Vote with your wallet. That's really the only thing that you can do. Intel is too comfortable in their position as market leader. Until they start to feel some pressure, they have shown they don't really care. I know AMD is not a perfect company either, but I elected to buy a Ryzen processor for my upcoming build. People need to at least consider the competition without defaulting to "I need a processor, I buy the latest Intel chip."
Yes, I know that most people don't build new PCs or upgrade their processors that regularly. Yes, I know that many people don't have much of a choice because they have some requirement that currently ties them to Intel. However, those that do have that choice, should remember this debacle the next time they are buying a CPU/system (even if they are not doing it for awhile). Intel is hoping they can sweep this under the rug, we can't let them until they make amends. Do not buy an Intel chip until they've proven they will do better. I am not endorsing AMD either. You can still vote with your wallet by not buying anything at all. If enough people put off their upgrade, it would put a dent in Intel's bottom line. Things won't change until it hurts them financially.
I understand your point, and agree with the spirit of it, but a few consumers buying Ryzen chips isn't going to make one bit of difference. A couple data centers buying dozens of racks of them, however, would be more measurable. Hit em in the B2B not the B2C.
I agree with you, and you are right. However, most people aren't making decisions about what types of chips to use in a data center. It would be wonderful if the people in those positions explored non-Intel options. For the average consumer, all we can do is choose which company we buy a CPU from every few years. People buying Ryzen chips incentivizes AMD to keep making chips and stay in the market. Competition is good for consumers. I totally get that it is a lot more complex than that, but I personally feel like it's the best we can do as the average consumer.
For sure. Like I said, I agree with the spirit, and you can obviously only do things within your own sphere of influence. I'm also planning on doing a Ryzen build for my next PC. I'm just trying to be realistic to say that even thousands of consumers switching won't make a huge dent in their bottom line. B2B is really the only way to influence a company as large as Intel, unfortunately.
Before Intel Core processors became the standard hot processor I was an AMD guy. I'm heading back towards that route. This means no Macbook or Surfacebook for my next development laptop for me. If anyone wants my money they better build a developer worthy laptop with an AMD processor and a sweet AMD graphics card. Also AMD is working on providing open source GPU Vulkan drivers.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
I don't think that's true. Meltdown and Spectre are sub-ISA issues, so you could have a RISC-V implementation with them if it handled caching and speculation similarly.
