> They can a handle a bit of criticism from a bunch of nerds on HN.

It was a tongue-in-cheek response to OPs statement that we should feel bad for Intel and offer it help. I suggested that it needs help drafting a better PR release that's a bit more honest and straightforward.

> Can they handle the loss of faith from big companies?

With a $200B capitalization they certainly can.

> Seems to me that AMD et al have now got the perfect opportunity to erode

Agreed. The next step is to see if any of the large cloud providers or PC manufacturers will announce they are buying AMD CPUs. I hope because I'd like to be able to buy cheaper CPUs and have more competitors in the market. But realistically I kind of doubt it. At the end of the day INTC's stock hasn't moved that much. The performance hit as reported by Google didn't seem to as big.

> At the end of the day INTC's stock hasn't moved that much.

nor should it.. huge stock (so less speculators), many products besides x86 PC processors, and their reaction/fix to this & subsequent impact to actual earnings hasn't shaken out..

not pro or against intel. but mentioning this as concerns market stuffs.

AMD’s x86/x86-64 Cross licensing agreement terminates if they ever have more than X (I think 30% or 50%) of the desktop and server market share, so I don’t think so. The agreement purposefully gimps AMD as a minority player.

> AMD’s x86/x86-64 Cross licensing agreement terminates if they ever have more than X (I think 30% or 50%)

Wow I'm surprised this is even legal because it sounds like an implemented monopoly.

Well if it means that AMD couldn't ship any x86 processors and Intel couldn't ship x86-64 (i.e. AMD64) processors, that effectively means neither of them could ship any modern x86 processors at all, so that's effectively mutually-assured destruction. If that were in any danger of happening I'd bet dollars to donuts it'd be renegotiated immediately since they both stand to lose everything.

This is strange, I’d never heard of this agreement. As I understand it, Intel x86-64 was actually based on AMD’s amd64 design originally. So in reality they are still two separate architectures in a sense?

Intel's biggest threat is not AMD but ARM.

Their shockingly bad PR and general response are directly tied to the loss of trust. Sure, the downfall of a monopoly is economically disruptive but also creates opportunities for progress.

PR is always shocking.

Let's wait to see how much performance is lost and what vulnerabilities get used in the wild.