that they are affected by this mess. We are not talkign about an old production line being continued, but about opening a brandnew one of which they knew it is affected as well. The only option should hav ebeen to delay the release and to redesign the chips on hardware level. Unforgivable. Greedy bastards. I hope somebody is going to make them bleed seriously for this, like car makers bleed for the Diesel fraud.
Seriously it's abit late now for the warning, and I certainly wont trust anything MS/Intel send down the line to patch it now, and why the hell would you patch something and be happy with a performance loss, I think it's a bit of over the top scare mongering, I'm not saying it's not true but I wouldn't panic about it..