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Comment by ggregoire | Hacker News Reader

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.

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