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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 31 2018, @09:12PM
No, Meltdown is not applicable to AMD processors. AMD has already stated they do bounds checking when userland asks to read kernel memory to prevent this sort of thing. Something Intel inexplicably didn't think of or totally screwed up.
Also, there is a "near zero" chance that Spectre variant 2 can be exploited on AMD processors. It sounds like both AMD and Intel are equally impacted regarding variant 1. Spectre is far more difficult to take advantage of in general.
So yes, this is primarily an Intel problem.