Giver of skulls
Some companies refuse to boot games that aren’t running Windows 11 in secure boot mode with TPM 2.0 for remote attestation, using the TPM as a hardware ID that’s difficult to fake. Ignoring half the PC gamers who are on Windows 10 is worth it for them for fighting cheaters alone.
I don’t think they will ban anyone until the first microcode cheats are proven to exist, but after that things may turn sideways for some AMD owners in some games.
If the scene is willing to pay people enough, I can see cheaters use this to write cheats that are undetectable by the OS. Right now, VM detection and PCIe bus monitoring for DMA devices seems to catch the most proficient cheaters, but it the CPU can turn your increment function into a multiplication, all bets are off. If cheaters do go this route, I expect game companies to blacklist these CPUs entirely.
Altering the CPU instructions could be very useful for reverse engineering, as debugger detection could be worked around on the CPU level. You could also use it to alter and monitor things like encryption functions. Malware could use microcode to write an entire class of CPU instructions custom to the malware/infection/infected PC itself, making it impossible to reverse engineer it using standard means. How powerful this stuff really is depends on how much free space there is in the memory that contains the microcode, but it’s pretty cool and scary stuff, depending on if your intentions are good or bad.
Intel used to have SGX, a processor component that was designed to run isolated code that not even the OS could manage. The only official way to play Blu-ray on PC, Powerlink, made heavy use of that for hiding DRM code. SGX got breached with SPECTRE/MELTDOWN, though, and Intel dropped it somewhere around the 9th Gen core processors for desktop CPUs. If AMD has a similar feature I don’t know about, that can be presumed broken on these chips now.
The new AMD 9950X3D CPU has 128MiB of L3 cache. Windows 95 installs to about 60MiB in total. Doom takes up 12MiB for all episodes. That means in theory you could load all of Windows 95 and DOOM into the L3 cache with some room to spare.
Of course this wouldn’t work out in practice because you’d lose those cache lines at some point during execution. However, Intel does have a part in its boot process where it runs a miniature OS in cache alone, but that’s part of the CPU design and probably can’t be altered.
If you could hijack the temporary “use cache as RAM” stage, you’d still lack video output or game input. I don’t think you can initialize the I/O components without completely clobbering the cache?
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While that works pretty well, I find it strange how little people use the ability to tap an NFC tag to instantly connect. Getting the camera pointed at a code only takes a second but tapping a sticker is even quicker.
I guess most people don’t know about that feature.
To be fair, DOCSIS 4 uses tk be called something stupid like “DOCSIS 3.1 full duplex” so a lot of areas reporting 3.1 may actually be running 4.
I personally would get a modem with DOCSIS 4 if I had to buy a new one. Replacing WiFi is quite cheap and if access points get flaky there’s always ethernet, but I would get the most up to date stuff on the upstream side just in case the ISP decides to upgrade their network.
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We’ll have to wait and see. AMD has about 31% hardware share on the Steam hardware survey (which includes the AMD driven Steam Deck of course) and Windows 10 makes up 53% of Team’s user base. Would cutting off 31% from the 44% or PC gamers really hurt their bottom line enough to not warrant anti cheating technology? It’s a significant chunk of gamers, but they’re already dropping literally most PC gamers anyway.
If AMD/Intel were close to a 50/50 split the story may be different, but unfortunately Intel still has most of the PC market share. I think gamers may be tricked into calling AMD hardware “cheater hardware” before calling out their favourite games companies.