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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

I am sure Intel will be fine. It is effectively a monopoly in the desktop and server market and enjoyed their position and profits for years. They can handle a bit of criticism from a bunch of nerds on HN.

Maybe loading data speculatively across a protection boundary was careless. It seems besides the latest ARM CPUs no other vendor went that route. But not owning up to it and issuing PR statements saying "This works as designed, not a bug" is a bit hard to stomach.

But if it needs help drafting a better PR release, someone is welcome to point them to HN's comments section.

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>They can a handle a bit of criticism from a bunch of nerds on HN.

What a reductive and shortsighted evaluation of the situation.

Can they handle the loss of faith from big companies? Can they handle the loss of faith from the entire tech community? Seems to me that AMD et al have now got the perfect opportunity to erode intels market share and build up a large market base amongst cloud providers etc (not to mention security minded users) that require technology that is both resistant to meltdown and not underperforming hardware.

It's silly to act like this is a storm in a teacup because the HN community is up in arms over it. Monopolies fall, and the loss of trust and key clients tends to precipitate that fall.

>But if it needs help drafting a better PR release, someone is welcome to point them to HN's comments section.

Their PR was shocking, but on the order of things people are upset about over this incident, this is literally at the bottom.

> They can a handle a bit of criticism from a bunch of nerds on HN.

It was a tongue-in-cheek response to OPs statement that we should feel bad for Intel and offer it help. I suggested that it needs help drafting a better PR release that's a bit more honest and straightforward.

> Can they handle the loss of faith from big companies?

With a $200B capitalization they certainly can.

> Seems to me that AMD et al have now got the perfect opportunity to erode

Agreed. The next step is to see if any of the large cloud providers or PC manufacturers will announce they are buying AMD CPUs. I hope because I'd like to be able to buy cheaper CPUs and have more competitors in the market. But realistically I kind of doubt it. At the end of the day INTC's stock hasn't moved that much. The performance hit as reported by Google didn't seem to as big.

> At the end of the day INTC's stock hasn't moved that much.

nor should it.. huge stock (so less speculators), many products besides x86 PC processors, and their reaction/fix to this & subsequent impact to actual earnings hasn't shaken out..

not pro or against intel. but mentioning this as concerns market stuffs.

PR is always shocking.

Let's wait to see how much performance is lost and what vulnerabilities get used in the wild.

AMD’s x86/x86-64 Cross licensing agreement terminates if they ever have more than X (I think 30% or 50%) of the desktop and server market share, so I don’t think so. The agreement purposefully gimps AMD as a minority player.

> AMD’s x86/x86-64 Cross licensing agreement terminates if they ever have more than X (I think 30% or 50%)

Wow I'm surprised this is even legal because it sounds like an implemented monopoly.

Well if it means that AMD couldn't ship any x86 processors and Intel couldn't ship x86-64 (i.e. AMD64) processors, that effectively means neither of them could ship any modern x86 processors at all, so that's effectively mutually-assured destruction. If that were in any danger of happening I'd bet dollars to donuts it'd be renegotiated immediately since they both stand to lose everything.

Intel's biggest threat is not AMD but ARM.

This is strange, I’d never heard of this agreement. As I understand it, Intel x86-64 was actually based on AMD’s amd64 design originally. So in reality they are still two separate architectures in a sense?

Their shockingly bad PR and general response are directly tied to the loss of trust. Sure, the downfall of a monopoly is economically disruptive but also creates opportunities for progress.

The Register did a great analysis of turning the Intel Press release into English.

"We translated Intel's attempt to spin its way out of CPU security bug PR nightmare as Linus Torvalds lets rip on Chipzilla"

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/04/intel_meltdown_spec...

If they need help, they should look at Google's release. Despite effectively saying the same thing, Intel's is disgusting and defensive, like a guilty man in a police interview yelling "I didn't do it!" Google's is facts, no bullshit language, and effective.

> It is effectively a monopoly in the desktop and server market

But it couldn't be better timing for ARM. AMD isn't the competition (Though this helps them a little bit) it really is all about ARM and it is going to get a lot more attension with this. Windows runs on ARM now.

CPUs can't get much smaller. It is now how many cores and thermal control you can place on a waffer. ARM has the advantage in both of those. We just have to learn how to utilize multiple cores better than we are now.

Which ARM? Have you ever even looked at ARM implementation errata? At the errata for people doing semi-custom ARM like Cavium? Do you think that those companies are as diligent as Intel?

I can’t say anything about ARM vendors, but I’m pretty familiar with MIPS and PowerPC errata from chips in the mid-2000s and they generally made Intel look 10x as professional and careful.

Like so.

* http://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/04/intel_meltdown_spect... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16064545 (https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-responds-to-security-r...)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16072368 (https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-issues-update...)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16067245 (https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16068118 (https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16072912 (http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2018/01/ubuntu-updates-for-me...)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071769 (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityTeam/KnowledgeBase/SpectreAn...)

* No headline, although mentioned at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16074531 and elsewhere (https://www.freebsd.org/news/newsflash.html#event20180104:01)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076660 (https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4072699/important-i... https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4072698/windows-ser... )

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16075348 (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208394)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076175 (https://lists.debian.org/debian-security-announce/2018/msg00...)

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076328 (https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-updates/2018-01/msg00000...)

A friend of mine "bought the dip" and profited about $100 in the first 20 seconds and it only got better as the day progressed.

Saying "it is not a flaw, it is working as designed", when that design has led to a demonstrated exploit, marks one as either clueless or duplicitous. Why would a company as large as Intel choose to present itself as such? I guess it thinks we are too dumb to notice (Intel did say it is not a flaw in its press release; I don't know whether it explicitly tried the "working as designed" excuse, but the no-flaw claim by itself is nonsense, regardless.)

My guess is that the memo, besides the marketing channels was also filtered through the legal department and they advised not to admit guilt as they probably expect to be sued at some point. Then a clear admission on their part would be slam dunk.

That is probably so, though if it came to being sued, I guess the plaintiffs' counsel would be ready to point out the flaws in that line of thinking.

On the other hand, Intel's stock price did recover in response, reversing the somewhat panicked or speculative drop earlier in the day, so perhaps this was mainly for the market.

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