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I'm skeptical that Intel really has that much of a problem, and the investors in the stock market seem to agree. Intel only has a problem if alternatives come t

I'm skeptical that Intel really has that much of a problem, and the investors in the stock market seem to agree. Intel only has a problem if alternatives come to be seen as economically viable. And right now it doesn't seem like there's any particular danger of this happening. Pundits want to say that there's a huge thing here, because pundits don't optimize for the truth. They optimize for clicks. So you really need to be careful looking to their writing for the truth.

abritinthebay 9y ago
Using the current stock market reaction as a bellwether for anything but short term (1-6 months) outlook is a bit silly. In the longer term (1-3 years) Intel has a very large problem. Especially as they are being eaten alive in non-desktop class cpus right now. These issues may not be a knockout punch, or even have them on the ropes, but it made them stumble and they look vulnerable.
gonational 9y ago
How do you factor into your thesis the possibility of a multinational class-action lawsuit?
jolan 9y ago
It's not even close to being over -- https://skyfallattack.com/ https://skyfallattack.com/
- bonzini 9y ago
  There seems to be consensus that it's a hoax.
  - jolan 9y ago
    Is there an embargo? Is it a silly play on the James Bond reference that Spectre represented? Either way pretty funny since you can't know for sure after this fiasco. Botched micro code updates, Intel engineers arguing with each other on the linux kernel mailing list, etc. Intel's best and brightest have had 6+ months to work on proper mitigations in secret and this is the result. https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=151559244214217&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=151559244214217&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=151559367514704&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=151559367514704&w=2
    - bonzini 9y ago
      Silly play is what I heard as most likely. Yeah, handling of mitigations for Spectre has been awful during the embargo period, but I am very happy with the result we're getting now. It's taking less than three weeks to get everything sorted out.
- ithkuil 9y ago
  Does the embargo have a hard deadline?
yuhong 9y ago
I remember the selling on insider information claims, and was skeptical that it would matter that much.
IronKettle 9y ago
Disclaimer: I know relatively little about differences between processor architectures, so this might be totally wrong because Intel might just have them over a barrel on this. I think the major difference between this and, say, the Equifax blowup, is that Intel's institutional clients are affected by this. I'm not sure what they're thinking internally, but it stands to reason that they're probably a bit upset at least: Their CapEx just went up to maintain the same level of computing power. I'd be surprised if internally Google is buying the "AMD is just as affected" line that Intel's been throwing out. So, I wouldn't be surprised if they're at least evaluating AMD. Or, again, maybe Intel just totally has them over a barrel and transitioning isn't feasible at all. It certainly doesn't paint a great picture of Intel's future if AMD does catch up, though.
- sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
  I think the big institutional clients are always evaluating AMD, and even more exotic options. But I don't think this bug has materially affected the equation here. Savvy buyers understand that there will occasionally be bugs, and this one has already been mitigated. How Intel verbally responds to the issue matters much less than their actions, because the words do not affect the costs of using their products, and the actions do. I am deeply skeptical of the commentary on Intel's attitude and press releases. I really doubt that matters much to most buyers.
  - whoryou 9y ago
    What qualifies this opinion? Value of nobody's on the net and all..
  - IronKettle 9y ago
    > this one has already been mitigated Correct me if I'm wrong: It's been mitigated by applying a patch that has fairly severe performance implications, no? How does this not affect the institutional clients' bottom line in that case?
    - ethbro 9y ago
Spooky23 9y ago
Don’t be generous to Intel. I work in a vertical strategic to Intel, and get regularly called on by them and get NDA presentations and the ability to talk to engineers about strategic projects. For this incident, I got an email a few hours after the embargo was lifted, that essentially said that it was no big deal and referenced public information. The purpose of the communication was to have people like me message up the chain that this was no big deal. That misdirection is inexcusable, particularly when they could have given meaningful guidance under NDA. We had some follow up questions, which weren’t really answered. We were directed to hardware OEMs, as ETA for microcode updates are out of their control and according to Intel are the full responsibility of the OEM. In reality, Intel was struggling to deliver the code, and the OEMs we deal with issued patches in hours, and had to pull back updates due to Intel code revisions. Personally, I do have alternatives for strategic parts of the business that drive high margin Intel sales. Many critical aspects of my business can run on Intel or Power platforms, and we can engineer solutions either way in similar cost footprints. Less strategic aspects of the business, like end user compute now have niche competitors that can gobble up Intel business very quickly. Half of my desktop users run on VDI, mostly with AMD thin clients. 50% of my constituencies can run their core line of business functions on iOS. iPad with a keyboard could reduce my Intel desktop spend by 50-75% for 2-3 years.
- ryanlol 9y ago
  > purpose of the communication was to have people like me message up the chain that this was no big deal. That misdirection is inexcusable But perhaps this was no big deal. We've seen years of research suggesting that modern CPUs are full of issues like this. There's probably a good decade worth of papers on cache side channel attacks. See https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/448.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/448.pdf for example Perhaps the big deal is that there are still people who think they can safely run multiple different things on a single machine?
  - rocqua 9y ago
    The 'bombshell' of meltdown isn't about cache side-channel attacks. Instead, it is about the use of out-of-order execution (meltdown) and speculative execution (spectre) to get side effects. It doesn't matter much that these side effects happen to be cache state. For meltdown, it matters that page protection is essentially broken. For spectre it matters that speculation on indirect branches are essentially attacker controlled. Both attacks, in their practical form, use cache timing as the side-channel to extract information. But the surprise is the control over (as the paper calls them) 'transient executions'.
gralx 9y ago
Pundits and editorial staff sensationalize. Investors collectively behave like a "drunken psycho". Neither are of themselves bellwethers of a company's future success. We might instead point to facts. Major tech companies are getting into chip design. Apple's foray into fabless last year almost destroyed the value of Imagine and Dialog shares. If they and other companies are successful, we can see the same happen to Intel.
- matt4077 9y ago
  The article you’re mocking uses that very fact, and many more, to make its case: The company has no competitor in server chips at the moment, but this episode could change that. Microsoft and Google have publicly praised Qualcomm Inc.’s first server chip, which went on sale in November, and Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook all have internal divisions working on chip designs.
asgioiobuio 9y ago
EPYC is already economically viable. If it's not seen as viable, that's for business rather than technical reasons. It has more cores, better IO, and after these patches it's no longer clear that Intel has simply better performance per core.
- FBISurveillance 9y ago
  Just a random rant: Our data team onprem infra is based on EPYC and boy it's wonderful. We've just placed an order for another 200 EPYC-based servers for our onprem setup that's set to arrive in Q1 but folks already can't wait. AMD people should be proud, as customers we're really happy. I hope that GCP would have EPYC-based platform at some point too.
  - betaby 9y ago
    Where do you source EPYC servers?
    - chx 9y ago
      Right now your favorite Supermicro seller is the best bet. Right now. In two weeks, it's Dell. R6415, R7415, R7425.
    - FBISurveillance 9y ago
      What chx said, but in our case we have custom racks with higher density of servers due to spacing constraints so it's not standard Supermicros.
chimeracoder 9y ago
> I'm skeptical that Intel really has that much of a problem, and the investors in the stock market seem to agree. It's way, way, way too soon to judge the long-term implications of Meltdown and Spectre on Intel. If their clients want to switch, it'll take months and years to do that. That doesn't mean they won't do it, but it means we won't really know the full extent for a while. The stock price is a really crude metric. For judging the long-term implications of this, we can't look at how the stock has performed in the last two weeks alone and extract any meaningful information. My prediction: nobody big is going to switch away from Intel entirely, but they will start to prioritize investments in technology built on its competitors, as a way to hedge their future risk. That's definitely bad for Intel, because over time, it'll reduce their lock-in.
- sambe 9y ago
  Intel stock is down ~10% and AMD up ~10% since end of December. I'm not even sure why people are saying the stock market thinks it's not a problem. The stock market represents a weighted average of possible futures and it has priced in some damage. Is the idea that Intel should instantly drop 90%?
  - avar 9y ago
    As I write this Intel stock is around $44, up from $41 last October, and that $41 is at an almost 18-year high, it hasn't been this high since the Dot-com bubble. Look at the longer term graph[1]. Similar story for AMD[2] except it's at an all time high since 2007-ish. The reason people are saying Intel stock isn't down is because of that, when what HN considers the worst thing ever is indistinguishable from fluctuations for the last 3 months the market doesn't think it's a big deal. 1. https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+stock https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+stock 2. https://www.google.com/search?q=amd+stock https://www.google.com/search?q=amd+stock
    - sambe 9y ago
      This didn’t become public last October.
wavegeek 9y ago
> the investors in the stock market seem to agree It's down several percent since the announcement in a rising market. More generally they have underperformed the SP500 over the past 2 years and AMD in particular is blowing them away. Yes they have a problem. The current CEO seems more interested in politics than technology. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/10/intel-cuts-300m-in-jobs-research-education-and-talent-to-fund-feminist-frequency/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/10/intel-cut... (inb4 I don't like Breitbart)
kaftoy 9y ago
Agree. Intel has as much of a problem as VW had after diesel-gate: none. Same will be valid for Apple's throttling scandal. Big corps like this may experience some little storms here and there, but there is no iceberg big enough for them. Articles like this exist just for the sake of writing something and making some money.
Bitcoin_McPonzi 9y ago
I tend to agree. This is a setback, but all vendors will have to rethink how they do out of order and predictive execution and caching even if this time it was Intel who seemed the most vulnerable. I think the vendor best poised to challenge Intel is NVidia. If they are able to put a number of Arm cores, in a Phi-like organization, on their GPUs they may be an alternative for many datacenter big-data applications.
placebo 9y ago
While I don't underestimate the scope and possible ramifications, I still don't understand the immediate threat to the average person. The malicious hacker that is after secret personal information does not need to go to the trouble of writing a trojan that exploits Spectre or Meltdown when a simple keylogger and file scanner would be much simpler and probably more effective. The article itself states: "So far, Meltdown and Spectre probably pose less risk to the average person than, say, a simple phishing attack in which a hacker tries to send you to a malicious website. They won’t lead to the kind of widespread panic that resulted from the 2017 hack of Equifax’s customer database. But that could change. Hackers who hadn’t tried to break into Intel’s hardware, believing there was no way it would leave a side door open, are now seeking ways in." "But that could change" is a vague term that doesn't mean much to me. Again - not trivialising this nor saying Intel shouldn't do some soul searching, but I'd like to better understand the justification for the apparent hysteria - unless, of course some people more experienced in security would care to explain what it is I'm missing here. P.S. One thing I wanted to check was whether Spectre/Meltdown breaches could somehow be caused by manipulating a web browser. Some searching revealed that this is indeed a possibility so at this point, everyone feel free to panic :-)
white-flame 9y ago
Regarding the stock price and business revenue, it might be naive and certainly depends on if lawsuits go forward, but these bugs could prompt customers to upgrade their chips when the next chip revisions are out, increasing sales over pre-disclosure expectations.

abritinthebay 9y ago

Using the current stock market reaction as a bellwether for anything but short term (1-6 months) outlook is a bit silly. In the longer term (1-3 years) Intel has a very large problem. Especially as they are being eaten alive in non-desktop class cpus right now. These issues may not be a knockout punch, or even have them on the ropes, but it made them stumble and they look vulnerable.

gonational 9y ago

How do you factor into your thesis the possibility of a multinational class-action lawsuit?

jolan 9y ago

It's not even close to being over -- https://skyfallattack.com/ https://skyfallattack.com/

bonzini 9y ago
There seems to be consensus that it's a hoax.
- jolan 9y ago
  Is there an embargo? Is it a silly play on the James Bond reference that Spectre represented? Either way pretty funny since you can't know for sure after this fiasco. Botched micro code updates, Intel engineers arguing with each other on the linux kernel mailing list, etc. Intel's best and brightest have had 6+ months to work on proper mitigations in secret and this is the result. https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=151559244214217&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=151559244214217&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=151559367514704&w=2 https://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=151559367514704&w=2
  - bonzini 9y ago
    Silly play is what I heard as most likely. Yeah, handling of mitigations for Spectre has been awful during the embargo period, but I am very happy with the result we're getting now. It's taking less than three weeks to get everything sorted out.
ithkuil 9y ago
Does the embargo have a hard deadline?

yuhong 9y ago

I remember the selling on insider information claims, and was skeptical that it would matter that much.

IronKettle 9y ago

Disclaimer: I know relatively little about differences between processor architectures, so this might be totally wrong because Intel might just have them over a barrel on this. I think the major difference between this and, say, the Equifax blowup, is that Intel's institutional clients are affected by this. I'm not sure what they're thinking internally, but it stands to reason that they're probably a bit upset at least: Their CapEx just went up to maintain the same level of computing power. I'd be surprised if internally Google is buying the "AMD is just as affected" line that Intel's been throwing out. So, I wouldn't be surprised if they're at least evaluating AMD. Or, again, maybe Intel just totally has them over a barrel and transitioning isn't feasible at all. It certainly doesn't paint a great picture of Intel's future if AMD does catch up, though.

sdhgaiojfsa 9y ago
I think the big institutional clients are always evaluating AMD, and even more exotic options. But I don't think this bug has materially affected the equation here. Savvy buyers understand that there will occasionally be bugs, and this one has already been mitigated. How Intel verbally responds to the issue matters much less than their actions, because the words do not affect the costs of using their products, and the actions do. I am deeply skeptical of the commentary on Intel's attitude and press releases. I really doubt that matters much to most buyers.
- whoryou 9y ago
  What qualifies this opinion? Value of nobody's on the net and all..
- IronKettle 9y ago
  > this one has already been mitigated Correct me if I'm wrong: It's been mitigated by applying a patch that has fairly severe performance implications, no? How does this not affect the institutional clients' bottom line in that case?
  - ethbro 9y ago

Spooky23 9y ago

Don’t be generous to Intel. I work in a vertical strategic to Intel, and get regularly called on by them and get NDA presentations and the ability to talk to engineers about strategic projects. For this incident, I got an email a few hours after the embargo was lifted, that essentially said that it was no big deal and referenced public information. The purpose of the communication was to have people like me message up the chain that this was no big deal. That misdirection is inexcusable, particularly when they could have given meaningful guidance under NDA. We had some follow up questions, which weren’t really answered. We were directed to hardware OEMs, as ETA for microcode updates are out of their control and according to Intel are the full responsibility of the OEM. In reality, Intel was struggling to deliver the code, and the OEMs we deal with issued patches in hours, and had to pull back updates due to Intel code revisions. Personally, I do have alternatives for strategic parts of the business that drive high margin Intel sales. Many critical aspects of my business can run on Intel or Power platforms, and we can engineer solutions either way in similar cost footprints. Less strategic aspects of the business, like end user compute now have niche competitors that can gobble up Intel business very quickly. Half of my desktop users run on VDI, mostly with AMD thin clients. 50% of my constituencies can run their core line of business functions on iOS. iPad with a keyboard could reduce my Intel desktop spend by 50-75% for 2-3 years.

ryanlol 9y ago
> purpose of the communication was to have people like me message up the chain that this was no big deal. That misdirection is inexcusable But perhaps this was no big deal. We've seen years of research suggesting that modern CPUs are full of issues like this. There's probably a good decade worth of papers on cache side channel attacks. See https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/448.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/448.pdf for example Perhaps the big deal is that there are still people who think they can safely run multiple different things on a single machine?
- rocqua 9y ago
  The 'bombshell' of meltdown isn't about cache side-channel attacks. Instead, it is about the use of out-of-order execution (meltdown) and speculative execution (spectre) to get side effects. It doesn't matter much that these side effects happen to be cache state. For meltdown, it matters that page protection is essentially broken. For spectre it matters that speculation on indirect branches are essentially attacker controlled. Both attacks, in their practical form, use cache timing as the side-channel to extract information. But the surprise is the control over (as the paper calls them) 'transient executions'.

gralx 9y ago

Pundits and editorial staff sensationalize. Investors collectively behave like a "drunken psycho". Neither are of themselves bellwethers of a company's future success. We might instead point to facts. Major tech companies are getting into chip design. Apple's foray into fabless last year almost destroyed the value of Imagine and Dialog shares. If they and other companies are successful, we can see the same happen to Intel.

matt4077 9y ago
The article you’re mocking uses that very fact, and many more, to make its case: The company has no competitor in server chips at the moment, but this episode could change that. Microsoft and Google have publicly praised Qualcomm Inc.’s first server chip, which went on sale in November, and Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook all have internal divisions working on chip designs.

asgioiobuio 9y ago

EPYC is already economically viable. If it's not seen as viable, that's for business rather than technical reasons. It has more cores, better IO, and after these patches it's no longer clear that Intel has simply better performance per core.

FBISurveillance 9y ago
Just a random rant: Our data team onprem infra is based on EPYC and boy it's wonderful. We've just placed an order for another 200 EPYC-based servers for our onprem setup that's set to arrive in Q1 but folks already can't wait. AMD people should be proud, as customers we're really happy. I hope that GCP would have EPYC-based platform at some point too.
- betaby 9y ago
  Where do you source EPYC servers?
  - chx 9y ago
    Right now your favorite Supermicro seller is the best bet. Right now. In two weeks, it's Dell. R6415, R7415, R7425.
  - FBISurveillance 9y ago
    What chx said, but in our case we have custom racks with higher density of servers due to spacing constraints so it's not standard Supermicros.

chimeracoder 9y ago

> I'm skeptical that Intel really has that much of a problem, and the investors in the stock market seem to agree. It's way, way, way too soon to judge the long-term implications of Meltdown and Spectre on Intel. If their clients want to switch, it'll take months and years to do that. That doesn't mean they won't do it, but it means we won't really know the full extent for a while. The stock price is a really crude metric. For judging the long-term implications of this, we can't look at how the stock has performed in the last two weeks alone and extract any meaningful information. My prediction: nobody big is going to switch away from Intel entirely, but they will start to prioritize investments in technology built on its competitors, as a way to hedge their future risk. That's definitely bad for Intel, because over time, it'll reduce their lock-in.

sambe 9y ago
Intel stock is down ~10% and AMD up ~10% since end of December. I'm not even sure why people are saying the stock market thinks it's not a problem. The stock market represents a weighted average of possible futures and it has priced in some damage. Is the idea that Intel should instantly drop 90%?
- avar 9y ago
  As I write this Intel stock is around $44, up from $41 last October, and that $41 is at an almost 18-year high, it hasn't been this high since the Dot-com bubble. Look at the longer term graph[1]. Similar story for AMD[2] except it's at an all time high since 2007-ish. The reason people are saying Intel stock isn't down is because of that, when what HN considers the worst thing ever is indistinguishable from fluctuations for the last 3 months the market doesn't think it's a big deal. 1. https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+stock https://www.google.com/search?q=intel+stock 2. https://www.google.com/search?q=amd+stock https://www.google.com/search?q=amd+stock
  - sambe 9y ago
    This didn’t become public last October.

wavegeek 9y ago

> the investors in the stock market seem to agree It's down several percent since the announcement in a rising market. More generally they have underperformed the SP500 over the past 2 years and AMD in particular is blowing them away. Yes they have a problem. The current CEO seems more interested in politics than technology. http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/10/intel-cuts-300m-in-jobs-research-education-and-talent-to-fund-feminist-frequency/ http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/09/10/intel-cut... (inb4 I don't like Breitbart)

kaftoy 9y ago

Agree. Intel has as much of a problem as VW had after diesel-gate: none. Same will be valid for Apple's throttling scandal. Big corps like this may experience some little storms here and there, but there is no iceberg big enough for them. Articles like this exist just for the sake of writing something and making some money.

Bitcoin_McPonzi 9y ago

I tend to agree. This is a setback, but all vendors will have to rethink how they do out of order and predictive execution and caching even if this time it was Intel who seemed the most vulnerable. I think the vendor best poised to challenge Intel is NVidia. If they are able to put a number of Arm cores, in a Phi-like organization, on their GPUs they may be an alternative for many datacenter big-data applications.

placebo 9y ago

While I don't underestimate the scope and possible ramifications, I still don't understand the immediate threat to the average person. The malicious hacker that is after secret personal information does not need to go to the trouble of writing a trojan that exploits Spectre or Meltdown when a simple keylogger and file scanner would be much simpler and probably more effective. The article itself states: "So far, Meltdown and Spectre probably pose less risk to the average person than, say, a simple phishing attack in which a hacker tries to send you to a malicious website. They won’t lead to the kind of widespread panic that resulted from the 2017 hack of Equifax’s customer database. But that could change. Hackers who hadn’t tried to break into Intel’s hardware, believing there was no way it would leave a side door open, are now seeking ways in." "But that could change" is a vague term that doesn't mean much to me. Again - not trivialising this nor saying Intel shouldn't do some soul searching, but I'd like to better understand the justification for the apparent hysteria - unless, of course some people more experienced in security would care to explain what it is I'm missing here. P.S. One thing I wanted to check was whether Spectre/Meltdown breaches could somehow be caused by manipulating a web browser. Some searching revealed that this is indeed a possibility so at this point, everyone feel free to panic :-)

white-flame 9y ago

Regarding the stock price and business revenue, it might be naive and certainly depends on if lawsuits go forward, but these bugs could prompt customers to upgrade their chips when the next chip revisions are out, increasing sales over pre-disclosure expectations.