Hacker News Reader

Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little puzzled by the uproar given that all the oneline chatter seems to suggest nobody is using this. If this was AVX512 or something I could understand the give it back reaction...

View on HN

I think it's more the principle. CPU firmware upgrades are not supposed be used for things like this, and if it became normal to use them for removing features, it would just lead to people not updating the firmware at all, and that's not a good scenario for anyone.

Physical hardware products shouldn't lose features after launch. If this was a "mistaken" feature which they suggested it was they should have disabled it on future chips.

A lot of this has to do with segmenting the market into high-end and low-end products.

When they were the underdog to Intel, they gave away lots of premium features to beat Intel.

Since they got more popular, AMD has been taking away features, or not upgrading old tech, from their desktop/gaming CPUs: Their DDR5 interface is gimped, being slower than Intel now, and still limited to dual channel. Their chipset link is still PCIe 4x4 the same as two generations ago.

If you want these features now, you need a server product.

None of that is a good rationale for patching the firmware to retroactively remove things from devices that were sold years ago. It's an abuse of a mechanism that's ostensibly meant for security fixes and maybe perf improvements, which is a dangerous game because it incentivizes people to just not update the firmware at all, which is a worse scenario for both parties than just resolving to not include the feature in CPUs going forward if it's such a huge loss to include it.

Judging by the Reddit threads I saw, A LOT of people were upset even though it was clear that they had not idea what the feature actually provided beyond “encryption”. I’d guess that the majority assumed that the change would result in them basically having to “encryption” in affected AMD devices any more in some vague general sense.

Exactly. Thus far I've seen 1 person use it...and they seemed to believe it provides rowhammer benefit...so somewhat tangential

Reply on news.ycombinator.com