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The "nutty"ness comes from people getting frustrated with intel fucking up the security of yet another feature they promised, and intel's overall poor security
by guug 7y ago
The "nutty"ness comes from people getting frustrated with intel fucking up the security of yet another feature they promised, and intel's overall poor security record.
Luckily there are other vendors who seem to know what they're doing: We just received our first batch of non-intel servers at work and have no intention of returning to intel for the foreseeable future. What they offer is simply not worth the risk. I expect more companies to follow suit.
- ehvatum 7y agoAt the level where large, security-centric organizations make decisions, these instances argue for getting AMD in the door like nothing else that I can recall. So, it's a good time for AMD to have such performant hardware and a process advantage. If it stays this way for a decade, I'll be able to put in a PO for AMD hardware...
- greyhair 7y agoThe problem is, these leaky cache issues come from 'performant' hardware. It is the pipeline optimization that leads to the side channel. There are cache architectures (such as pseudo random replacement) that are much more difficult to perform side channel attacks on, but have slightly lower performance. Intel's problem has been its relentless pursuit of per clock performance, and that has led to some of these side channel attacks. Cache coherency on multi-core is hard. My guess is that if the market share of Intel and AMD were swapped, you would see similar cache attacks on AMD.
- ngneer 7y agoWhen the market rewards secure design, you can make that complaint. Since the market does not reward secure design, expect investments in security to be commensurate. You cannot have it both ways.
- guug 7y agoNot a complaint but merely stating the obvious.
- mlyle 7y agoThe market is noticing that we're losing a whole lot of performance on Intel to these security-related mitigations, though...
- empiricus 7y agoIntel reports record profits again.
- ngneer 7y agoThank you. Apparently, the stockholders agree with my assessment.
- mlyle 7y agoThis doesn't mean that Intel hasn't been affected negatively by the resurgence of AMD in the processor business. AMD is taking several billion dollars of revenue, and every dollar of that costs Intel much more than $1. A noticeable part of AMD's newfound competitiveness comes from the various performance taxes that Intel has had to pay for speculative execution mitigation. It's worth noting, too, that Intel has diversified-- the processor business is only one very important business to Intel.
- xondono 7y agoProfit in infrastructure is a delayed indicator, it talks about how the company was doing, not how is it doing now.
- jnordwick 7y agoWhat do you do? The vulnerabilities don't apply to a vast majority of situations (meltdown was about the only one and it has been patched - more of a big). Unless you are running untrusted VM from others, you're not making a rational, knowledgeable decision. Most people are just using this to falsely justify their Intel hate, similar to Microsoft in the 2000s.