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It's something of a self fulfilling prophecy I suspect. People use Intel because people use Intel. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" etc. As a sysadmin (who ad

by wlll 8y ago

It's something of a self fulfilling prophecy I suspect. People use Intel because people use Intel. "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" etc. As a sysadmin (who admittedly doesn't deal with hardware much) these issues with Intel chips (the mitigation of which can seriously decrease performance), and the relative ease with which AMD has come through the problems make me wonder if we would be better with AMD. I'm reminded of this experiment: https://www.dowellwebtools.com/tools/lp/Bo/psyched/16/Smoke-Filled-Room https://www.dowellwebtools.com/tools/lp/Bo/psyched/16/Smoke-... "People respond slower (or not at all) to emergency situations in the presence of passive others."

Leonid99 8y ago
> and the relative ease with which AMD has come through the problems make me wonder if we would be better with AMD. I think the only reason this is the case is the difference in market share. There are much more Intel processors out there, so finding an Intel vulnerability makes a much better academic paper (and much more lucrative for bad actors). AMD might have made some inroads into the enthusiast market lately, but with cloud providers they are basically non-existent. These guys buy (or manufacture) servers by tens of thousands. They hate rebooting servers, even if they got a VM live-migration stuff worked out (as everybody does these days). BIOS and RAM problems that people mention here make AMD a complete no-go. I'm sure that now there are people at Amazon/Google/Microsoft thinking hard about reducing their dependence on Intel, but I doubt we will see any difference for years.