At the level where large, security-centric organizations make decisions, these instances argue for getting AMD in the door like nothing else that I can recall. So, it's a good time for AMD to have such performant hardware and a process advantage. If it stays this way for a decade, I'll be able to put in a PO for AMD hardware...

The problem is, these leaky cache issues come from 'performant' hardware. It is the pipeline optimization that leads to the side channel.

There are cache architectures (such as pseudo random replacement) that are much more difficult to perform side channel attacks on, but have slightly lower performance.

Intel's problem has been its relentless pursuit of per clock performance, and that has led to some of these side channel attacks. Cache coherency on multi-core is hard.

My guess is that if the market share of Intel and AMD were swapped, you would see similar cache attacks on AMD.

When the market rewards secure design, you can make that complaint. Since the market does not reward secure design, expect investments in security to be commensurate. You cannot have it both ways.

The market is noticing that we're losing a whole lot of performance on Intel to these security-related mitigations, though...

Intel reports record profits again.

This doesn't mean that Intel hasn't been affected negatively by the resurgence of AMD in the processor business. AMD is taking several billion dollars of revenue, and every dollar of that costs Intel much more than $1. A noticeable part of AMD's newfound competitiveness comes from the various performance taxes that Intel has had to pay for speculative execution mitigation.

It's worth noting, too, that Intel has diversified-- the processor business is only one very important business to Intel.

Profit in infrastructure is a delayed indicator, it talks about how the company was doing, not how is it doing now.

Thank you. Apparently, the stockholders agree with my assessment.

See here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22167267

I work for Intel (not speaking in my official capacity) and the AMD scare here is real.

Not a complaint but merely stating the obvious.

What do you do? The vulnerabilities don't apply to a vast majority of situations (meltdown was about the only one and it has been patched - more of a big).

Unless you are running untrusted VM from others, you're not making a rational, knowledgeable decision.

Most people are just using this to falsely justify their Intel hate, similar to Microsoft in the 2000s.