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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's not "an intentional thing to sabotage people, time, and resources".

It's intentional business decision to maximize performance and minimize costs paid by Intel, making their products faster and generating higher margins.

They achieved this by gambling that vulns wouldn't be exploitable. But Intel externalized that risk onto their customers and partners without their knowledge or consent.

So when the gamble failed, the rest of the ecosystem bears the cost while Intel harvests the gains for themselves.

Externalizing risks and losses on others without their knowledge or consent is a form of theft.

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> They achieved this by gambling that vulns wouldn't be exploitable.

That's a huge leap, and seemingly without merit. You're still just arguing that Intel knew this would create huge vulns and they went ahead regardless, which is baseless.

Right, I think it makes a lot of sense that the engineers designing the cores didn't think about the security implications. I know I wouldn't have.

> You're still just arguing that Intel knew this would create huge vulns and they went ahead regardless, which is baseless.

The first scientific paper about such vulnerabilities namely in Intel processors is from 1995 [1]. They went ahead regardless. Processor technology has developed a lot. Many things that were not practically feasible in 1995 are possible today. That holds for the good and the bad. There must be some people inside Intel who must have understood that. Otherwise all that progress would not have possible. Some experts might have blind spots, but I doubt Intel microarchitecture is developed by just a handful of people.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltdown_(security_vulnerabi...

That paper primarily discusses a (cooperative) covert channel between processes using the FPU TS register, then mentions that caches or the TLB could similarly be used to implement a covert channel. IMO, meltdown and Spectre and MDS are a different class of vulnerability, so I don't know that I would say that paper was about "such vulnerabilities."

The product being designed in 1995 was very different from today. Many of these trade offs result in much lower risk vulnerabilities in 1995 when you don’t have virtualization or hardware shared with anyone with a credit card.

I lack the technical expertise to honestly critique the architecture. My assumption is that the folks behind the design of some of the more advanced technology on the planet aren’t morons or seeking to defraud the market.

All of the noise here is about significant vulnerabilities that haven’t been exploited in public. It is a serious defect, but not the end of the world.

That linked study covers speculative execution and hyperthreading? It seems to be covering 386/486 era processors

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