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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

So the last PC I built was with the Intel 9700 and that was ~2 years ago. At that time Ryzen was pretty good but didn't have the proven track record or price-performance it does now.

Now, in terms of pure price-performance, i think I'd want to buy Ryzen but... this sort of stuff is what scares me off AMD. I just want my crap to work. Reading some of the comments here, one commenter suggested there's an instruction to find an approximate determinant of a matrix where both Intel and AMD are standards compliant but those instructions produce different results on each chip.

Of course I don't know if this is true or not but saving $200 on a PC build is just not something that justifies (to me) dealing with kind of issue or, worse, potentially dealing with issues like these.

I buy NVidia for pretty much the same reason.

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> saving $200 on a PC build is just not something that justifies (to me) dealing with kind of issue

This kind of issue.. you mean a visual glitch with limited scope and available work arounds in a more than decade old video game?

Yes, what a serious issue. /s

Or the Destiny 2 bug (broken RDRAND implementation). Or the segfault bug (manufacturing error with broken uop cache). etc etc. There have been a fair number of teething problems affecting AMD users.

They are not incorrect that there is a certain turnkey nature of using Intel, and certain merits to using a core that has been basically only incrementally refined for the last 10 years.

And yes, Intel has processor errata too, but AMD had to work through some major ones because it was a brand new architecture. They also chose not to take corrective action for some rather major ones - the fix for the segfault bug should have been disabling uop cache, or to do a recall, instead they just let people go on thinking the intermittent crashes they experience (including in windows) are software-related. They entirely declined to patch the Ryzen Take-A-Way bug, which leaks metadata about page table layouts and breaks KASLR on their processors, leaving users even more vulnerable to spectre v2. etc.

This bug upsets you but things like Meltdown and CSME vulnerabilities don't worry you?

I had a 3770k in a previous machine, which suffered noticeable performance hits with the software mitigation applied.

There's very little reason for home users to be running smeltdown mitigations, especially if you find the performance hit objectionable.

Browsers immediately mitigated via other measures, and I've never read about any criminal network choosing to crawl through memory for credentials (that might even be stored encrypted) as opposed to just dropping some malware and keylogging.

It's a big deal if you are a cloud host or your threat model includes state actors, not for joe public worrying about his bank credentials or his CS:GO knife skins.

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