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Comment by kilburn | Hacker News Reader

For the longest time there was no practical alternative, but nowadays... AMD is back! The whole Ryzen lineup has turned out to be pretty good. You may even save some money in the process.

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Has AMD processors been confirmed as not vulnerable? As I recall the original investigation only covered Intel processors, but hypothesized that AMD would be affected as well, as they more or less have the same fundamentals around branch prediction.

CPUs from AMD are not vulnerable to Meltdown, but are vulnerable to both versions of Spectre.

https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/speculative-execution

Damn! So, practically, no modern processor (or consumer laptop, or enterprise server) is safe from Spectre?

Time to go off the beaten path.

I think it's safe to assume that pratical mitigations will eventually surface, the biggest issue is probably around the cost in performance. Shaving 30% (or whatever) of the worlds computing power in one fell swoop is kind of a big deal.

Arm (starting with Cortex-R7 and higher) and PowerPC are vulnerable to Spectre too.

The earliest Intel Atom chips (Nxxx series) are supposedly safe, but they were only ever used in woefully underpowered netbooks and nettops, and they had perhaps half the performance of a similarly clocked (much older) Pentium M. That performance metric is documented, and I've felt it myself when I owned a Pentium M laptop and Atom N450 netbook at the same time a few years ago.

A few ARM SoCs -- including the entire line used in Raspberry Pi boards -- are safe, but the vast majority of recent ARM devices are affected by one or more of the attack vectors. This means virtually any flagship and most if not all midrange smartphones and tablets, even iPhones and iPads, are vulnerable.

This is the most complete list of affected CPUs and SoCs I've found, and they appear to be keeping it updated:

https://www.techarp.com/guides/complete-meltdown-spectre-cpu...

Zen is not anywhere quite as vulnerable to Spectre v2 as Intel's CPUs are, due to architectural differences, according to AMD, so that's something.

This is why I always preferred AMD. They gave you either more or the same bang for your buck. I hope they don't slack off on pushing to innovate ahead of Intel now that they're "even" in a sense.

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