Intel processors artificially slowed down by half
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In August, it became known that a number of common processors from Intel, which were considered record-breaking a few years ago, were significantly slowed down “on command from the center”: the cause of the slowdown was an anti-virus update from the manufacturer. Users of PCs with these chips – and we are talking about processors for workstations and servers – are faced with a dilemma: slow down for security or maintain speed, risking data leakage. Whom this problem will affect in Russia – found out “MK”.
It all started with a large-scale “vulnerability” – until recently it was simply called a “Trojan” – called Downfall and was disclosed by Intel on August 9 this year. Using this security hole, attackers can steal data and other sensitive information from computers equipped with Intel processors released approximately from 2015 to 2019 (for advanced “intel drivers”: from Skylake 6th generation to Rocket Lake and Tiger Lake 11th generation).
“Memory optimizations in several generations of Intel processors have been found to allow software that is not properly trusted to access the hardware’s internal memory registers,” explained Daniel Mogami, senior researcher at Google.
The processor manufacturer almost immediately released an update for devices affected by this vulnerability. “While exploitation of this vulnerability outside of a lab environment is unlikely, microcode-level updates have been released for affected platforms,” Intel said, emphasizing that recent generations of processors (Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, and Sapphire Rapid) are not affected by the vulnerability.
The developers themselves admitted that the update would slow down the processors – the figures were “up to 50%” of the performance loss. The update “rolled up” automatically on some computers – their users felt “slowdown”, especially on graphical tasks. According to the results of independent tests, depending on the type of tasks, the slowdown ranged from 6% to 39%.
Owners of vulnerable series processors, however, have a choice: they can refuse to update, while maintaining the machine’s performance. However, then the vulnerability of the data will persist.
“Typical news of “white people”, which is practically irrelevant for Russia,” Nikolai Kalinin, a computer repair and setup master, told MK. – Let’s start with the fact that Intel has not been working in Russia since last year, and even the manufacturer’s website can only be accessed via VPN. Accordingly, there can be no automatic update – on the contrary, you need to take special gestures to get this update.
In addition, there are not so many computers in Russia on Intel processors from 2015-2019. During these years, according to the interlocutor of MK, competing processor manufacturers were actively promoting – in particular, it was “non-Intel” microcircuits that were used in those years in most popular laptops and workstations.
“What can be more or less critical is the servers that were updated in many companies and data centers in those years, and it was about “Intel” chips,” the master explained. “But, most likely, last year, most administrators closed automatic updates, so there will hardly be any kind of collapse.
However, users of the most ordinary computers and the most ordinary Moscow Internet still felt some slowdown. Unless, of course, it seemed – because we are already used to the fact that the work of computer technology slows down over the years even on approximately the same tasks.
“In general, of course, it’s an excellent marketing ploy: buy our new “elephants” if you need speed, otherwise the old ones are “rotten,” Nikolai Kalinin ironically. – In general, it is known that old processor architectures are artificially slowed down so that people should not use technology for too long, but there is something new here to make such fresh products so open.
However, all these problems, as was said, are not directly related to Russia and Russian users – all major processor manufacturers have officially left the Russian market and do not offer auto-updates. Nevertheless, as the MK correspondent was told in the ΙΤ-department of one of the Russian banks, at least some of the credit institutions continue to install updates using VPN – the bank’s rules require maximum security by any means (and the possibility of malicious interventions by the manufacturers themselves bankers do not seem to believe).
And this means that “braking” may well meet us on any of the banking or any other large-corporate ΙΤ-platforms. Speed can easily be sacrificed for security – and this is even quite justified, if only we are really talking about security.
Newspaper headline:
“Intelian” strike
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