Broken Hyperthreading. "(Dangerous) application and system misbehaviour, data corruption, and data loss" (with any OS) under certain specific conditions.
"Disable Hyperthreading immediately in unfixed systems. Contact system vendor to obtain an updated UEFI/BIOS which implements the fix."Intel microcode packages which fix this are available for some affected platforms and operating systems.
I'm actually surprised such a serious bug remained unnoticed (and unfixed) for so long. Apparently the "specific conditions" which cause this bug must occur very infrequently and/or generally compromises system data in "noncritical" ways.
On the plus side:
- this doesn't affect Core i5 parts (because they lack HT)
- this doesn't seem to present apocalyptic risk when gaming (because most games make poor or downright awful use of multi-threading - 4C/8T typically being roughly equivalent to 5C/5T, at best - and very few games running outside of VMs could/would use even 4 physical cores anyhow, let alone 8 virtualized cores)
But if you're not able to easily restore your WinOS and all your data (from a backup image or from scratch) then disable HT in BIOS and keep it disabled until this erratum gets fixed, lol, chance of failure appears very low but consequence of failure could be catastrophic!
Also being discussed in
this thread.
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