On 01/11/2018 05:02 PM, Rich Freeman wrote: > On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 5:41 PM, Mick <michaelkintz...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Most vendors only sell Intel in their laptops. I could build a desktop I >> guess, but Ryzen is also affected by Spectre. With Intel's burning platform >> I >> want to jump off, but I'm not sure if spending money at this stage will >> materially improve my PC security ... or if it is wiser to wait for the next >> round of 'improved' CPUs. >> > I wouldn't let Spectre drive you to hold off on buying a CPU. If > you're happy with what you have stick with it. If not get what makes > the most sense, which is probably Ryzen at this point unless your > particular workload benefits from the marginal single-thread > performance of Intel even after any Meltdown handicaps. > > IMO Spectre is going to drive some microcode updates for relatively > recent CPUs, compiler improvements, and some hand-tuning of > particularly critical code. >
FYI : The microcode updates pushed out for AMD by Gentoo seem to be only for : Fam16h, Fam17h CPUs. Fam15h, Fam10h, no change. "dmesg" output unchanged, before and after updating. ( Yes, the firmware update is built-in to the kernel. ) [ 0.114108] smpboot: CPU0: AMD FX(tm)-9590 Eight-Core Processor (family: 0x15, model: 0x2, stepping: 0x0) [ 0.114113] Performance Events: Fam15h core perfctr, AMD PMU driver. [ 10.296207] microcode: microcode updated early to new patch_level=0x0600084f [ 10.296915] microcode: CPU0: patch_level=0x0600084f [ 10.297658] microcode: CPU1: patch_level=0x0600084f [ 10.298338] microcode: CPU2: patch_level=0x0600084f [ 10.299093] microcode: CPU3: patch_level=0x0600084f [ 10.299813] microcode: CPU4: patch_level=0x0600084f [ 10.300502] microcode: CPU5: patch_level=0x0600084f [ 10.301193] microcode: CPU6: patch_level=0x0600084f [ 10.301849] microcode: CPU7: patch_level=0x0600084f [ 10.302601] microcode: Microcode Update Driver: v2.01 <tig...@aivazian.fsnet.co.uk>, Peter Oruba
