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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could buy the latest Xeons at a 30% discount? ;-)

That's why they're the dominant player. Because even when a horrible defect is exposed people still desire the product over the competition.

To be fair, this bug looks like it mostly affects systems that run lots of untrusted code -- e.g. cloud services. If you are only running code you wrote, that does not require many syscalls (compute heavy), in your own data center (or whatever), discounted Xeon chips that suffer from the flaw could be a good deal.

> even when a horrible defect is exposed

Are you sure AMD parts have no horrible defects of their own?

They would have to screw up really bad for people to go to AMD. I think that may never happen.

People who need to get absolutely the most bang for the buck have no ties to any given supplier. Cray deployed one of the first Opteron-based supercomputers.

Intel got lots of datacenter business simply by having a better (as in "better suited to our demands") product than anyone else in the segment. AMD has a short time window to make some large sales. They have until Intel ships a microcode fix or a new line of processors.

> They have until Intel ships a microcode fix

Sounds like microcode fix isn't possible.

Then the next generation it is.

It's a 5-30% performance boost without even a major change. :-(

Not disagreeing, but why do you say that?

If the processor is 30% slower, the same amount of work is going to take 43% longer - right? If I'm renting machines by the hour my costs just went up 43%.

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