Thus, if a chip family falls under one of those categories – such as
Intel can't easily fix Spectre v2 in the design, or customers don't
think the hardware will be exploited – it gets a "stopped" sticker.
This is how hardware gets exploited.
Imagine thinking this is okay. Fuck Intel, guess who's never getting my money ever. Even if AMD goes and pulls another Bulldozer, I'll take sub par performance any day to this shit.
I don't have anything against shitting on Intel, but it should be noted that these are pretty old CPUs, and also that for these updates to make a real difference, motherboard manufacturers (as I understand it) would have to give a shit as well, which is even less likely.
It's not that they won't fix it that's the problem, it's that they're putting the "stopped" tag on them because "we don't think anyone will exploit them". They're basically saying "well, we don't think it's a big deal, so it's therefore not even a problem that exists." That's the problem here.
I mean, the exact same thing happened with Windows XP, Microsoft stopped releasing updates for it because they didn't think anyone would exploit it any more.
And 'lo and behold, nobody's bothered to try and exploit XP for ages, the return on investment for any such attacks is just too low to be worth it.
You don't need motherboard makers to support the update. Microsoft has released microcode updates through windows update before, and there's alternatives for linux. Microsoft just didn't do this for Intel's initial meltdown fix because they didn't deem it stable.
(See: Reports of Intel CPUs with the fix causing random reboots because of the patch)
microhardware design is always a trade-off
to get faster, you have to do speculative execution eventually, but now that you're executing code that may or may not run, there's always the potential for data to be exfiltrated
Really thankful these days that my weak-ass computer at least has an AMD card.
what
Wanacry targeted XP.
Well, I might be fucked considering my dad bought me this PC refurbished, around 3-4yrs ago. It was already a few years old when purchased, I believe. [url=Intel® Xeon® Processor E5620 (12M Cache, 2.40 GHz, 5.86 GT/s Int..]According to the Intel page, my CPU was released in 2010.....[/url]
Aren't these exploits highly theoretical at this point in time anyways?
I'm gonna be honest, I have no idea what this means. I feel like my CPU is pretty old (Intel i7-2600k 3.4ghz) and I have no idea if I'm affected by this, or what it means for my CPU?
Wannacry targeted SMBv1, which is present in almost literally all Windows versions, and could in fact even strike on Linux through Samba with the same exploit - even if their payload wouldn't work there.
Admittedly, Spectre is present in many Intel processors as well, so a generalized Spectre attack that runs on all their CPUs would still be able to attack one of the old ones. Not that I expect anyone to explicitly target those systems, because of the lack of a good RoI for such an exploit.
Westmere isn't in their stopped list, so you shouldn't have any issues with lack of fixes.
I actually own a single CPU in the list of stopped families, an almost decade old Bloomfield i7-950 which I had in use until the end of last year, it just wasn't useful anymore and was in desperate need of an upgrade by that point.
Last year I've spent $2000 on a pair of 24 core Xeons-E5 V4, but they're engineering samples and do not have a retail equivalence. Therefore, my super expensive workstation is now forever vulnerable to spectre/meltdown and I'm not entirely sure what to do at this point :/
Sandy Bridge CPU's were patched. Next issue is that your motherboard manufacturer now needs to give a shit so you get the microcode update.
Quick, somebody try to sabotage the AMD stocks again
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