I remember hearing plenty of whispering that Intel had a major bug disclosure coming up, but for most of that time I feel like the majority of speculation was centered around the Intel ME.
Sadly my immediate reaction to this post on /r/sysadmin was to discount it, or rather attribute it to some external factor that nobody could possibly figure out and entirely unrelated to the MRI. In this case I was quite happy to be proven wrong by the follow up posts and subsequent article.
I'm really curious why something they can generalize to "helium leaking into the quartz oscillator" only affected Apple products. What feat of manufacturing keeps a broad range of OEMs safe on the Android side but so eludes Apple? Worse yet, was some "cost savings" engineered between iphone 5s and 6 that ultimately introduced this issue?
It wasn't a quartz oscillator - it was the MEMS oscillator that Apple was using in place of a quartz oscillator that is speculated to be the root cause.
"But quartz oscillators have some problems. They don’t keep time as well at high (and low) temperatures, and they’re a relatively large component—1×3 mm or so. In their quest for smaller and smaller hardware, Apple has recently started using MEMS timing oscillators from a specialized company called SiTime to replace quartz components.
Specifically, they’re using the SiT512, 'the world’s smallest, lowest power 32 kHz oscillator.' "
So it was size, not cost that led Apple to be using a susceptible component.
I remember hearing plenty of whispering that Intel had a major bug disclosure coming up, but for most of that time I feel like the majority of speculation was centered around the Intel ME.
Sadly my immediate reaction to this post on /r/sysadmin was to discount it, or rather attribute it to some external factor that nobody could possibly figure out and entirely unrelated to the MRI. In this case I was quite happy to be proven wrong by the follow up posts and subsequent article.
I'm really curious why something they can generalize to "helium leaking into the quartz oscillator" only affected Apple products. What feat of manufacturing keeps a broad range of OEMs safe on the Android side but so eludes Apple? Worse yet, was some "cost savings" engineered between iphone 5s and 6 that ultimately introduced this issue?
It wasn't a quartz oscillator - it was the MEMS oscillator that Apple was using in place of a quartz oscillator that is speculated to be the root cause.
The other phones involved still used quartz.
From the article:
"But quartz oscillators have some problems. They don’t keep time as well at high (and low) temperatures, and they’re a relatively large component—1×3 mm or so. In their quest for smaller and smaller hardware, Apple has recently started using MEMS timing oscillators from a specialized company called SiTime to replace quartz components.
Specifically, they’re using the SiT512, 'the world’s smallest, lowest power 32 kHz oscillator.' "
So it was size, not cost that led Apple to be using a susceptible component.