It’s been a long time since the flaws and other vulnerabilities are no longer center stage. But that was without counting on a little news from the summer, SQUIPwhich particularly affects AMD Ryzen. To counter a vulnerability, the solution is generally always the same: a soft patch which solves the problem but which still consumes resources, even modest ones. The problem with SQUIP is that apparently the solution is to disable SMT (ie multi-threading). So here is a flaw that might potentially handicap owners of AMD CPUs.
The specific design of AMD Zen CPUs means that they would be the only ones affected. According to a computer science researcher at the Graz University of Technology (Austria), this flaw affects AMD processors and not Intel processors due to separate multi-level scheduling queues, while Intel uses a single scheduler . According to AMD, virtually all processors AMD Zen 1 , Zen 2 et Zen 3 of the company are concerned. The Athlon 3000 would also be affected.
What is disturbing in this story is that AMD has not provided, for the moment, a real solution to counter the SQUIP vulnerability. The Reds consider this vulnerability to be of medium importance. At this moment, the only recommended solution to counter SQUID is to disable the SMT of our AMD CPU. Obviously, such an operation entails a major degradation of the performances. The only question that really arises therefore concerns the extent of the distribution of SQUID. AMD puts the ball back in the court of the developers who must take action if they are affected (by disabling the SMT?). But if the problems grow, will we agree to voluntarily castrate our processors by 50% of their performance?