Intel rested on their laurels because AMD almost wiped themselves out, which led to them getting complacent with the process. The actual designs were quite good, it took AMD a few years of better process and newer designs to properly dethrone intel (which intel have now reclaimed in the mid range, this will now yo-yo as it should always do)
You mean, Intel almost illegally wiped AMD out using its monopoly position in the x86 market:
Did Bulldozer really lose or was the competition cheating?
Spectre mitigations shouldn't effect quite a lot of programs because there's nothing to mitigate within the same address space.
Worst case I see is approximately 33% performance penalty in aggregate for Xeon parts, with much worse performance in specific scenarios. Comparing the original Bulldozer benchmarks, this does close the gap like GP suggested.
Also, refresh your memory on how the mitigations work because there’s definitely an impact for most programs.
Also bulldozer is almost definitely vulnerable to spectre.
Bulldozer and it’s competition were both designed at a time where leaking information to another process on the same physical core was outside the threat profile CPU memory protection was designed to mitigate against. Intel was optimizing aggressively within the envelope of expectations at the time, which were upended by the rise of cloud computing.
Here's the terms: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2488/000119312509236...
I don't think any money actively changes hands on an ongoing basis for this, but when this was signed Intel did pay $1.25 billion and AMD agreed to drop anti-trust complaints against Intel.