Hacker News Reader

Comment by sulam | Hacker News Reader

That’s a very premature read. The market is still digesting this news.

I agree, this is very premature, we don't have all the information yet. I purchased an i9 in december, because I cared about the performance, not the price, and had I known the little information we have now, I would have switched to AMD (I even hesitated to do so at the time).

I am still able to send back my i9 to amazon, until end of january, and as I am in europe, I also have a 2-year guarantee against faulty or non-conform goods. Not sure if it can apply, but as of today nobody can tell what kind of action we can take against this (I understand the intel claims this is not a bug, but others may beg to differ).

Also, besides any legalities, I am now an angry customer and would probably not buy intel anymore after this.

I think for something this big, the foreseeable effects would be priced in by now. But, I'm no finance expert. I could be wrong.

NVidia was growing for a year after Polaris release with nearly 50% performance jump. It still is growing.

I don't the the impacts have really begun to be felt yet. We're already anticipating over 20% based upon our current AWS findings (as others have pointed out their dilemmas as well). If i'm a larger company looking at a sudden increase of 20-30% for operations, i'm going to have a pretty strong response. I would imagine it takes upwards of 1 quarter before the Tech impact becomes a Business cost impact.

Your code may be, but I would think most code isn’t CPU bound nowadays. If so, that may lessen the impact on Intel quite a bit.

Or does this indirectly affect network and disk speed, too?

based on AWS findings we should expect the stock to be up, not down: after software mitigation everyone will need more horsepower to run the same load, and guess where they would buy new chips? (given that updating infrastructure to use AMD, let alone ARM, would cost more time and money than just suck it up).

Well, they may chose to spend more money on specialized chips they earlier have thought of as risky. But the whole risk considerations are now out of the window. You never got fired for buying from IBM and then Intel. Now Intel lost the magic touch and is just one among others. That will affect their pricing power big time - check out their pricing history over the past years and you notice some strong tendency for functional pricing which is an indication of near monopoly pricing power. Expect profits to dive.

> Well, they may chose to spend more money on specialized chips they earlier have thought of as risky. But the whole risk considerations are now out of the window. You never got fired for buying from IBM and then Intel. Now Intel lost the magic touch and is just one among others. That will affect their pricing power big time - check out their pricing history over the past years and you notice some strong tendency for functional pricing which is an indication of near monopoly pricing power. Expect profits to dive.

I expect a firesale in current and possibly next gen Intel processors. They have a healthy margin that should not exist. I want at least a 20% possibly 30% price cut across the board for all Intel processors.

Oh and I expect the CEO to go to prison for a long, long time. Anything that does not involve at least five years in prison sends a wrong message to board rooms everywhere.

You expect, or you want? These words often mean different things.

There are many foreseeable effects. Some of them will actually happen and others won't. Some of them are in direct contradiction with others. Some of them will result in a greater or lesser financial impact than expected. Beyond that there are unforeseen and unforeseeable impacts. Discounting all that, yes, I believe the market is reasonably efficient.

My take is that Intel issues in the past have not affected profitability, so it's unlikely that this one will.

When investors see that there are operating system fixes for it, and that those fixes apply to AMD and ARM processors, it doesn't seem like a big deal. It doesn't look like there's going to be a massive recall of it, and there are no issues going forward.

So, while it's technically a BFD, as of now, investors are not seeing how this negatively impacts Intel's ability to make money. Plus, Intel's PR team did a good job at damage control.

If anything, it makes newer chips even more compelling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com