No one saw this coming. Things happen. It's impossible to predict every contingency.
They acted in good faith.
Also, heh, users are funny: "all other games i have work fin by the way so there must be a problem whit fortnite."
Normally I'd agree but not in this case. Notice that besides latest ARM it seems no other architecture is susceptible to Meltdown - s390x, SPARC, POWER, AMD etc.
Speculatively loading and executing code across protection boundary is something someone should have thought twice about. Doesn't mean other vendors knew or had PoC examples, but they could have had an instinctive hunch.
I've given this example before, say I have some sensitive data on a server. I could install a bunch of services and API endpoints on it, to access it faster, inspect it, extract it various formats etc. Or I could decide to lock it down and just install only the minimum number of needed things, locked everything down. Doesn't mean I knew all those additional APIs or services had vulnerabilities, but it's just a good practice.
If the server gets hacked and someone looks back, I think they would be justified asking "What the hell were you thinking installing all that crap you didn't need on it".
Of course you can't predict every contingency, but some of them you pay for.
Yes.
They showcased benchmarks and paid people to benchmark/review their product along similar lines.
https://ark.intel.com/products/96900/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E7...
etc.
That's new for a company, and it's not indicated by their PR spin right now.
What I think happened : a company produced a product with a problem. Probably not out of malice, but ignorance.
One of two things happened after, which can kill the 'good faith' argument ; the problem was found internally and hushed, or the problem was found externally and minimized to reduce financial burden arising from fixing the problem and the PR related.
We have no way of knowing how well it was known about internally, but we can all see the PR going on from Intel right now, and I hope i'm not the only one who reads into those press releases to establish intent.
Modern processors are insanely complex systems. Branch prediction, out of order execution, hardware virtual memory management, hardware virtualization, etc. Not to mention that these are side-channel attacks. It's not a direct vulnerability, it requires executing some code and measuring timing very precisely; similar to and oscilloscope and a very expensive safe.
Of course Intel is going to be spinning this however they can for damage control. That's what PR departments do. I still doubt engineers at Intel really thought this attack was plausible, or else they wouldn't have been engineering chips this way for the past decade.
And until we align their market incentives properly, silicon vendors are going to continue to ignore this fact when it comes to verification. Intel is especially bad here; they’ve had an unreasonable number of hardware bugs in recent years.
Right now, I think the problem started out of ignorance - but they have abused Google's policy of responsible disclosure to hide the flaw as long as they could and take advantage of their market position while the unknowing public kept buying their products. Now they are pulling the four D's of propaganda in their PR statements all while we are seeing huge performance deltas in graphs from Epic and more?
This is straight up deceptive, I'm glad I switched back to AMD with my new gaming rig and I already have plans in the works to purchase multiple EPYC servers with our datacenter move starting next month.
I'm not sure about this. At any large company like Intel, the cost of potential - even predicted - lawsuits are already factored into their budgets.
I remember reading something about how rich people can get 'everything else's insurance that's basically applicable to anything bad that could happen to them. Maybe its the same with companies?
So really, in this case insurance is just another word for “more lawyers to drag through the courts for people years, with uncertain results.”
They were aware of the problem for a couple of years: https://twitter.com/TheSimha/status/949361495468642304
The PR spin and misdirection games isn't in good faith which completely demolishes this line of defense.