Cloud companies consider Intel rivals after security flaws found

Re:Cloud companies consider Intel rivals after security flaw... by kayoone on Saturday January 13, 2018 @06:01AM (#16139091)

Doesn't it also mean Intel kind of cheated their way to the performance crown by ignoring security while AMD does not seem to have these issues ? It certainly brings Ryzen closer again, however future improvements to the patch might make it negligible in the end.

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Re:Cloud companies consider Intel rivals after security flaw... by marcosdumay on Saturday January 13, 2018 @11:15AM (#16140051)

Meltdown looks pretty much like cheating. Intel simply took security verification out of the critical path, and their public image ought to suffer for that.

Spectre is a much more complex issue. It is more of a "I would never thing of that" thing. Looks like there were people at the security community talking about it even 10 years ago, but it is certainly hard for knowledge to spread to chip designers - most of what security people study would be noise for them, and even the security people mostly ignore those.

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Re:Cloud companies consider Intel rivals after security flaw... by pishpash on Saturday January 13, 2018 @06:17AM (#16139134)

AMD has the same issues. The difference in Meltdown, according to the paper, comes down to idiosyncratic peculiarities of timing differences, not anything fundamentally more sound in other processors.

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Re:Cloud companies consider Intel rivals after security flaw... by contrarian_ on Saturday January 13, 2018 @06:20AM (#16139146)

WRONG. You fell for the Intel PR strategy. AMD is completely unaffected by Meltdown, since AMD checks permissions before fetching memory into the cache.

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Re:Cloud companies consider Intel rivals after security flaw... by wohlergehen on Saturday January 13, 2018 @06:44AM (#16139215)

Section 6.4 of the Meltdown paper seems to indicate that the same flaw is present in AMD CPUs, but not easily exploitable.

Do you have a different source for that?

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Re:Cloud companies consider Intel rivals after security flaw... by contrarian_ on Saturday January 13, 2018 @07:31AM (#16139352)

The toy example referenced in section 6.4 is actually closer to Spectre. It's missing the crucial distinction that the speculatively loaded address should belong to a page inaccessible from the current ring level.

To see why that toy example is insufficient, consider that you could simply execute the load directly without putting an exception in front of it and you would be able to read the value.

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