Intel Announces Xeon Scalable Processor Family (hothardware.com) 52
MojoKid writes: Intel unveiled information regarding a new Xeon processor family today, some of which will be based on the company's Skylake-SP architecture. Intel will have four levels of Xeon processors that scale with respect to feature support and core counts. Intel is calling it the Xeon Scalable Family with Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum processors. Today, Xeon model names follow a fairly easy-to-understand format. Take for example the Xeon E5-4640 v4. "E5" in this case means that it is in the middle of Intel's current stack in terms of features and capabilities, where the "4" signifies use in a 4-socket system. Finally, the "v4" represents the architecture. With this change, a model like the one above would become Intel Xeon Gold 4640, as an example. Regardless, the chips will include support for AVX-512 instructions, QuickAssist and Volume Management Device (VMD) technologies that will take advantage of NVMe solid-state drives. The platform will also support complementary processing engines and IO technologies like Intel FPGAs, Xeon Phi accelerators and Silicon Photonics connectivity. Intel notes the processors will be arriving to market this summer.
Why 4-digits (Score:3)
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The last digit is the number of back doors MOD 10.
Re:Why 4-digits (Score:4, Informative)
When the last one is always zero.
Because it was designed in America, where three houses on a cul-de-sac will each have a four digit house number. Americans love superfluous digits.
But I shouldn't ridicule Americans too much, since some other countries have numbering schemes that are even sillier. For instance, in Japan, houses on a block are not numbered in sequence, but in the order in which they were built.
Re:Why 4-digits (Score:4, Interesting)
It depends on where you are. In my town, house numbers start in the single digits. This causes a problem if the street is extended in the wrong direction, as happens from time to time. In the town I grew up on, the streets are numbered as if they extended to the center of town, so houses between 1st and 2nd streets are in the 100s, but streets ten miles away have five-digit addresses (it's a large city). That works well, as you can often tell about where something is by the street number even if you've never heard of the street.
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This causes a problem if the street is extended in the wrong direction, as happens from time to time.
I once raged looking for a number on a street that had been extended twice and the blockheads in charged had chosen the following numbering scheme (from the new start of the street): 200..299 1..199 300..1000
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When Concord Street was extended in my town, the new portion was named "Concord Street Extension." That makes addresses ugly, but it solves the problem. Of course, Concord Street is one of those crazy streets where you come to a four-way intersection, and you turn left to stay on Concord Street, or you go straight for Concord Street Extension, or you turn right for another street where you then have to turn left at the next intersection to stay on that street. At the other end at another four-way interse
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"For instance, in Japan, houses on a block are not numbered in sequence, but in the order in which they were built."
And now you know why new housing developments are given large numbers with gaps: so that when you build something between them later the new construction can still get an in-sequence number without renumbering the whole street.
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When the last one is always zero.
Or 7 when they go CRAZY!
First question (Score:3)
Does it have a brand new NSA backdoor in it ?
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Does it have a brand new NSA backdoor in it ?
Why would it? There's nothing wrong with the old one.
Scalable hardware??? (Score:1)
They're probably doing QC testing on the chips & "downgrading" the ones that don't work... either that or they're charging you a LICENSE FEE for features and cores in the CPU and making their hardware "by subscription" which would be a truly horrific turn of events
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Yeah, Intel would never do something like charge people to unlock features present in the CPU they bought [wikipedia.org]
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Of course, I find this significantly more palatable, as a) the whole computer only cost $35, and b) I think it's due to some licensing agreement with a separate entity (Broadcom).
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Actually, I didn't get the point of this announcement. To me, it looked more like a die shrink, or an extension of an existing CPU platform. Tossing in more cores, changing the packages or upping the frequencies doesn't exactly change things all that much. What would change it would be new instructions, but I doubt that Intel would wanna include new instructions that would force newer software to be recompiled, particularly when its primary competition has been its older CPUs that have really had a robu
shelf space (Score:1)
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Why?
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If you buy Mac Pros, it has a server CPU - used in this case as a workstation CPU. People who need workstations have to go w/ Xeon. Personally, I think Intel should include ECC in the i3/5/7 CPUs, and for those who don't need that, offer them the Atoms or the Pentiums
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You can use i3, Pentium and even now Celeron with ECC (the real desktop chips, not Celeron-branded Atoms). You need a "workstation" or "server" grade motherboard though.
Surprise : there are new motherboards that looks like just your standard gamer/office motherboards with a new coat of paint. So you will pay more.
i5/i7 are branded as "Xeon E3" like before, but this time they don't run in regular motherboards. So there's still an ECC tax but if that was all you wanted it's a bit cheaper now.
Not an "unveiling" -- an accidental leak (Score:5, Informative)
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This summer they are planning on releasing Coffee Lake, which will be 8xxx in desktops (ex: i7-8700K, or whatever). 8 is getting close to 0, so they are probably going to have to rebrand that. The Xeons had a bit more life in them- a coffee lake Xeon would only be "v6", and it isn't out yet. Their enthusiast chips, should they keep that artificial market, would be out at a similar time to the Xeons (some time in the future- the Skylake enthusiasts aren't even out yet), would be something like "i7-9950X"
Obligatory:Intel CPU Backdoor Report (May 1 2017) (Score:2, Interesting)
The goal of this report is to make the existence of Intel CPU backdoors a common knowledge and provide information on backdoor removal.
What we know about Intel CPU backdoors so far:
TL;DR version
Your Intel CPU and Chipset is running a backdoor as we speak.
The backdoor hardware is inside the CPU/Bridge and the backdoor firmware (Intel Management Engine) is in the chipset flash memory.
30C3 Intel ME live hack:
@21m43s, keystrokes leaked from Intel ME above the OS, wireshark failed to detect packets.
[Video Link] 30C3: Persistent, Stealthy, Remote-controlled Dedicated Hardware Malware [youtube.com]
[Quotes] Vortrag [events.ccc.de]:
"DAGGER exploits Intel's Manageability Engine (ME), that executes firmware code such as Intel's Active Management Technology (iAMT), as well as its OOB network channel."
"the ME provides a perfect environment for undetectable sensitive data leakage on behalf of the attacker. Our presentation consists of three parts. The first part addresses how to find valuable data in the main memory of the host. The second part exploits the ME's OOB network channel to exfiltrate captured data to an external platform and to inject new attack code to target other interesting data structures available in the host runtime memory. The last part deals with the implementation of a covert network channel based on JitterBug."
"We have recently improved DAGGER's capabilites to include support for 64-bit operating systems and a stealthy update mechanism to download new attack code."
"To be more precise, we show how to conduct a DMA attack using Intel's Manageability Engine (ME)."
"We can permanently monitor the keyboard buffer on both operating system targets."
Backdoor removal:
The backdoor firmware can be removed by following this guide [github.io] using the me_cleaner [github.com] script.
Removal requires a Raspberry Pi (with GPIO pins) and a SOIC clip.
Decoding Intel backdoors:
The situation is out of control and the Libreboot/Coreboot community is looking for BIOS/Firmware experts to help with the Intel ME decoding effort.
If you are skilled in these areas, download Intel ME firmwares from this collection [win-raid.com] and have a go at them, beware Intel is using a lot of counter measures to prevent their backdoors from being decoded (explained below).
Useful links:
The Intel ME subsystem can take over your machine, can't be audited [ycombinator.com]
REcon 2014 - Intel Management Engine Secrets [youtube.com]
Untrusting the CPU (33c3) [youtube.com]
Towards (reasonably) trustworthy x86 laptops [youtube.com]
30C3 To Protect And Infect - The militarization of the Internet [youtube.com]
30c3: To Protect And Infect Part 2 - Mass Surveillance Tools & Software [youtube.com]
1. Introduction, what is Intel ME
Short version, from Intel staff:
Re: What Intel CPUs lack Intel ME secondary processor? [intel.com]
Amy_Intel Feb 8, 2016 9:27 AM
The Management Engine (ME) is an isolated and protected coprocessor, embedded as a non-optional part in all current Intel chipsets, I even checked with the engineering department and they confirmed it.
Long version:
ME: Management Engine [libreboot.org]
The Intel Management Engine (ME) is a separate computing environment physically located in the MCH chip or PCH chip replacing ICH.
The ME consists of an individual processor core, code and data caches, a timer, and a secure internal bus to which additional devices are connected, including a cryptography engine, internal ROM and RAM, memory controllers, and a direct memory access (DMA) engine to access the host operating system's memory as well as to reserve a region of protected external memory to supplement the ME's limited internal RAM. The ME also has network access with its own MAC address through the Intel Gigabit Ethernet Controller integrated in the southbridge (ICH or PCH).
The Intel Management Engine with its proprietary firmware has complete access to and control over the PC: it can power on or shut down the PC, read all open files, examine all running applications, track all keys pressed and mouse movements, and even capture or display images on the screen. And it has a network interface that is demonstrably insecure, which can allow an attacker on the network to inject rootkits that completely compromise the PC and can report to the attacker all activities performed on the PC. It is a threat to freedom, security, and privacy that can't be ignored.
ME firmware versions 6.0 and later, which are found on all systems with an Intel Core i3/i5/i7 CPU and a PCH, include "ME Ignition" firmware that performs some hardware initialization and power management. If the ME's boot ROM does not find in the SPI flash memory an ME firmware manifest with a valid Intel signature, the whole PC will shut down after 30 minutes.
Quotes on Intel backdoors:
A message from RMS [fsf.org]
by Richard Stallman on Dec 29, 2016 09:45 AM
The current generation of Intel and AMD processor chips are designed with vicious back doors that users cannot shut off. (In Intel processors, it's the "management engine".)
No users should trust those processors.
2. The backdoor is next to impossible to decode and reverse engineer:
Due to multiple instruction sets + custom compression algorithm.
The Trouble With Intel's Management Engine [hackaday.com]
While most of the firmware for the ME also resides in the Flash chip used by the BIOS, the firmware isn't readily readable; some common functions are in an on-chip ROM and cannot be found by simply dumping the data from the Flash chip.
This means that if you're trying to figure out the ME, a lot of the code is seemingly missing. Adding to the problem, a lot of the code itself is compressed with either LZMA or Huffman encoding. There are multiple versions of the Intel ME, as well, all using completely different instruction sets: ARC, ARCompact, and SPARC V8. In short, it's a reverse-engineer's worst nightmare.
To break the Management Engine, though, this code will have to be reverse engineered, and figuring out the custom compression scheme that's used in the firmware remains an unsolved problem.
But unsolved doesn't mean that people aren't working on it. There are efforts to break the ME's Huffman algorithm. Of course, deciphering the code we have would lead to another road block: there is still the code on the inaccessible on-chip ROM. Nothing short of industrial espionage or decapping the chip and looking at the silicon will allow anyone to read the ROM code. While researchers do have some idea what this code does by inferring the functions, there is no way to read and audit it. So the ME remains a black box for now.
3. Onboard ethernet and WiFi is part of the backdoor:
The ME has its own MAC and IP address for the out-of-band interface, with direct access to the Ethernet controller; one portion of the Ethernet traffic is diverted to the ME even before reaching the host's operating system
If your CPU has Intel Anti-Theft Technology enabled, it is also possible to directly access the backdoor from cell towers using 3G.
4. The backdoor uses encrypted communication:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology#Using_Intel_AMT [wikipedia.org]
AMT version 4.0 and higher can establish a secure communication tunnel between a wired PC and an IT console outside the corporate firewall. In this scheme, a management presence server (Intel calls this a "vPro-enabled gateway") authenticates the PC, opens a secure TLS tunnel between the IT console and the PC
5. Recent backdoors run Java applets
*3 billion devices run Java* and everyone's motherboard is running it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology#cite_ref-is_31-0 [wikipedia.org]
Starting with ME 7.1, the ARC processor can also execute signed Java applets. The ME state is stored in a partition of the SPI flash, using the Embedded Flash File System.
6. Possible attack vectors from Intel/CIA/NSA (who holds the certifica
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It's not even so tough. Pick a handful of levels (number of cores, amount of cache, whatever). If not all the features work for one level, try again at the lower level, and repeat. You could then bin again on clock frequency, but the simple solution would be market them based upon the clock frequency and level only. So as long as you're in the same level, you would have the exact same feature set, so higher clock = faster. Between levels, it may not be so clear, but you could check benchmarks and what
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Not a big deal for Intel. When they see the confused look on your face they'll just hand you an i3 because they've got to get rid of those somehow.
So what you're saying is... (Score:3)
The naming scheme wasn't convoluted enough so far?
Chip names (Score:3)
I gave up trying to understand chip names and model numbers a long time ago.
GPUs and CPUs are the worst - I have absolutely no clue whether a particular number / model is better / worse than any other.
I let my suppliers deal with it - I tell them what I want, they send me a spec, I google to ensure the chip numbers do what I want in terms of core-speed, number of cores, etc.
It's not hard to come up with a sensible numbering / naming system, but if Intel didn't have a page for every chip that just says number of cores, speed, etc. then I'd have absolutely no clue. Changing it to colours isn't helping matters either - that just reeks of marketing where everyone thinks they need to have "Gold" rather than "Silver" when there's probably little gain for most people.
For the same reason, I stopped buying separate CPUs and motherboards many years ago and nowadays I don't even tend to buy PSUs etc. separately. Because the combination needs to be correct and I'm not going to waste my time and effort only to get it wrong.
Everything from CPU sockets, to PSU power draw (don't forget to check the 12V rail!), to PCIe speed,to card profile height - after a while it just gets so boring, and I'm paying people to supply me the gear, so I let them do the legwork.
But the situation for consumers is actually completely the flip of that. People ask me about buying laptops. I say "check it has the ports you want". No point paying a fortune for a laptop that doesn't have enough USB, and if you buy enough USB or whatever you want for it, it'll be fast enough to do what you want nowadays. Even the cheapest gaming laptops are stupendous in specification and able to play anything I have on my Steam account (if my 6-year-old laptop can do it, too!).
Don't care about the numbers, or the exact model of chip, or anything like that. If you want a cheapy thing just for office, buy a cheapy thing just for office. If you want a gamer's thing for high-end gaming, buy something that's pitched at gamers and comes with the Razer gaming mice or whatever. Pretty much, that's a better indicator than faffing with all the statistics - which although I could understand, nobody else does and I just don't have the time to be bothered to do the research.
Don't even get me started on "does AMD graphics card X perform better than nVidia graphics card Y?"
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It's a CPU. Even if you pick horribly wrong but are still in the ballpark for price what are you going to lose? A few percent of performance?
a bad omen (Score:2)
I hate this shit. This is going to become such a nightmare in three to five years when these CPUs begin to hit the resale market. Typing "Xeon E5" into eBay proved too damn useful, so now this.
I'm trying to imagine myself typing "gold + anything" into eBay, and failing miserably.
Or any other search bar, without requiring "Coinage Act of 1792" peril impervious sunshades.
Intel is lately taking a sharp turn back to their Edward "RoDRAM" Hyde persona. You see this with Optane and Optame Memory. And now this
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You know, I would give quite a bit to see the Xeon Pentium D become known in street slang as the "Xeon Redhead".
Between the Xeon Bronze and the Xeon Silver, I'll take the Xeon Redhead every time.
___
Ricky: You've got some 'splaining to do.
Lucy: Er, uhhhh, cold fusion?
Ricky: Really? Cold fusion?
Lucy: Yeah! Cold fusion!
Software Licencing Implications (Score:1)
Awesome, but how will this affect my ridiculous Oracle licensing?