Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed now please excuse the mess here I was doing something else but we've briefly hit the pause button on benchmarking to cover a rather interesting news story now I decided to cover this news story sort of last minute rush tip because the comment sections of all my latest benchmark videos how it has been getting spammed with links to news stories covering at the topic that we're going to discuss in this video and the users that were posting links for claiming that all the benchmark results are now invalid because Intel CPUs are about to become 30% slower now this news comes after a somewhat difficult or at least concerning you for Intel as they went from complete market dominance to well a little less dominant the tide is starting to turn let's say actually I might be downplaying AMD's achievements a little bit here in 2017 Rison certainly transform the desktop landscape thread Ripper certainly changed the high-end desktop landscape and while the epic CPUs they've been wreaking havoc on the server side so with all that the last thing Intel needed was a serious CPU bug to be discovered and addressing it could have a huge impact on performance perhaps even worse still the bug impacts almost every Intel processor manufactured over the past decade the problem is within the Intel x86 64 hardware and it can't be fixed with a simple micro code update rather in order to fix this major security flaw a significant operating system redesign is required and then impacts pretty much all operating systems such as Linux Mac OS and Windows the exact details of the vulnerability have been placed under embargo and this is a given tell time to work on a fix now it's been reported by the register that the floor could allow normal user programs to see some of the content of protected kernel memory areas for those of you wondering a kernel is a program that is at the core of the operating system and it connects software applications with the hardware components in your computer such as your CPU your system memory your basically anything else attached to your PC keyboard mouse monitor all that stuff this means any malicious programs might be able to read information like passwords login keys cached files and well pretty much anything this is obviously a serious issue for not just users like you and I but it seems companies that use virtualized environments are the biggest targets for those looking to exploit the vulnerability for example Microsoft Amazon and Google are all working on fixes to be implemented over the next week now for those of you wondering no this does not impact AMD processors they are completely free of this bug an AMD software engineer did have something interesting to say about the issue when he speculated that Intel's processes might execute code without performing security checks and presumably they do this to maximize performance so while it's speculated that Intel went about this shortcut let's say to improve performance the band-aid or patch well that's going to come with a massive performance penalty the solution being a kernel page table isolation or kpti patch this separates the kernels memory from the user processes unfortunately though this solution increases the kernels overhead causing the system to slow down anywhere from 5 to 30 percent depending on the task and of course the CPU model for desktop users though it's possible the patch whine actually have that much or any impact on everyday usage and that also includes gaming performance and said though we just don't really know yet we'll have to wait until Microsoft rolls out their fix and that is expected to happen by the tenth so next week patches fill the next kernel though they're already available and tech cipher onyx has done some benchmarking quite a good bit of benchmarking I'll link that in the video description so you guys can check that out it looks like though that servers are mostly going to be affected by the patch and that is affected is in a reduction in performance while gaming and video rendering light sort of stuff we do on the desktops that seems to be mostly unaffected of course in typical harbor and box fashion we do plan to test the impact of this patch for Windows users next week and will report back our findings then for now though this looks to be an incredible blow for Intel with AMD already breathing down then they really can't afford to give up any performance on the server side what's your take on all this and do you believe there will be any major repercussions for Intel as always we'd love to hear your thoughts so drop them down below in the comment section and well that's gonna do it for this one I'm your host Steve I've got to clean up all these graphics cards and continue benchmarking for tonight so yeah I'll see you again soon