Another day - another ARM server chip startup. Meanwhile at Intel...
... economists are working out how much to cut the price of Xeons to so you go out of business. See El Reg passim for details...
Intel will today add the D-2100 x86-64 system-on-chip to its lineup of Xeon D x86-64 processors, billing it as its "fastest low-power edge processor." The Xeon D CPU family is aimed at powering web servers, high-speed cellular broadband towers, regional and branch office systems, warm file storage in the cloud, data center …
Brian : Hey Diane, while you're on sabbatical why don't you sign up with Carlyle group and loose them $Billion.
Diane : Great plan!! That will ensure Qualcomm's Centriq faces even MORE competition and gets shut down earlier and both going bust together will discourage any other ARM server entrants,
Brian : High Five !! - You can be Intel's HR director when the dust settles/
Wednesday: Intel shows off new server chips
With or without meltdown/spectre vulnerability ? Since they have to re-design their very basic CPU layouts I doubt their CPU's have been fixed so soon ... my builds takes 2.5 times as long as before the MS-supplied Spectre/Meltdown fixes, so I am just saying ....YMMV, mine sucks golf balls through garden hoses ... as my German mates say: "Einfach Griff ranschweißen und wegschmeißen!"
AMD CPUs are not affected by Meltdown, only by Spectre. The workaround to the former is really expensive in terms of CPU overhead on Intel (and exactly 0 cost on AMD), especially if your workloads involve lots of IO, which is why I plan my next upgrade to AMD Epyc (from Xeon Ivy Bridge). The workarounds to Spectre are still appearing, but so far all are pretty cheap.
This reminds me of the Floating Point issue that Intel said would only occur ever 27 years so nothing to worry about. Pack of arseholes. If someone wants to start a Class Action against them for incompetence and hiding the flaw, COUNT ME IN!
Bloody Microsoft patched windows 10 and they can't be uninstalled. After that happened, though it may be coincidental, I periodically loose web browser connection. Can ping an IP and URL but no browser will resolve to either. Have to reboot to get it back working.
Dinosaur de-facto monopolies always have something ready to announce should the minnow-sized competition dare to launch a new product which competes with their line up.
Otherwise it'll never see the light of day. I mean, why would it if they're the monopoly?
It almost doesn't even matter how many cores or what speed they are. For what these CPUs are intended to do, having only 32 PCIe lanes* (in theory, in practice this number will be reduced by use of builtin components) is the real joke. Intel really badly needs to work on correcting this bottleneck. It's bad enough in a regular PC, but in a server or workstation? Who cares how many threads your software can theoretically run when your CPU is always stuck waiting for the data to come in! Intel needs to stop fixing the wrong bottleneck.
As for Meltdown and Spectre, here's a point of elucidation for those who apparently need it: It is not just Intel. Meltdown and Spectre are both speculative branch prediction / out-of-order execution (OoOE) attacks. Meltdown targeted Intel's implementation specifically. Spectre is a broader attack using multiple techniques / variants for a more generic approach. And there's nothing preventing the addition of even more Spectre variants in the future. OoOE has been a buzzword since the early 90s, making these attacks possible on chips over 20 years old! (Assuming you can find one still running anyway.) These vulns affect pretty much every company that has ever made a CPU, ever. Yes, Intel. Also AMD, ARM-A, even PowerPC. (And potentially other less-known oldie-but-goodies like DEC Alpha, SPARC64, etc.) To perpetuate the myth that this is an Intel-only vuln, or that Intel is somehow the only company to ever implement OoOE in a CPU is just wildly misinformed. Nor was it a bad concept to fill unused execution units with future possibilities to make execution faster and more efficient. It just needs further refinement to mitigate attacks.