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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

IMO it is worth noting that the “turbo mode,” as you call it, seems to be an overlock that some motherboards do by default. Not the stock boost frequencies.

The hyperthread and c-state stuff, eh, if you want to run code that might be a virus you will have to limit your system. I dunno. It would be a shame if we lost the ability to ignore that advice. Most desktops are single-user after all.

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Remember that you run a lot of untrusted code on your single-user desktop through Javascript on websites. Javascript can do all those side channel attacks like Spectre and Meltdown.

There are almost certainly unmitigated Spectre-style bugs hiding in modern hardware. People who don’t block JavaScript by default are impossible to protect anyway.

Maybe you do, but some of us use NoScript[0] and whitelist sites we trust.

I'm not affiliated with NoScript. I just think it's insane that we run oodles of code to display web pages.

[0] https://noscript.net/

Using no-script made me realize how unchained the Internet has become. Sites with upwards of 15 different domains all running whatever JS they want on your machine. Totally insane.

turbo boost is an advertised feature of the chip

these chips that have been specially binned because they are supposedly stable at those frequencies (within an envelope set by intel)

if intel can't get it to work they shouldn't be selling these chips at all

Unless I misread the blog post, there doesn’t seem to be any issue with the stock turbo behavior.

Provided enough cooling, a chip that can boost to its turbo frequency for a few seconds should also run stably at that frequency indefinitely. Nowadays these boost clocks are so high that there is often not much gained by pushing any further.

> The hyperthread and c-state stuff, eh, if you want to run code that might be a virus you will have to limit your system.

So, you are trusting all web pages you view? Because these are unknown code running on your box which probably has some beefy private data.

I know some people browse the web while gaming, but I don't. For the gaming use case, I legit want a toggle that says "yes, all the code I'm running is trusted, now please prioritize maximum performance at all costs." For all I care this mode can cut the network connection since I don't do multiplayer.

I imagine people doing e.g. heavy number crunching might want something similar.

I run noscript and try to be selective about which pages I enable.

Intel should police their own ecosystem.

They have, in the past. People (including posters here) absolutely freaked out about clock-locked processors and screamed about the needless product differentiation of selling "K" CPUs at a premium.

People want to overclock. Gamers want to see big numbers. If gamers don't do it their motherboard vendors will. It's not a market over which Intel is going to have much control, really.

Note that you don't, in general, see this kind of silly edgelord clocking in the laptop segments.

Overclocking is ok.

Out of the box default overclocking is not, this aspect should be policed.

FWIW, there's no evidence that this is an "out of the box default" configuration on any of this hardware. Almost certainly these are users who clicked on the "Mega Super Optimizzzz!!!" button in their BIOS settings. And again, overclocking support on gaming motherboards is a feature that consumers want, and will pay for. So of course the vendors are going to provide it.

Oodle maintainer here, we had two people that hit the issue offer to run some experiments for us. Neither were doing any overclocking before and both tried numerous things including resetting to BIOS defaults and also updating their BIOS (there was a known [to Intel] issue affecting some ASUS boards that had been fixed in a BIOS update in spring of 2023, and we were asked to rule it out.)

This issue doesn't affect every such machine, but both people affected by the issue that consented to run tests for us still had the issue reproduce after flashing BIOS to current and with BIOS default settings for absolutely everything.

Among the settings enabled by default on some boards: current limit set to 511 amps (...wat), long duration power limit set to 350W (Intel spec: 125W), short duration power limit also set to 350W (Intel spec: 253W), "MultiCore Enhancement" which is extra clock boosting past what the CPUs do themselves set to "Auto" not "Off", and some others.

Why does this reminds me in this big, extremely profitable company that made something every American needs in a while, which seems to have abandoned all sanity in their processes? Looks like Intel and Boeing are on a similar path....

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