A nasty Intel Puma 6 chipset (x86 SoC) bug, which has caused latency spikes and packet loss for owners of Virgin Media’s latest SuperHub 3 (ARRIS TG2492S/CE) cable broadband router in the United Kingdom, will soon be patched by a new firmware release.
At the end of last year we reported that various Intel Puma 6 based routers (e.g. Arris Surfboard SB6190, Hitron CGNV4 and Compal CH7465-LG etc.), not just the SuperHub 3, all appeared to be suffering from the aforementioned problem and this was particularly noticeable on ultrafast (200Mbps+) broadband connections (here).
In short, the Central Processing Unit (CPU) inside the modem component of the router was taking on too much work while processing network packets, which caused the chipset to run a high-priority maintenance task every few seconds. Owners noticed that this task was occupying the CPU a bit too much and causing momentary latency spikes (increases of 200 milliseconds+), including a little packet loss.
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Big spikes in latency, even if only occurring for a moment, are no good for response time sensitive Internet applications like fast paced multiplayer video / computer gaming. At the time Intel said they were “aware of an issue with the Puma 6 system-on-chip software that impacts latency and are working to address it.” Virgin Media does have a partial fix for this but the full solution still needs to come from Intel.
The good news is that Intel finally put out an engineering release with new Puma 6 code in February 2017, which claims to resolve the problem. The code has been slowly making its way out to hardware manufacturers and they in turn have started to work it into beta firmware. Early results look promising.
Naturally we queried this with Virgin Media and they informed us that their parent, Liberty Global, had held a meeting with Intel last Monday (6th March 2017) where the issue was discussed. The good news is that a fix is coming, albeit not immediately.
A Spokesperson for Virgin Media told ISPreview.co.uk:
“The firmware update is currently being tested and should be issued in the coming months.”
At present the new update is only in the very early stages of closed testing. Anything that changes a key aspect of how the chipset works will need a lot of Quality Assurance (QA) work before being distributed to a wider base of testers. Only after that will it finally make its way out to everybody else, which is why Virgin Media is being coy with their time-frame.
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The last thing that any ISP would want to do is issue a fix for one thing and in the process end up breaking a whole bunch of other stuff. Credits to Carl for pointing us to Intel’s update.
NOTE: This article is not directly related to the separate performance issues that appear to have been occurring on Virgin Media’s wider broadband network this week.
UPDATE 20th June 2017:
Last week we asked for an update on the Intel Puma 6 latency fix for Virgin Media’s SuperHub 3 (aka – Hub 3.0) routers and were told that the field trials of a new firmware update are due to “begin shortly“. Sadly we don’t know any more than that.
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