Hacker News Reader

Comment by Macha | Hacker News Reader

Also worth noting that they're not patching it for 1st, 2nd or 3rd generation Core CPUs. I'm sure there's plenty of Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge CPUs in the wild, and it's not like you have an option to discontinue use of the Intel ME :(

View on HN

There's always me_cleaner. It's a bit of a pain and requires hardware access to run but better than being exposed to an unpatchable vuln. I encourage every hackspace to set up an ME removal station (I'm building one for EMF Camp this year, and will document it so others can easily replicate)

Please do! I would love to do this, but am far too much of a sissy to mess with SPI flash. I've subscribed to your RSS feed. Do drop any guides/artifacts in the Noisebridge IRC when you have them :)

Mitch will be at EMF, probably in a tent adjacent to mine. So I'll just ask him to bring the knowledge back to noisebridge.

Planned obsolescence of otherwise viable product implemented via a certain-to-be-exploited architecture (the ME) followed by strategic withholding of patches?

That's quite a conspiracy theory you got there. Things like these make people look at AMD again.

It doesn't have to have been a full-blown plan from years ago in order to be a viable strategy. Intel can choose planned obsolescence going forward today for selected products by not developing or releasing security patches.

The extent to which this particular strategic business option was discussed during the design phase of the ME is hard to know from the outside. Surely someone within Intel pointed out that the ME was inherently insecure, but as for all the consequences, who knows?

There are many ways to to planned obsolescence. I'm sure there is a way to just manufacture the chips such that they degrade in a few years.

Planned obsolescence through major security bugs doesn't sound very smart to me.

I don't get a vibe that Intel is enjoying this publicity or the presumed replace of those chips. My understanding is that AMD is quite competitive today in the data center.

The Intel C2xxx Chip was faulty and I wonder if there is more to this story. Like CPU degradation due to heat. Maybe the traces on the CPU just can't hold up to heat. The reason I say this is the top end C2750/C2758 seems to be more at risk then the C2338 dual core. This is unscientific just browsing forums. I think this is heat related.

Wasn't the C2xxx series also an expensive server SOC. Man these guys are fumbling.

[0]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/06/cisco_intel_decline...

My i7-2600 is still a beast (well, still gong strong anyway). They did the same thing with Meltdown/Spectre fixes.

Grandpa, it's time to upgrade.

Why? Because it's been longer than intel would like since parent gave them money?

If Intel has made currently processes ultra fast recently that wouldn't be an issue, but the Intel Core i7 2700 is actually not that slow. Roughly comparable, at least within 20%, of other 4 core + 4 HT Intel processors.

with an entry-level GPU and slow RAM that works with an i5-2500k, i can play every modern game i have tried on high.

Nothing about me opening a text editor, interpreting most code, or compiling the occasional thing require anywhere near that much power.

For the overwhelming majority, and i really mean overwhelming, there's really no progress or point to upgrading anything except the gpu in the past 7 years or so

in laptops, new stuff uses a LOT less power for the same speed, so there's that I guess.

I upgraded my 2500k last year (to a Ryzen system) and the extra cores are very nice sometimes but honestly the biggest improvement was the fact that I also went from 8GB RAM to 16GB. There were a couple of games that benefited substantially from faster memory (Rise of the Tomb Raider, Fallout 4) but generally not so much the actual CPU performance.

No real advancement after Sandy Bridge was made. Only incremental 10% with each gen. That means current gen is only 2x as fast when comparing the same lines (i7 to i7). If you can't make new things better, just gimp the old ones, like Spectre/Meltdown.

2 times faster would be quite good actually. Sadly we're barely at 50% faster per core, and that's including the usual 20-30% frequency bump on newer models. Pure IPC improvement is even lower, at maybe 2-5% per generation (~30% total at same frequency, 2nd gen vs. 7th gen).

Yeah, you could argue that doubling the core or thread count doubled performance in selected software but the reality is that for real world use, excluding specific corner cases, the improvement is hard to notice.

A reason to upgrade is to have a newer platform and the features that would bring, definitely not the CPU.

well ddr4 is a huge improvement

If you're memory-starved, yes. A typical quad core is not going to be memory-starved, and the effect is pretty mild compared to the effect of a GPU. Or for non-gaming, it either doesn't matter at all or is 90% about core count.

https://img.purch.com/r/711x457/aHR0cDovL21lZGlhLmJlc3RvZm1p...

My Ivy Bridge laptop uses twice the power as my Apollo Lake laptop.

Literally 2x.

Apollo is Atom, isn't it? So it's not apples to apples. I'm pretty sure there were sub 10W SoC for some years before Ivy bridge.

Yes, Apollo Lake is an Atom SoC. While I am doing simple web development, performance is about the same. Mostly lacking RAM versus older, Core platforms.

But all-up, Windows 10 at 6 Watts. Including the display, storage, the whole system — or so the performance counters on the battery tell me.

My Dell laptop doesn't have a way to activate it (Latitude) because Dell thought it was an paid feature. I am happy and safe.

Guilty, core i3 2120 and not planning on replacing anytime soon

Reply on news.ycombinator.com