Hacker News Reader

What started as speculation about recent kernel developments has really turned into a shitshow for Intel. I can't imagine they thought that these massive changes would get through without anyone finding out. However, there really isn't any other better option for Intel, so it seems they are in a lose lose situation with no way out. Or at least a way out that doesn't involve them going bankrupt trying to repair the damage.

View on HN

> going bankrupt trying to repair the damage.

I think you took it a bit too far. May be, I am missing something. Is it really that bad?

Bankrupt might be a wild guess, but it is one of the largest blunder I can recall. 12 years lineup affected, large penalty fix, hardwired. Intel is gonna enjoy a healthier diet for a while.

There are at least tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of Intel CPUs in just datacenters around the globe. Most of which are controlled by companies that make a lot of money and paid a lot of money to intel for their CPUs. And I doubt that they will just take this kind of hit to their performance sitting down. And thats just datacenters, not to mention all the personal computers (mine included) that will suffer. At this point, if this is real, its not a question of if it will cost them, its how much. And considering the sheer numbers of the products affected, I can't imagine it will be cheap. I am not saying that I think they are going to go bankrupt, and I would be surprised if they did, but a 30% percent performance hit is multiple generations of fallback, and considering the importance of computing today (and the number of different entities that are affected by this) I find it hard to imagine that it will be just taken sitting down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com