Ryzen life.
Man I just hate that you can’t disable the PSP spyware bullshit. It’s the only reason I don’t use them
Its a “trusted” execution environment for the system. So basically, it has access over your entire system and there’s no way to know what it is doing because it is proprietary and many people and third party security groups have expressed concerns about it before and asked them to open source the code that runs it and they will not do it.
Intel has a similar system the Intel Management Engine but you can disable that after bootup and also run it on open source bios so that it is essentially neutered. You cannot do that with AMD.
The NSA disables and removes Intel ME on their systems, so it seems like there’s a very real threat from these proprietary systems that have complete and entire control over every aspect of the machine and software running it.
And people laughed at me for sticking with my MOS 6502. Who’s laughing now?
“Pure, passive cooling. No fans or moving parts. Will be working a century from now.”
I recently built a 12th Gen PC, expecting an upgrade to 13th Gen will be a cheap and significant upgrade path soon. Now there isn’t going to be any way to know if a second-hand CPU is damaged in this way.
It can get a whole lot worse.
I bought a $500 13th gen CPU that destroyed itself, replaced it (and didn’t keep the dead CPU) with a $500 14th gen CPU that destroyed itself, and spent another ~$500 on related hardware and dumping Intel stuff to go AMD to get a working system. I also spent a lot of time trying to resolve the problem. I’d bet that I’m not the person burned worst, because someone could very easily have replaced their motherboard or memory or power supply unit in the hopes of fixing the issue, as any of these could have looked like potential causes, and there’d be no way for anyone to prove to Intel that this was the cause even if Intel intended to reimburse for these.
Maybe, I might get $500 back at most if Intel reimburses for the 14th gen CPU; I’d assume that at best, based on what they’ve been doing so far, that they’d send out another Intel CPU (which I no longer have a use for, having gone AMD).
And I was mostly using this system for fun. While I was corrupting my root filesystem regularly at boot at the end, I ultimately didn’t – as far as I know – suffer any serious data loss or expense from the data that the processor was corrupting. My system was mostly to be used for my own entertainment. I didn’t miss deadlines or lose critical information.
As Steve Burke has pointed out in earlier episodes on this, there are people who have been impacted by those secondary costs, some of which might make my own costs look irrelevant.
He was talking to video game companies who were using affected processors as well as having customers who were affected; they had apparently banned some customers for cheating because they knew that the internal state of the game was incorrect; they couldn’t figure out what the customers were doing, but knew that their game state was being modified. It apparently wasn’t the customers cheating, but their CPU, which had partially destroyed itself, and was now corrupting memory.
Another had been using CPUs for video game servers and those kept dying and taking down service; another company estimated that they’d lost $100k in player business due to the problem.
Apparently these were also popular, due to high single-threaded performance, with hedge funds that do stock trading. I imagine that a system that suddenly stops working or corrupts data can very quickly become extremely expensive in that context, far in excess of what the CPUs cost.
OEMs who build and sold systems containing these CPUs had apparently been taking back systems and repeatedly replacing parts; they probably incurred substantial costs and hits to their own reputation, as customers are upset with them.
Same thing with datacenter providers, who incurred a lot of costs investigating and mitigating problems, swapping parts and CPUs. One of these Burke quoted as having advised customers to use an alternate AMD-based system and if they insisted on the Intel one, the provider would charge a $1000 additional service fee to cover all the costs the provider was taking in having to deal with systems based on the CPUs. Gives an idea of what they were losing.
God only knows what the impact of having a ton of data around the world corrupted is. Probably no more than a tiny fraction of the problems related to corruption will ever actually be attributed to the CPUs themselves.
And I don’t know how many systems out there may not be fully-tracked – so they don’t get updates to avoid the problem – and have the CPUs built into them. Industrial automation hardware? Ship navigation systems? Who knows? All kinds of things that might fail in absolutely spectacular ways if they work for a period of time, then down the road, eventually start corrupting data more and more severely.
I mean, Intel might, at best, provide a cash refund for a dead CPU. But they aren’t gonna cover losses from secondary problems, and there’s no realistic way that most businesses and people who bought these could prove them, anyway.
Buying the last CPU they made before this clusterfuck occurred is maybe one of the best things you could have done and still be indirectly affected, as you got a reasonably fast system that wasn’t directly affected – if I’d known about this in advance, rather then Intel not saying anything, I’d have purchased a 12th gen CPU happily rather than another $1k in useless hardware and spent a ton of time to try to resolve my problems. You’ll have the option to, at upgrade time, go AMD or 15th gen Intel and LGA 1851, if you want to hope that Intel’s 15th gen is more solid than their previous two. Just means a new motherboard and, if you’re using DDR4 memory, you’ll need to toss that and buy DDR5.
Anyone who knows of this and buys 15th gen over AMD is a fool imo. The risk is just so high and AMD has become so solid in the last decade.
I would have gone AMD in the first place if this happened at the time of my purchase.
Oh well. Upgrade time is going to be a long way away. My last gaming PC served me well for almost 10 years before I did an in socket upgrade.
I would have gone AMD in the first place if this happened at the time of my purchase.
Well, you’ve got better judgement than me. l’d been running just Intel for ~25 years and was comfortable with them, and even when ordering the replacement, still wasn’t absolutely certain that the CPU was at fault until the replacement (temporarily, for a few months) resolved all the problems.
Moving forward, I expect I’ll use AMD unless they manage to do something like this.
My last gaming PC served me well for almost 10 years before I did an in socket upgrade.
Yeah, not a lot of annual single-threaded performance improvements since the early 2000s. Can very easily use older CPUs just fine for a long time these days, depending upon workload.
If your CPU is crashing/unstable then yes, damage is already done, but for the few of us who bought these later just update your bios to the latest one, set intel defaults, do not overclock (I have even undervolted it a bit, but ymmv) and wait for the microcode update.
Though I do wonder if Intel isn’t just stalling for time, I do hope they are not. Didn’t wanna touch my build for next ~5 years.
That is, disappointingly, not sufficient to guarantee avoiding damage. I set all that in the BIOS using my first processor (13900KF) before ever inserting my replacement processor (14900KF) into the motherboard. The replacement processor still destroyed itself.
Processor 1 used only motherboard defaults and managed to destroy itself.
Processor 2 used only Intel recommended settings, no XMP memory profile, no Intel turbo boost, more conservative than motherboard defaults, and also destroyed itself.
I did not try running a processor for its lifetime at minimum memory speed or with only 1 core active. It’s possible that that might be sufficient to avoid damage. If I hadn’t already gone AMD over this, and had to use a processor from the affected generations, that’s what I’d be doing now until Intel comes out with their update. Not gonna do much by way of fancy gaming, but at least the system’s usable and hopefully won’t destroy itself.
Real shit, can you sue them for this? I mean they aren’t stopping selling them even knowing they are faulty. Seriously, how can you get your money back from these vultures.
