4 ms·

The engineering is great. People's bias likely stems from the numerous security scandals surrounding intel's CPUs in the last few years.

azinman2 7y ago
Hardly unique to intel's cpus... they're just the biggest target.
- rowanG077 7y ago
  That's simply not true the biggest target is ARM. Most of the worlds devices run ARM.
  - azinman2 7y ago
    Which also have side channel attacks... these and much more: [1] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-16/materials/eu-16-Lipp-ARMageddon-How-Your-Smartphone-CPU-Breaks-Software-Level-Security-And-Privacy-wp.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-16/materials/eu-16-Lipp-ARM... [2] https://duo.com/decipher/new-side-channel-attack-extracts-private-keys-from-some-qualcomm-chips https://duo.com/decipher/new-side-channel-attack-extracts-pr... [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/980.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/980.pdf
    - rowanG077 7y ago
      Still not even close to the clusterfuck that is Intel CPU's
      - azinman2 7y ago
        Well they’re typically not as superscalar in processing, which helps. But I wouldn’t make an assumption that ARM chips generally are more secure — plenty of weaknesses have been found, and doubtlessly many more exist. Security research has shown there are always new untapped directions to exploit, and really nothing can be assumed to be actually secure at this point. Like I said before, Intel is the big target, especially as they run the servers you access over the internet. ARM devices tend to be local and thus aren’t as valuable for side channel attacks. Instead, most attacks for ARM chips tend to be at the sandbox/OS level.
    - paulmd 7y ago
      to be a little more explicit: there are ARM chips that are affected by meltdown. People shit on Intel like it's their particular mistake, but POWER, ARM, and basically everyone's out-of-order cores except Ryzen were affected by Meltdown. It's some oddity of Ryzen's cache predictor that make it immune, basically everybody else was affected by it.

azinman2 7y ago

Hardly unique to intel's cpus... they're just the biggest target.

rowanG077 7y ago
That's simply not true the biggest target is ARM. Most of the worlds devices run ARM.
- azinman2 7y ago
  Which also have side channel attacks... these and much more: [1] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-16/materials/eu-16-Lipp-ARMageddon-How-Your-Smartphone-CPU-Breaks-Software-Level-Security-And-Privacy-wp.pdf https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-16/materials/eu-16-Lipp-ARM... [2] https://duo.com/decipher/new-side-channel-attack-extracts-private-keys-from-some-qualcomm-chips https://duo.com/decipher/new-side-channel-attack-extracts-pr... [3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/980.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/980.pdf
  - rowanG077 7y ago
    Still not even close to the clusterfuck that is Intel CPU's
    - azinman2 7y ago
      Well they’re typically not as superscalar in processing, which helps. But I wouldn’t make an assumption that ARM chips generally are more secure — plenty of weaknesses have been found, and doubtlessly many more exist. Security research has shown there are always new untapped directions to exploit, and really nothing can be assumed to be actually secure at this point. Like I said before, Intel is the big target, especially as they run the servers you access over the internet. ARM devices tend to be local and thus aren’t as valuable for side channel attacks. Instead, most attacks for ARM chips tend to be at the sandbox/OS level.
  - paulmd 7y ago
    to be a little more explicit: there are ARM chips that are affected by meltdown. People shit on Intel like it's their particular mistake, but POWER, ARM, and basically everyone's out-of-order cores except Ryzen were affected by Meltdown. It's some oddity of Ryzen's cache predictor that make it immune, basically everybody else was affected by it.