Yes!
¹ For example in SPECvirt_sc2013 the patch reduces performance by 31% (https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Inte...) 31% is unheard of for a security patch! It's a difficult security-speed tradeoff that businesses must carefully consider.
Give intel some time to cope with this newest set of vulns, see if they can find a way to re-enable hyper threading safely, and if they can't and are still advertising hyper threading, then start going after them.
It does not. The fundamental difference between AMD and Intel CPUs in all these faults is that AMD does all permissions checks eagerly before returning results from memory, while when speculating, Intel defers them until speculation is resolved.
This does not mean that AMD escaped all of it, because some of the attacks (eg, spectre variant 1) do not cross a protection boundary that permissions checks would catch.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=152954666609919&w=2
While no AMD issues are known at present. OpenBSD will have it disabled by default. How about other operating systems, I wonder?
The major win (whether AMD intended it or not) is that AMD cpus don't speculate loads until page permissions have been verified. Intel fires off the speculation immediately. That is one of the primary side channels underlying many of the attacks.
Intel has been actively muddying the waters with FUD to get people to think AMD is just as vulnerable. Please don’t buy into that. Intel is far more exposed. The subsequent slowdowns are more severe.
Microarchitectural differences. They are, after all the same architecture, i.e. x86-64.
/pedantic