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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 31 2018, @05:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the doesn't-raid-fix-this? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

In 2015, Microsoft senior engineer Dan Luu forecast a bountiful harvest of chip bugs in the years ahead.

"We've seen at least two serious bugs in Intel CPUs in the last quarter, and it's almost certain there are more bugs lurking," he wrote. "There was a time when a CPU family might only have one bug per year, with serious bugs happening once every few years, or even once a decade, but we've moved past that."

Thanks to growing chip complexity, compounded by hardware virtualization, and reduced design validation efforts, Luu argued, the incidence of hardware problems could be expected to increase.

This month's Meltdown and Spectre security flaws that affect chip designs from AMD, Arm, and Intel to varying degrees support that claim. But there are many other examples.


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  • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday February 01 2018, @10:11AM (6 children)

    by Wootery (2341) on Thursday February 01 2018, @10:11AM (#631399)

    isn't there a market for the more reliable machine?

    How reliable do you want? Server hardware is pretty good, no? If you want near-perfection, there are CPUs out there rated for safety critical systems, but it'll likely cost you 50x the price, and the performance won't be anywhere close to that of a modern Intel CPU.

    Fun fact: the RAD750 [wikipedia.org] radiation-resistant PowerPC chip clocked at 200MHz, from 2002. Its unit cost: around $200,000, back then when that was real money.

    It's like with software. Formally-verified software exists, but is enormously more expensive to develop. (Vaguely related: the CompCert formally verified C compiler is actually performance-competitive with GCC optimised builds. [inria.fr] I wouldn't have guessed, but there we are. Neat!)

    99.99999% validated design

    Meaning what?

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:05PM (4 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:05PM (#631453)

    If you want near-perfection, there are CPUs out there rated for safety critical systems, but it'll likely cost you 50x the price,

    There's a positive feedback loop involved there - the 50x price is because the validation costs $V and the sales volume is Ntiny, so $V/Ntiny = 49x the price of a normal CPU.

    and the performance won't be anywhere close to that of a modern Intel CPU.

    More of the non-virtuous positive feedback loop - low volume market = infrequent product refresh cycles.

    If that same $V effort were applied to the high volume product line (Nhuge) $V/Nhuge might = 0.05x the price of the chips, or less. More importantly, it would also slow delivery of product by x months on average, which is a perceived competitive cost...

    I say perceived cost because, often I will buy a generation, or sometimes two, back from the bleeding edge just because they are the devils whose faces I know - Skylake was a clusterfuck, and only now am I starting to feel confident that we can deal with all of its quirks in a product. The performance gains of the next couple of generations are nice, but truly un-necessary for any application I have. Bugs, driver glitches, field patches - lack of those all matter much more to me.

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    • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:20PM (3 children)

      by Wootery (2341) on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:20PM (#631457)

      I'm inclined to trust market forces here. If people cared more about correctness than performance, wouldn't we expect the CPUs on the market to reflect that?

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:09PM (2 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday February 01 2018, @02:09PM (#631475)

        I'm inclined to trust market forces here. If people cared more about correctness than performance, wouldn't we expect the CPUs on the market to reflect that?

        Seriously? The mass CPU market is consumer driven, you trust Facebook users to decide how robust/secure the majority of CPUs manufactured and used in the world should be?

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        • (Score: 2) by Wootery on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:43PM (1 child)

          by Wootery (2341) on Thursday February 01 2018, @03:43PM (#631500)

          Eh? Do Facebook profit by their servers being insecure?

          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:21PM

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday February 01 2018, @09:21PM (#631700)

            Not talking about Facebook itself profiting, talking about the mass market electronics consumers of the world (Facebook users, among others) and their "collective wisdom" with respect to reliability, security, etc. For every Facebook server machine, there are hundreds of users who access it via multiple consumer gadgets each - that's the market that needs a nanny.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:08PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday February 01 2018, @01:08PM (#631455)

    99.99999% validated design

    Meaning what?

    Nothing, of course, except that it's orders of magnitude better than 99.999%. When you're talking about catching the next Spectre before it's exploited in the wild, there are no metrics that mean anything, but effort invested in looking for the problems does pay off in proportion to the amount of effort invested.

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