Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

It's mind-boggling to me that Qualcomm only guarantees 2-3 years of support for their chipset. Compare that to the PC processor space, how much does AMD/Intel provide? 10 years? More?

Somehow people seem to be running on 15 year-old Thinkpads without a problem, yet a $1000 phone apparently can't scrape by for more than three years due to vendor support?

View on HN

When Intel released the microcode updates for the MDS family of vulnerabilities, in May 2019, they declined to support my Westmere Xeon, which launched in May 2010.

So, not quite 10 years. Still a hell of a lot better than Qualcomm, though.

HP Z400 series got the microcode updates, so it was actually up to your vendor.

Hmm, don't think so. Vendors cannot create CPU microcode, Intel has to do that. And the relevant Intel document[1] clearly stated that they weren't going to do that.

The HP400 specs I found only list Bloomfield processors[2], not Westmere. Perhaps that is the source of your confusion?

1- https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents...

2- https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c01709672

X5690 (Westmere) works well in Z400. Here’s another article specifying the BIOS update:

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/new-microcode-for...

Jesus, what a pain. Why the hell do you need to wait for your proprietary OS vendor or BIOS vendor to update anything? On Linux the kernel does that for you, just configure your bootloader to point the kernel to a microcode image and that's it. Why can't windows do the same?

You only really need the "early" microcode loading procedure (the one where you pass it in the bootloader) if you have a microcode problem that is so broken the system won't boot with it unfixed (...or you're toggling feature bits off and the kernel will break if you originally booted with those bits and then they go missing - e.g. the broken TSX implementations on Haswell/Broadwell).

Otherwise, just loading the microcode update once you get into the running OS is fine. I've never actually had a system that needed to use the former, but I've certainly used the latter.

Microsoft does release microcode updates for windows, here's an example: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/kb4494454-intel-mi...

That's a Meltdown and Spectre update from 2018. I'm talking about Microarchitectural Data Sampling, from 2019.

That got me thinking, why aren't Dell, HP, Lenovo etc selling "enterprise" Android phones? They could get probably pretty good margins on basic devices if they'd have good well-defined support periods. Bonus points for good MDM compatibility and various silly standard compliances that nobody cares about. Just being able to do purchases from same supplier as workstations seems like a major benefit for IT depts. They could probably do some bundle deals ("buy/lease workstation and get phone for free").

Because most IT departments now get the best of both worlds. They won't pay for phones for employees but still insist employees install their spyware to "byod".

Long term support for client side machine isn't a requirement for enterprises. Most companies typically refresh laptops after 3-5 years.

3-5 years is long-term for a phone.

Samsung has enterprise versions of some phones/tablets with 5 year security updates

Minus the bundle deals, it sounds like you're describing iPhone.

>yet a $1000 phone apparently can't scrape by for more than three years due to vendor support

The OEMs came up with a simple solution. Make batteries non-replaceable so that given the limited charge/discharge cycle life of a Li-ion the phone becomes almost useless after 2-3 years anyway.

There’s something else to this story people don’t talk about: write endurance of nand. Phone performance degradation over time can be explained by a combination of (in decreasing outlandishness) TGMLC, nand wearing out, throttling due to battery peak current being lower, and some secret throttling. I haven’t seen nand performance over time discussed or tested.

Replaceable batteries might be moot if after two batteries the device was unbearably slow. Consumers would still replace their phones within a few years.

Whule I also hate the status quo, the batteries can still be replaced, in the same way that a car's exhaust can be replaced, you just need to have the tools and skills" or pay a repairshop to do it for you.

If the phone still had years of milage, its worth doing

>Compare that to the PC processor space, how much does AMD/Intel provide? 10 years? More?

They don't "provide" anything. It's the software (eg. linux/windows) that's providing backwards compatible support. Vendor support for pc hardware lasts a few years at most.

Well, Intel's employees are fixing Intel drivers for Intel hardware released >15 years ago on the Linux Kernel main repository, among other trees such as the Mesa project. So yes they are providing support. Other companies do that too.

Amd and Intel CPUs are still 100% backwards compatable with 40 year old chips. Not just their own chips but also nearly all the features of their competitor's chip too.

>Amd and Intel CPUs are still 100% backwards compatable with 40 year old chips

The CPUs might be, but the chipset drivers definitely aren't. You'll have a hard time booting windows 95 on a ryzen system, for instance. Hell, ryzen doesn't officially support windows 7. Still, I get your point, standardization in the PC space (mainly stemming from the "IBM compatible" standard) has made backwards/forwards compatibility much easier.

True, but old hardware can run windows 10, or modern Linux just fine.

Windows and Linux (and others) seem to hold the policy of drivers for old hardware being maintained and supported seemingly indefinitely. This work isn’t free, but there’s no reason Qualcomm and Samsung and others couldn’t do the same.

Somewhat controversially at the time, Kaby Lake from Intel dropped Windows 7 support: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/skyla...

What anybody wants is the other way around though. If you want to run Windows 95 on modern hardware you run it in a VM; running it on bare metal isn't that interesting.

And the current versions of various Linux distributions do run on 25+ year old PC hardware, if you really want to.

I am not sure about win95, but applications compiled 15 years ago still run on windows 10. That's stability.

They provide microcode updates.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com