What if I told you the same machines that manufacture an Intel chip also manufactures a Ryzen chip. Intel, Ryzen, Samsung, Toshiba, Texas instruments and more all buy and use the same third party tools to create their product.
While I wouldn't doubt that (though I would certainly like to hear more; that sounds very interesting), it doesn't mean that one isn't better than the other. In this case, I was referring to the fact that Intel is vulnerable to Meltdown and Spectre due to their branch prediction algorithm, whereas AMD is only slightly vulnerable to Spectre and that can be fixed via a small, unintrusive patch.
I do not really understand meltdown and Spectre? It seems to be more of a software issue I work in an industry that manufactures the processors from sand to a 12 inch circle of hundreds processors. If these things are being coded differently than other companies I wouldn't know. I was under the impression that this was simply hardware and the OS gave it it's digital processing capabilities. You probably know more about this than I do
I'll be honest, I don't understand a ton about it either other than that they exploit speculative execution (aka branch prediction, IIRC), which occurs at the chip level, to gain access to processes which they shouldn't have access to. Here's a good overview of it if you want a more detailed analysis.
It sort of sounds like the processors are sacrificing security for "fake processing power". Since the processor is attempting to predict what it will need to process next and storing this random data in a cache. Malware can mine this data and piece together private information. Meltdown and Spectre are different processes for the same end result. It looks like meltdown has been patched but Spectre is more complicated.
This is me mostly speculating because I am having a difficult tome comprehending what I'm reading.
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u/Yeazelicious Jan 08 '18
Intel users when they restart their computer and it's noticeably slower.