This is extremely disingenuous phrasing. You seem to be trying to craft a narrative that makes putting security vulnerabilities in products an intentional thing to sabotage people, time, and resources.
It's intentional business decision to maximize performance and minimize costs paid by Intel, making their products faster and generating higher margins.
They achieved this by gambling that vulns wouldn't be exploitable. But Intel externalized that risk onto their customers and partners without their knowledge or consent.
So when the gamble failed, the rest of the ecosystem bears the cost while Intel harvests the gains for themselves.
Externalizing risks and losses on others without their knowledge or consent is a form of theft.
That's a huge leap, and seemingly without merit. You're still just arguing that Intel knew this would create huge vulns and they went ahead regardless, which is baseless.
The first scientific paper about such vulnerabilities namely in Intel processors is from 1995 [1]. They went ahead regardless. Processor technology has developed a lot. Many things that were not practically feasible in 1995 are possible today. That holds for the good and the bad. There must be some people inside Intel who must have understood that. Otherwise all that progress would not have possible. Some experts might have blind spots, but I doubt Intel microarchitecture is developed by just a handful of people.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabi...
I lack the technical expertise to honestly critique the architecture. My assumption is that the folks behind the design of some of the more advanced technology on the planet aren’t morons or seeking to defraud the market.
All of the noise here is about significant vulnerabilities that haven’t been exploited in public. It is a serious defect, but not the end of the world.
And the decision to implement it without that study, or despite it, was made. Because implementing it increased performance which made the numbers which captured market share.
It's not like the processor designed itself that way. Humans made choices along the way, and every choice is a tradeoff. Execution-time attacks and other sidechannel leakage have been well-known for years, and I can't imagine that at a place like Intel, nobody had heard of that.
Because we should assume all your past missteps were due to willful negligence? Yeah, let's not just start making shit up to support the group think outrage.
and either no one thought about the security implications, or no one could come up with a security problem at design time - likely just no one thought about side channel problems.
More than the following big things, in both directions?
- A consistent fabrication advantage until very recently? That's said to have wiped out a generation of clever hardware architects, when Intel beat their best efforts with their next process node.
- Falling behind AMD with the Netburst "marchitecture", the front side bus memory bottleneck, and only supporting Itanium as a 64 bit architecture?
- Reversing the above by licencing AMD64, reverting to the same Pentium Pro style design AMD was using, and copying their ccNUMA multi-chip layout (each is directly attached to memory, with fast connections between them).
- AMD losing the plot after the K8 microarchitecture, including putting a huge amount of capital into buying ATI instead of pushing their CPU advantage? And then having to sell off their fabs, putting them at a permanent disadvantage until Intel's "10nm" failed? (And what happened to the K9??)
- Anticompetitive marketing and sales?
> Execution-time attacks and other sidechannel leakage have been well-known for years, and I can't imagine that at a place like Intel, nobody had heard of that.
The strange thing is that security researchers assumed for years that Intel was accounting for this, when it turned out not a single one of AMD, ARM, IBM POWER and mainframe/Z, Intel, MIPS, or SPARC did?
It obviously wasn't obvious to the very, very many people worldwide who know about execution-time attacks and other sidechannel leakage, as it took more than 10 years of almost every chip worldwide being vulnerable until it was noticed. It's not as if some 2016 design tradeoff suddenly enabled Meltdown. Engineers were carefully studying competitor's chip designs, and none of them noticed that flaw for more than a decade.