Intel Pumageddon: Broadband chip bug haunts Chipzilla's past, present and future Intel says the performance issues that have dogged its Puma 6 gigabit broadband modem chipset also affect the Puma 5 and Puma 7 family. A Chipzilla spokesperson confirmed to The Register on Tuesday that a TCP/UDP latency issue that makes home and business gateways powered by Puma 6 processors trivial to knock offline is also …
Not fully relevant because I'm pretty sure there isn't a Puma chip in there, but how does the Tivo provide streaming of Internet resources like Nextflix?
I think that the usual TV channels will be broadcast by the head end, but I am assuming that Netflix will be streamed over the Internet, as with FreeSat boxes.
So does the VM Tivo have some kind of DOCSIS modem inside or is there a gateway somewhere at the head end?
I have been wondering for a while because we have an original SuperHub in modem mode giving us about 160 Mb/sec throughout the day but iPlayer and Netflix seem to buffer a lot, especially in the evenings.
Oh, and I am entitled to an upgrade to 200 Mb/sec which entails an SH3. So far I have resisted the temptation.
Our SH3 needs a reboot about once a week (which takes a good five minutes before you get connectivity again).
Oh, and it won't work correctly in modem mode (the connection would drop every fifteen minutes), so buying a decent router turned out to be a waste of money.
Apart from that it works ok.
I have a Virgin V6 box if that's what you are referring to? It doesn't have a modem in it, you connect to the Superhub via Ethernet or Wireless. Or a 3rd party router if you put the Superhub into modem mode.
It's a slow buggy piece of crap by the way, while no fan of Murdock's Sky, having spend the weekend with my wife's family and using their Sky Q box, the Sky Q is far, far, far superior.
Virgin are being a little economical with the truth. There are 3 different hubs in use SH 2, SH 2ac and SH 3. I had an SH2 that was knackered and the visiting engineer didn't have any replacements so gave me an SH 2ac instead. It was already capable of DOCSIS3 when installed and ramped up to full speed as soon as my tiny bit of the country was enabled.
SH2 was no longer being used in new installs at that time and VM were giving new customers either an SH 2ac or SH3 as the SH 3 was still brand new and in short supply. You may still be able to get the SH 2ac, this is a NetGear based router and uses the Broadcom chipset so has been very reliable for me.
Supplying your own router wont make a difference
The issue is the modem in the superhub
So before the interwebs gets to your router it gets slowed down by the system performing the various tasks using software rather than the hardware controls
Virgin don't give a shit because you can either take it or go to the competition. users who realise they are being shafted are a tiny % of their user-base.
Had the old Tivo and that wasn't connected to the SuperHub it was only connected to the TV part of the cable. This is partly why the old Tivos performance was utterly carp.
The new Tivo, on the other hand is connected to both the SH and the TV cable so Netflix and iPlayer etc are fetched over the internet and is an immeasurably better experience than the old Tivo.
Having an SH 2ac I get none of the issues with the SH 3 and also full 200 down, except for really busy times when it sometimes drops to 150 so the new Tivo has always been pretty sharp in performance.
Then perhaps they should have made sure their hardware was not s**t before they rolled it out?
"it appears from network throughput graphs that the chipset is running a routine task every couple of seconds that stalls packet processing, inserting bursts of lag into connections."
WTF's that about? What is so f**king vital that everything else has to stop while this gets done?
Interesting comment that this affects chipsets built around both ARM and Atom processors.
Intel could not have been so stupid as to do another "Management engine" drop of untested processor hardware running un reviewed code, could they?
The information above about the V6 not requiring a connection to the actual cable network is incorrect as it still uses DVB-C.
https://my.virginmedia.com/content/dam/virgoBrowse/docs/Virgin-TV-V6-QuickStart-Guide-for-New-Customers.pdf
The V6 uses both DVB-C as well as the ethernet to connect to internet based resources.
Cable operators let you buy your own cable modem, at least in the US, so once Intel releases the fix you could buy a new one from the first OEM that integrates that fix into their product, instead of waiting an unknown amount of time (possibly forever) for the one you rent from your cable company to get the fix.
Unless your cable company doesn't charge a monthly fee for using one they provide, it is cheaper to own it yourself anyway.
I had an engineer visit for another reson but he's not heard of it and the support on the phone pleaded ignorance, more likely they were instructed not to comment. They charge so much for a gamer package which isn't so much gamer as it is streamer, a gamer doesn't want lag spikes.
People should be more vocal about this as they are more likely to deny knowledge and sweep it under the carpet if it's just a few fed up gamers they can afford to loose.
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