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Intel hasn't had a very skillful 2022. While the company's quarterly performance has been excellent, information technology'south been repeatedly hammered past security flaws, some of which are baked into the fundamental structure of its microprocessors. While these flaws are non unique to Intel, the visitor has been uniquely exposed by its own market authorization and by certain design decisions it made years ago to enhance its CPU performance. To-date, the company has mostly reacted well, with good communication and prompt updates, only this week, it tried to gag anyone who applied a microcode patch under Linux to fix the Foreshadow flaw (the most contempo major security problem). Specifically, information technology attempted to block anyone from discussing the performance impact of the security updates.

That's a pregnant motion by Intel, because most of the fixes that have been pushed out for Meltdown and Spectre have at least a pocket-size touch on operation in some scenarios. In some cases, particularly with older chips and in certain workloads, the operation penalization tin can be x percent or more. This is a serious problem in an industry where functioning gains have been so pocket-sized, often averaging but a few percent per twelvemonth on a per-core basis. And Intel, evidently, didn't want people to observe that out.

Buried in the licensing document for the security patch was the following:

Unless expressly permitted nether the Agreement, You lot volition not, and will non let any third party to (i) use, copy, distribute, sell or offering to sell the Software or associated documentation; (iii) use or make the Software available for the use or benefit of tertiary parties; or (four) use the Software on Your products other than those that include the Intel hardware product(southward), platform(due south), or software identified in the Software; or (5) publish or provide any Software benchmark or comparison test results. (Emphasis added)

When this blew up in the user customs, every bit one might await, Intel swiftly backpeddled. The new license reads:

Redistribution and use in binary form, without modification, are permitted, provided that the post-obit conditions are met:

Redistributions must reproduce the above copyright detect and the post-obit disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

Neither the proper name of Intel Corporation nor the names of its suppliers may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

No reverse engineering, decompilation, or disassembly of this software is permitted.

"Binary course" includes any format that is usually used for electronic conveyance that is a reversible, bit-exact translation of binary representation to ASCII or ISO text, for example "uuencode."

Information technology'southward not uncommon to see these kinds of restrictions in enterprise deployments — it'due south really normal for large companies to merits the correct to prohibit any benchmarking of their products — but in Intel's instance, these demands to not-publish information are taking identify in an surroundings where the visitor's previous insistence on a black-box approach only ensured that security vulnerabilities shipped for decades in some of its fundamental products.

Given that Intel is launching a new line of CPUs after this twelvemonth with hardware repairs in identify for some of these issues, it makes sense that information technology doesn't desire to talk likewise much about the performance hit its chips accept from these fixes. An emphasis on whatsoever meaning functioning declines could exist used to either hand AMD CPUs a representative reward (which Intel obviously doesn't want) or to argue that whatever "new" performance improvements delivered by Cascade Lake are nada merely a restoration of performance that Intel's poor security practices removed. "Our new chips are twenty% faster and incorporate new security features," is a much more positive spin than "Our new chips improve performance by fixing the bits we bankrupt in the last ones. Can nosotros accept $2500?"

Now Read: New Foreshadow Flaw Cracks Intel SGX, Intel Details Cascade Lake Hardware Mitigations, and What is Speculative Execution?