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Comment by mpswardle | Hacker News Reader

Well they did release their Coffee Lake generation chip after they already new about the exploit.

Now i know it would take a lot for a major company to delay/cancel a release like that, but i think it could be argued that they were dishonest if they knew it would have a performance impact.

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They would have had to delay it for a year or more.

So the decision was, go ahead and release it even though we know it's vulnerable because we'll make more money that way than we would if we took the time to fix it and make it secure?

If so, I hope the market punishes that decision mercilessly.

To be fair, Coffee Lake is presumably faster/better and not more vulnerable than other chips [0]. If you have to mitigate anyway, and you're desperate to get back to pre-mitigation performance parity, releasing a faster chip that still requires mitigation could be a reasonable option.

[0] Caveat: Skylake and later are extra-vulnerable to Spectre because they have even more aggressive speculative execution, but fortunately, the IBRS microcode update is roughly equally performant as retpoline on Skylake+ only.

What? No, that's not even remotely how it works. Not releasing Coffee Lake when it was ready would not have sped up the design of a new CPU which fixes Meltdown in any way. The only way that not shipping Coffee Lake would have helped anyone is by indirectly increasing sales of AMD processors.

Well, Intel sales are going to drop off a cliff, and might not entirely be made up once a "fixed" version comes out.

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