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New Downfall Attack Could Lead to Sensitive Data Leakage on Intel Processors
Security researcher Daniel Moghimi discovered a new side-channel vulnerability affecting Intel processors that could be exploited to steal data from other users or apps running on the same computer. Dubbed Downfall, the vulnerability has been patched by Intel and mitigated by most major OS vendors.
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Intel oneDAL Available in ML.NET
The first preview release of ML.NET 3.0, available since December, contains the integration with Intel oneAPI Data Analytics Library that leverages SIMD extensions on 64-bit architectures, which are available on Intel and AMD processors.
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Cockroach Labs 2022 Cloud Report: AMD Outperforms Intel
Cockroach Labs recently released their annual cloud report which evaluates the performance of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud for common OLTP workloads. Differently from the past, this year’s report does not indicate a best overall provider, but concludes that AMD instances outperform Intel ones. ARM instances were not covered in the tests.
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Hardware Mitigation on Intel, Arm, and AMD CPUs Shown Ineffective against Spectre v2
Security researchers from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam showed the hardware mitigations to Spectre v2 attacks implemented in both Intel and Arm processors have fundamental flaws that make them vulnerable to branch history injection.
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Deep Learning Toolkit Intel OpenVINO Extends API, Improves Performance, and More
The latest release of Intel OpenVINO offers a cleaner API, expands support for natural language processing, and improves performance and portability thanks to its new AUTO plugin. InfoQ has spoken with senior director AI Intel OpenVINO Matthew Formica to learn more.
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Intel Loihi 2 and Lava Framework Aim to Advance Neuromorphic Computing Research
Intel introduced its second-generation neuromorphic chip, Loihi 2, with the aim to provide tools for research in the field of neuromorphic computing. In addition, Intel has released Lava, a software framework to build neuromorphic apps both on conventional and neuromorphic hardware.
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AWS Announces Amazon EC2 M6i Instances Powered by Latest-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
Recently AWS announced the availability of the new general-purpose Amazon EC2 M6i instances. The new Amazon EC2 M6i instances deliver up to 15 percent more performance and a better price when compared to the fifth-generation instances and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).
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New Exploit Breaks Current Spectre Defenses; Fixes Hard without Performance Impact
Researchers from the University of Virginia School of Engineering recently disclosed a new Spectre hardware exploit that can steal secrets via Intel/AMD micro-op caches and circumvents current Spectre defenses. Intel and AMD say no new guidance is needed. Researchers say suggested fixes are inconvenient to deploy or have performance drawbacks.
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Two Hidden Instructions Discovered in Intel CPUs Enable Microcode Modification
Security researchers Mark Ermolov, Dmitry Sklyarov, and Maxim Goryachy discovered two undocumented x86 instructions that can be used to modify the CPU microcode. The instructions can only be executed when the CPU runs in debug mode, which makes them not easily exploitable, though.
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55th Anniversary of Moore's Law
April 2020 marks 55 years since Intel co-founder Gordon Moore published ‘Cramming more components onto integrated circuits’. For over 50 years Intel and its competitors kept making Moore’s law come true, but more recently efforts to push down chip feature size have been hitting trouble with limitations in economics and physics that force us to consider what happens in a post Moore’s law world.
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Benchmarks for Amazon's Graviton2 Arm Processor
AnandTech has published 'Amazon's Arm-based Graviton2 against AMD and Intel' which includes comprehensive benchmarks across Amazon’s general purpose instances. The cost analysis section describes ‘An x86 Massacre’, as while the pure performance of the Arm chip is generally in the same region as the x86 competitors, its lower price means the price/performance is substantially better.
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Intel Working on New Data Parallel C++
Announced at its Software Technology Day in London, Intel new Data Parallel C++ aims to provide a unified, cross-industry, single-source language to program heterogeneous architectures.
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PortSmash is the Latest Side-Channel Attack Affecting Intel CPUs
Researchers have devised a new kind of timing attack to steal information from a different process running on the same core with SMT/hyper-threading enabled. By carefully measuring port contention delays when sending instructions to a shared core, the researchers could recover a private key from a different process. Intel CPUs are probably not the only ones affected.
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Continuous Integration at Intel for the Mesa Graphics Library
Mesa CI is a continuous integration system at Intel for running builds and compliance test suites for the Mesa graphics library. It runs across more than 200 systems and runs tens of millions of tests per day.
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MIT Researchers Propose DAWG Defense against Spectre and Meltdown
Security researchers from MIT claim to have devised a hardware solution to prevent cache timing attacks based on speculative execution, such as Spectre and Meltdown. Their approach, named Dynamically Allocated Way Guard (DAWG), splits the processor cache in variably-sized partitions to make it impossible for processes to snoop on other processes’ cache partitions.