We do try and keep our Labs systems up to date on patches and whatnot, and I recently wrote about the negative performance impact that one such update had on Intel's Core i9 9900K processor: https://www.pugetsystems.co...

As I understand it, the reason Hyperthreading is a security risk on some Intel processors has to do with the potential - in a virtualized environment - for one of two threads that are running on the same physical core to be able to use weird vulnerabilities to "see" what the other thread on the same core is doing, and possibly accessing data it is processing. Thus compromising one OS with malware could let you siphon data off another, uncompromised OS running on the same physical hardware. In a server situation where that could include login credentials or other sensitive information, this is an unlikely but still very dangerous risk... but in a desktop or workstation, without multiple virtualized OSes, if someone has gotten malware onto your system then there are much worse things they could do than try to listen in to the activity of another program running on the same OS. Instead, they could be directly reading data from the drive, keylogging, etc... all of which are far more likely to get at sensitive data. That is why it is my assertion - based on my current understanding of the situation - that Hyperthreading is not a security risk on single-OS systems like most desktops and workstations. If anyone reading this believes I am in error, please link to additional information on the subject for me to check out :)

And lastly, regarding your statement that "AMD has finally earned the right to get a truly objective and even handed real world evaluation" - I would argue that AMD has had that right all along, and that we have been doing exactly that for years! There have been places where AMD was a clear winner since at least the launch of their Threadripper platform, and for users on a limited budget AMD has been a fine option for years even before that. If you go back far enough, they actually outperformed Intel across the board for a few years back in the early 2000s. But in recent memory, Intel has had one particular advantage which has gone unchallenged until very recently: single-threaded performance. Their strength there, combined with offering a good number of cores (though not as many as AMD's TR chips) and lots of software optimization meant that Intel has been our mainstay for a long time now.

If rumors online are to be believed, though, I would say instead that "AMD has finally built a chip that might unseat Intel's single-threaded and general-purpose performance crown". I am speaking, of course, of the 3rd generation of Ryzen processors. I am looking forward to testing them soon, and if you are interested in AMD I would recommend checking back on our site over the coming weeks :)

Posted on 2019-07-01 16:50:41