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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
In 2015, Microsoft senior engineer Dan Luu forecast a bountiful harvest of chip bugs in the years ahead.
"We've seen at least two serious bugs in Intel CPUs in the last quarter, and it's almost certain there are more bugs lurking," he wrote. "There was a time when a CPU family might only have one bug per year, with serious bugs happening once every few years, or even once a decade, but we've moved past that."
Thanks to growing chip complexity, compounded by hardware virtualization, and reduced design validation efforts, Luu argued, the incidence of hardware problems could be expected to increase.
This month's Meltdown and Spectre security flaws that affect chip designs from AMD, Arm, and Intel to varying degrees support that claim. But there are many other examples.
(Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:23PM (1 child)
Depends.
Meltdown, the currently known dangerous one, is definitely Intel and possibly a few other Intel designed chips.
Spectre, the one that is *relative* harmless, so far, if present in both Intel and Amd...except, a few really low end models.
Meltdown has currently known exploits that can work through the browser if you allow Javascript. It also has several other exploit modes.
Spectre doesn't *yet* have any known useful exploits. But it almost certain will.
P.S.: I'm not an expert here, there are several classes of Spectre, and I can't distinguish between them. If you're interested there's lots of info on the web, but unless you're working in the field distinguishing between them doesn't seem useful to me.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @07:28PM
The reason to distinguish between them for the average person is the performance impact of the mitigation. Everyone expects a constant stream of bugs/vulns these days anyway, but not that patching for them will slow everything down to half speed or whatever. That is where intel has the main problem (according to what I've read).