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Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

These days you can't say anything positive about Intel even if it is factually true. I am personally excited about the 10900K and the competition with AMD is bringing Intel prices down.

People seem to have a deep hatred for Intel, exactly the way they had deep hatred for AMD (pre-Conroe days, when Intel released Conroe in 2005/06, people were rooting so hard for Intel, it was hard to find any positive comments about AMD). I don't get it. Both are multi-billion dollar companies and innovating like crazy. We can't just sit back, and feel the utter awe of what it takes to make computer chips whether it is Intel or AMD. You know, its engineers like anyone else - they have good intentions and work hard to make all of this possible, the fans have this egregious entitlement that is so infuriating and dismissive.

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The engineering is great. People's bias likely stems from the numerous security scandals surrounding intel's CPUs in the last few years.

Hardly unique to intel's cpus... they're just the biggest target.

That's simply not true the biggest target is ARM. Most of the worlds devices run ARM.

Which also have side channel attacks... these and much more:

[1] https://www.blackhat.com/docs/eu-16/materials/eu-16-Lipp-ARM...

[2] https://duo.com/decipher/new-side-channel-attack-extracts-pr...

[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/980.pdf

to be a little more explicit: there are ARM chips that are affected by meltdown.

People shit on Intel like it's their particular mistake, but POWER, ARM, and basically everyone's out-of-order cores except Ryzen were affected by Meltdown. It's some oddity of Ryzen's cache predictor that make it immune, basically everybody else was affected by it.

Still not even close to the clusterfuck that is Intel CPU's

Well they’re typically not as superscalar in processing, which helps. But I wouldn’t make an assumption that ARM chips generally are more secure — plenty of weaknesses have been found, and doubtlessly many more exist. Security research has shown there are always new untapped directions to exploit, and really nothing can be assumed to be actually secure at this point. Like I said before, Intel is the big target, especially as they run the servers you access over the internet. ARM devices tend to be local and thus aren’t as valuable for side channel attacks. Instead, most attacks for ARM chips tend to be at the sandbox/OS level.

AMD is still a bit of an underdog valued at a fraction of Intel. People like rooting for the underdog.

Second to this, is competition is important and having competitive products tends to bring pricing down to what is probably closer to optimale.

Aside: I've thought for a long time, that if medications had a dual-sourcing requirement it would help a lot.

If "rooting for the underdog" means becoming deeply viled, callous and irrational when facing facts, I don't think that's a good thing.

That cuts both ways... there are definitely Intel fans that will excuse everything Intel is/has ever done that isn't above board.

I was only stating part of why someone might favor for AMD strongly, without going into the irrational, which you seem to be focusing on here.

Right now, AMD is largely better at every price bracket and in general has done better in terms of security and long-term support (don't have to by a new motherboard every year if you want to upgrade).

You seem to miss the huge list of speculation bugs with mitigations that take a variable chunk of performance away with no buyback or return program in place. VW diesel gate was less of a blunder than the Intel speculative execution saga and one cost a company $33 billion.

Wait, really? My understanding was that, whereas VW intentionally cheated to fool regulators, Intel (and others) got blind-sided by a creative attack against a fundamental, well-established technique for gaining performance. These seem like very different problems.

Note: I haven't followed the "saga" closely so maybe there is more to it that I'm not aware of.

Speculative execution is fine, speculative execution across protection domains is not. So VW cheated for better milage, Intel cheated for better performance.

"Cheating" implies something sinister. Far more likely, they just missed it.

Modern CPUs are at the very edge of what humans can design and build. Hundreds of verification engineers try to make sure they work. Not one of them will have a whole picture of the entire machine in their head, or really understand all of its requirements. The very best, hardest working, most diligent and dedicated teams will still ship a CPU with bugs. Perfection is simply not possible in this domain.

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