I wouldn’t say Intel sold defective products if they were honest — and said that speed ups came at the cost of chip level security. But they didn’t. The trade

I wouldn’t say Intel sold defective products if they were honest — and said that speed ups came at the cost of chip level security. But they didn’t. The trade off between risk and performance isn’t a smooth gradient in this case. Eventually conservative behavior under a certain threshold does nothing but cost performance and waste power. Therefore, the multi-billion dollar question is where that threshold is and how closely can a design toe that line. Perhaps I am wrong, but I don’t believe Intel’s management would risk a vulnerability like Downfall for better SIMD benchmarks. Do you believe that Intel would have sold as many chips if they’d been honest — “our products are faster than before by trading your security for speed”? Outside of the “prosumer” market, the vast majority of retail consumers do not even look at CPU benchmarks, nor could they understand them if they did. The true target of those performance numbers is the enterprise segment, a reoccurring multi-billion dollar revenue stream for Intel. With that in mind, it makes about as much sense for Intel to ignore vulnerabilities for benchmarks as it does for a milkman to sell spoiled milk.