Dear Chris, the first court cases against Intel have been filed:
http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/web/spectre-meltdown-erste-us-verbraucher-verklagen-intel-wegen-chip-schwachstelle-a-1186595.html http://docs.dpaq.de/13109-show_temp.pl-27.pdf http://docs.dpaq.de/13111-show_temp.pl-28.pdf http://docs.dpaq.de/13110-07316352607.pdf So, lets hope others are joining in here to get the ball rolling. Don't get me wrong here, this is nothing against Intel per se. However, and here I am talking wearing my HPC hat, a performance decrease of up to 30% is simply not tolerable for me. I am working hard to squeeze the last performance out of the CPU and using highly optimised libraries and then the hardware has a flaw which makes all of that useless. I am somewhat surprised that this has not discovered earlier (both bugs I mean). I am sure it will be interesting to see how it will be patched and what the performance penalty will be here. All the best Jörg Am Samstag, 6. Januar 2018, 03:27:33 GMT schrieb Christopher Samuel: > On 05/01/18 10:48, Jörg Saßmannshausen wrote: > > What I would like to know is: how about compensation? For me that is > > the same as the VW scandal last year. We, the users, have been > > deceived. > > I think you would be hard pressed to prove that, especially as it seems > that pretty much every mainstream CPU is affected (Intel, AMD, ARM, Power). > > > Specially if the 30% performance loss which have been mooted are not > > special corner cases but are seen often in HPC. Some of the chemistry > > code I am supporting relies on disc I/O, others on InfiniBand and > > again other is running entirely in memory. > > For RDMA based networks like IB I would suspect that the impact will be > far less as the system calls to set things up will be impacted but that > after that it should be less of an issue (as the whole idea of RDMA was > to get the kernel out of the way as much as possible). > > But of course we need real benchmarks to gauge that impact. > > Separating out the impact of various updates will also be important, > I've heard that the SLES upgrade to their microcode package includes > disabling branch prediction on AMD k17 family CPUs for instance. > > All the best, > Chris _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
