Intel Patched Over 230 Vulnerabilities in Its Products in 2019:
Intel patched over 230 vulnerabilities in its products last year, but less than a dozen impacted its processors, according to the company's 2019 Product Security Report.
Intel said it learned of 236 vulnerabilities in 2019, including 144 discovered internally by its employees. Internally discovered issues included 61% of the vulnerabilities rated high severity, and 75% of those rated critical. In total, 4 flaws were rated critical and 81 were classified as high severity.
Three quarters of the vulnerabilities reported by external researchers were submitted through the company's bug bounty program.
"Combining Bug Bounty and internally found vulnerabilities, the data shows that 91% of the issues addressed are the direct result of Intel's investment in product assurance," the company wrote in its report.
The chip maker says only 11 vulnerabilities affected its CPUs, with an average yearly CVSS score of 5.02. This includes the MDS flaws named ZombieLoad, Fallout and RIDL.
"As acknowledged by security researchers and industry experts, side-channel issues are difficult to exploit and often require a level of access to the target system that would afford would be attackers more efficient and reliable methods of obtaining and exfiltrating information," Intel explained.
Of the 236 vulnerabilities found last year in the company's products, 112 affected software, 59 affected firmware and 13 impacted hardware. In the case of 52 vulnerabilities, patching required both software and firmware updates.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday March 02 2020, @09:37PM
AMD has slightly better IPC, Intel has slightly higher clock speeds. That situation should stay about the same with Zen 3. Ice Lake would have better IPC than Zen 2 but there is no desktop version and their clocks would probably be lower due to "10nm" suckage.
AMD destroys Intel on core counts and prices. The chiplet approach also allows them to make high core count CPUs a lot cheaper than Intel can. AMD has a ton of room to drop prices (Intel probably does too).
Then there's power consumption. That's another bloodbath in favor of AMD, and Intel's upcoming 10-core i9-10900K [techradar.com] could use more power than AMD's 64-core TR 3990X.
On security vulnerabilities [tomshardware.com]:
When Apple announced their new Mac Pro Cheese Graters, they went with inferior Intel CPUs.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]