FAO Intel users

[Mouse]

Do you have any idea - a guestimate, perhaps, of how long it will take for the boffins to sort it all out?

I read the link you gave, and I read ChickPea's link as well. I am (for better or worse) an artist. I think in colours, shapes and patterns. I find reading all that technical stuff really difficult to take in and understand the meaning. I can draw a really complicated tessellation for you without breaking a sweat, but I don't understand the implications of all this technical stuff at all.

[ChickPea]

Seems there's two exploits and AMD isn't completely in the clear either, as the second affects all current chips. Here's a NY Times article that isn't too technical. There's patches coming out already though, and the first exploit seems more likely to affect cloud computing operators, rather than home users. As for re-engineering entire computer chipsets, gulp......!!

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/0...JhdWSzln?amp=1

[waldronate]

Every CPU ever built has had errata (errors in implementation) and the impact of those errors has varied widely (everybody remembers the famous Pentium divide error and the complete collapse of civilization that it caused, right?). As the NY Times article above points out, these particular errors are most likely to be of interest to large-scale operators because of how they share physical hardware among customers. The threat to the common user is minimal. An Ars Technica article from earlier today points out that ARM processors (like the one in your phone) are likely also vulnerable, because patches for that problem are being produced for them. It will likely take much longer for the phone patches to make it out into the wild than for any Windows or Linux patch due to how vendors don't update their phones.

The other software errors in your system are far more likely to cause problems than any particular processor problem.

[Falconius]

The Pentium floating point bug was the end of the world! Lucky someone just hit the restart button and nothing happened. That didn't stop the world form ending with the Y2K bug though. Woe is us.

[Mark Oliva]

Today's news reports say that AMD processors also are affected.

[Mouse]

This is a quote directly from the New York Times article that ChickPea linked to above:

"The Meltdown flaw is specific to Intel, but Spectre is a flaw in design that has been used by many processor manufacturers for decades. It affects virtually all microprocessors on the market, including chips made by AMD that share Intel’s design and the many chips based on designs from ARM in Britain."

Quoted from "Researchers Discover Two Major Flaws in the World’s Computers", Written by Cade Metz and Nicole Perlroth, in the New York Times, 3 January 2018

Though I'm not great at interpreting technical jargon, there do appear to be two flaws involved, as ChickPea already noted above, and one of them affects many different chips, not just Intel, as I assume "...the many chips based on designs from ARM..." will also include several other makes of chip as well as ARM chips.

[egdcltd]

ARM chips are in almost every mobile device on the planet, not to mention being present in a whole host of other electronic devices.

[Redrobes]

It seems to me from reading a few docs that intel chips are the most at risk and AMD and ARM are less so with some of the attacks not working on them and some of the attacks require a non standard build settings of the kernel so thats unlikely. So all in all its kinda yeah this could be a bit of an issue but im not convinced at this stage that its catastrophic. You still need to run a user program on the local machine to try the attack and on some of the attacks you need very specific knowledge of the processes running.

Compared to the impending devastation of the intel ME when that gets fully decoded these issues will look like small potatoes.

[Mouse]

Just an update from BBC News.