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Comment by PerusingAround | Hacker News Reader

I'm amazed on how Intel's stock price still keeps going UP, despite all these problems... just WOW.

The recent jump is because they released a good earnings report.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/26/intc-intel-stock-jumps-to-hi...

I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of demand for future Intel hardware that's immune to spectre and meltdown. I think it might cause _more_ sales of Intel chips in the future, not fewer.

Regardless of sales, I would think damage to their image would be a concern. Maybe it's not a concern to investors because their "PR nightmare" turned out to be softball for them, and it's been hard to pin anything on Intel when they keep pointing fingers in all directions.

I think it's our responsibility as technology literate folks and decision makers to explicitly highlight their failures so that mistakes and poor handling like this are not normalized.

It would be a concern if real competition was allowed in the x86_64 CPU space. Monopolistic patents, in this case, create the opposite incentives

What, are you going to stop buying Intel processors?

I will, but I am just a guy who builds his own computer every few years.

I tend to think it's because the folk who trade with stock very well know that these "issues" are actually features. I can also bet that that "grilling" they get from US government is not about the mess the chip flaws are doing , it's about why the "flaws" were publicly announced.

I think we're just in a bull market so people ignore bad news

Do you know someone who is going to stop buying Intel's CPUs?

I know in my company this has indeed resulted in a full stop in buying Intel and going AMD instead. There is also an active "project" to replace the Intel servers.

I work in a bank and they are terrified of the possibility of user processes reading privileged memory. Not necessarily out of actual fear but out of the insane amount of paperwork this will require to satisfy the auditors that it is still safe.

Anecdotally, but you asked for "someone" and here is someone :)

Wasn’t AMD also affected?

Not by Meltdown which enabled user processes to read kernel memory. And as we've seen in the aftermath, they have not nearly as much trouble with their patches for Spectre as Intel has had.

Well , Linus already said perhaps linux should look at the arm folk . Should that happen , well guess what ? From my very small knowledge , 90+% of internet infrastructure runs on linux .

Then ARM "folk" will find the equivalent of Spectre and Meltdown... then the cycle repeats, ad infinitum.

ARM already did.

https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update

The Meltdown/Spectre class of attacks affect certain CPUs. Spectre is a microarchitectural attack on any CPU that does speculation and uses data caches, regardless of architecture.

Arguably, it has been handling Meltdown and Spectre in a much much more humble and transparent way. See https://developer.arm.com/support/security-update/compiler-s... for work they are doing with the compiler communities to address the Variant 1 both on current and future chips.

Spectre affects AMD, too, so there's no competitor to run to... and CERT was saying at one point that only new processors would fully fix it. They're looking at everyone needing to buy a bunch of replacement products, aren't they?

Spectre v2 affects AMD less drastically than it does with Intel, because of the architectural differences between Zen and Intel's processors.

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