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Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

I noticed yesterday's articles about Intel's upcoming unusually large release of security mitigations. Under serious competitive threat for the first time in a while, I'm curious if Intel may have slowed the release of some mitigations to land after this round of comparison benchmarks.

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That's an interesting idea I didn't consider.

edit: Below is wrong, see author of article's reply below for why. Preserving for record.

They have been holding back review samples of their latest i9s so reviewers wouldn't do head-to-heads with this new 3950X (but people have anyway, and the 3950X crushes the i9). See Linus Tech Tip's review of the 3950X this morning for citation.

The new 18-core i9-10980XE isn't out yet, and review embargoes haven't been lifted. We know it's a slightly clock bumped version of the i9-9980XE, which was included in the AnandTech review and not the Linus review.

Linus tested the 8-core i9-9900KS, which came out a few weeks ago, and those results are also in the link which is the title to this thread.

Ian,

What are your thoughts on the question of whether Intel may be strategically timing releases of some mitigations to favor their performance in review benchmarks?

This decision was likely made from a different department, and just lucked out that it was the day before an AMD launch. If Intel wanted to delay it specifically to appear for better benchmarks, they would have waited until after Cascade Lake-X benchmarks were out. It's meant to be being launched later this month.

Yet the main question remain if the benchmark were done with the latest mitigation (and version of the microcode) or without...

No, I didn't have time to run 30hr+ of tests on 7-10 Intel CPUs with only 24 hours notice from the announcement yesterday

That would be responsible to mention in the review, with a promise to publish new comparisons whenever new mitigations are released.

Intel's security flaws pushed our LCRs up at least two years and cost us extra in over-provisioning to account for real and potential performance loss. If Intel isn't actually hardware mitigating (as in, making no effort to redesign their chips with security in mind and instead playing whack a mole with vulnerabilities as they're discovered) and reviewers are not highlighting and disclosing this, they're lying by omission.

I'm not being rude, but don't give Intel a pass here because of any prior fondness you might have held for them. Every benchmark of an Intel CPU you've ever published was made false by their negligence. That's a big, confusing problem for consumers, and they rely on your clarity and diligence to bring it to their attention and correct.

How much does performance degrade an average year for Intel and AMD? To a consumer a desktop CPU is an investment lasting for 3-8 years. Attempting to factor in predicted degradation of performance results based on history would be interesting and I think the right thing to do.

Those results are not valid anymore.

Better phrased: won't be valid for long, if the security patches are released ;)

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/1123580-intel-could-tak...

For those of you without really good search engines :) (Contains link to YouTube video review.)

Intel has been cheating their single core performance against AMD for many years, thanks to predictive and insecure algorithms.

Reality is just catching up, AMD is already number one for a long time. Intell's cheating just didn't make it clear.

I've waited for a year to express my opinion, before I could see any evidence.

The time has come that AMD is even beating Intell's fake single core performance, so slowly we will see all of Intell's shit appear. There is no point in hiding it anymore for the consumer/gaming market, if they are not nr 1 in single core. Not if they lose trust of their business clients and profitable server market.

All those gamers that bought Intel for single core performance and OEM's that stick to Intell because of monopolies betted on the wrong horse.

https://twitter.com/damageboy/status/1194751035136450560?s=1...

This feels "nice", although I'm affected to :(

Waiting for decent AMD laptops...

Ps. Long AMD, ever since Spectre and meltdown.

Do remember that Meltdown and Spectre affected literally everyone else in the industry (including POWER, ARM, and SPARC) and it's only by chance that AMD's branch predictor happens to be relatively difficult to train to follow a predictable path (which is a necessary condition for some of these exploits). Intel isn't cheating any more than anyone else, AMD got lucky.

Cascade Lake and the latest Coffee Lake (and Comet Lake) steppings have hardware mitigations for all the previously known exploits (although there is a new batch) including some for which AMD still requires software mitigations themselves (Spectre V2).

So, AMD got lucky 218 times?

https://windowsreport.com/amd-intel-security-vulnerabilities...

Most of those exploits are software/driver vulnerabilities, and AMD has plenty of their own. Like when Threadripper drivers installed an out-of-date web server running with SYSTEM privileges, or when a series of PSP and BIOS bugs let an attacker escalate from VM guest to control of the PSP and BIOS persistence. If you're not finding vulnerabilities in your software, you're not looking.

Intel is in a lot more verticals than AMD is - networking, storage, etc - and all of those get their own CVE number. But that's a more nuanced approach than "big number bad" isn't it?

Specifically, Intel is finding a lot because they're doing an enterprise-wide initiative to lock down their IPs. Is AMD making the same effort, or are there more vulnerabilities in those GPU drivers or in the chipset drivers that they're not looking for? After all, a year ago they were at the stage where they were installing an out-of-date Apache instance along with your motherboard drivers... doesn't sound like security is priority #1 for them.

Again, low number sounds good. But if you're not looking, it's actually not good.

And researchers are not looking on AMD much either. AMD is less than 5% of the server market right now, you get the big headlines from finding vulnerabilities in Intel now, not AMD. Give it another 5 years and there will be more scrutiny on AMD's hardware/software.

> Specifically, Intel is finding a lot because they're doing an enterprise-wide initiative to lock down their IPs.

Do they now? Why may that be? Not voluntarily i guess, with all the mess, others have found first, they fear losing ground, and shareholders blood thirst.

Last I read AMD processors aren't affected by the Meltdown bug. And the overall performance hit was 9x as large for Intel.

However, if that’s wrong I would love to read about it.

Like I said, AMD was unique on Meltdown in that their branch predictor uses a neural-net based approach that is difficult to train to follow a specific path. It affected everyone else in the industry - Intel, IBM, ARM, Oracle, everyone.

I think you are confusing Meltdown with Spectre V2.

Isn't the reason that AMD isn't affected, that they don't prefetch / cache pages before checking instruction's access privileges?

So researchers aren't checking AMD.

A bit later, AMD was uniquely not affected. But they were investigated, yes?

Seems like you like Intel more than AMD.

No problems with that, I'm the other way around :)

If that’s what you meant then saying ‘Meltdown and Spectre affected literally everyone in the industry’ was literally false. Perhaps you could say almost everyone else in the industry in the future.

As to being lucky, I have no idea what their internal process is or what they considered. But luck seems like an odd way to talk about such things.

Well, maybe. Probably so, in part, but intel makes large dies rather than AMD's style of multiple smaller dies, which means signals have less far to go (and possibly don't have to be boosted to get between mini-dies).

Perhaps someone who knows about this stuff can comment.

Edit: the mini-dies are chiplets/CCDs. Couldn't remember the name.

As I understood, they had to much hick-ups going to smaller dies because of internal issues.

They plan to recover in the end of 2020, while temporarily leaving the market open for AMD. Accepting that made them willing to fix their security issues, which decrease performance.

Since they have no product line in response to AMD for now, that was not an easy call for sure.

>Ps. Long AMD

So you recommend to buy AMD stock now? Or TSMC? Or is it already too late for that? The share price already went up from 28 to 38 since October

AMD has been overbought by brand fanboys/"amateur investors" egging each other on (see: r/AMD_Stock) and is now effectively pricing in a massive amount of expected future growth. Probably decades worth.

For context: Intel currently has a P/E ratio of 13.57, which is 70th percentile of tech stocks. AMD currently has a P/E ratio of 201.89, which is 5th percentile of tech stocks.

https://www.gurufocus.com/term/pettm/intc/PE-Ratiottm

AMD as a company has great potential in the long term, but still barely makes any money today. Like, AMD is hoping to double their server marketshare (only part of the company) by the end of 2020... which will take them to... almost 10% of the market. It's real easy to make big percentage gains when you have 0% share of the market. The AMD of 2016 had nowhere else to go but up.

Server, desktop, laptop and video cards.

Lots of room if they break Intel's monopoly though.

Intel had 16 billion revenue in 2018 and AMD "profits" from TSMC and their clients ( eg. Apple, Nvidia,... )

In the server market, it seems that they are partially breaking Intel's monopoly. Today's news in Intel won't change that perspective. P/e is also a bad ratio if a company invests a lot.

But yeah, a lot of hype on the stock.

Intel is keep getting hit hard though. Benchmarks, security issues, delays, failing at 7-10nm. They are currently still holding the monopoly though.

Fyi, Amazon's P/e was even 1.100 at a time. P/e is not the best indicator for a company investing/researching and selling in lower prices. The AMD product line-up proves that they are investing a lot.

What I see lately is that AMD is raising prices. This seems like a good indicator of how they are positioning themselves versus the market.

Your bias is showing with your "brand fanboys/amateur investors" slurs.

Their P/E is an irrelevant measure for AMD's market value, as it was for AMZN when they were aiming for 0 profit and re-invest everything towards growth. They're obviously interested in maximizing R&D and selling their chips at very competitive pricing over profit which currently offers much better value over Intel's chips.

AMD only made 120M in profit last quarter on 1.8B revenue up 9% YoY, Intel made 6B profit down 6% YoY. How much more likely is AMD to double their profits to 240M then Intel is to 12B? If the market perception of AMD's chip superiority and OEM vendors start preferring AMD over Intel it could happen within the very near future, not decades out.

Amazon only recently started to turn on profits after achieving dominance in a number of markets, I don't expect AMD to focus on profits until they're able to get much higher market penetration so I expect their focus is going to continue to be on R&D and low margins. So their P/E will remain high along with their potential for future growth.

I won't recommend anything. The p/e is too bad to recommend it, Warren Buffet would think I'm a fool :p

But I do think that AMD has enough space too grow the next year:

- servers

- laptops

- desktops ( OEM )

And I'm curious if their video card line-up will be as good as their CPU line-up.

Intel had 16 billion revenue in 2018. My guess is they will take a lot of that the coming years.

Probably, since they have known it for 6 months ( according to the researchers)

I suppose, if you get this bad in the news and excepting it.

This is kinda weird: https://twitter.com/gchip/status/1187519015544967168

In a similar vein, some local supermarket catalog showed half laptops based on ryzen, the only intel I saw were ultra cheap atom x5.

Wow, I didn't expect that. Laptops were the only market Intel was still strong, still dominated. Having brought an rx5700 XT recently, the power usage has been just as impressive as the performance. AMD will have some very nice products when they start putting mini RX5000s in their CPUs. Decent performance without discrete GPUs is a real possibility. (Just need add some HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) to the mix and things will get rather interesting!)

I bought an RX 5700 XT almost immediately after launch, and I can't say that I've had had much luck with RDNA/Navi. I experienced freezes/crashes in Windows 10 while gaming, and the card's hot, loud, and still unsupported by ROCm for compute on Linux. There are rumours that ROCm won't ever support this generation of Navi and is waiting on Arcturus[1]. The drivers still aren't there and support is limited outside of some gaming use. Reviews also appear relatively mixed on Amazon.

That said, even though perf-per-watt isn't great and that's usually my #1 concern, I still buy primarily AMD GPUs and suffer with the issues, as the NV CUDA/DL monopoly needs a counterweight. I'm just sitting on Vega until Arcturus.

[1] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Radeon-R...

>RX5700XT almost immediately after launch

So a reference card, which came with an horrendous, insufficient cooling solution.

The experience has been much better for those that bought the custom cards (such as sapphire pulse/nitro) later. They also got far more mature drivers to start with.

I would agree on bad cooling on reference cards. But regarding drivers and general I would not expect a lot of difference between all those cards.

> There are rumours that ROCm won't ever support this generation of Navi and is waiting on Arcturus[1].

I think you're misinterpreting that bit. Arcturus refers to an upcoming product based on their older, pre-Navi Vega microarchitecture. It seems Vega may be a more compute-oriented microarchitecture while Navi is more graphics/gaming-oriented and thus in the near term they are still developing more compute-oriented products based on the Vega microarchitecture. But that doesn't mean they have no plans to ever bring Navi support to ROCm, it just means that it takes less work and has more short-term payoff to add support for another Vega-based product.

I'm expecting decent AMD laptops next quarter, I'm not seeing decent ones now, yet. It's one of the few markets that "is in progress", so it seems.

Mostly because of power consumption, fyi.

You will probably still see mostly intel in expensive (>1000€) gaming laptop but everything else the power consumption of AMD new chips alone should give them the reign until intel can react.

Until AMD releases stable drivers and gains market share, we'll just sit on the porch and buy cheap Intel.

Fleet of BSODing machines because we decided to buy workstation graphics from AMD, I thought they would have figured out drivers by now.

The knee jerk reaction to go and because they finally got closer to closing the gap with Intel is funny to watch but not very forward thinking.

Uhh, have had no problem with the AMD integrated graphics on the twenty or so 2400G I have acquired in the past 6 months. Are you talking Linux ? On windows it works great.

Or if you're talking about dedicated graphics and not integrated, then I don't see how it relates to the subject at hand, their CPUs.

... Until Apple leave Intel. It’s been the eternal rumour but it doesn’t show any sign of dying.

My comment talks about specialized gaming laptop series (MSI G-series, ASUS Republic Of Gamers, HP Omen, Acer Predator).

Well, Apple has never been about performance/$ though.

It's the "total package" ;)

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