x86 Drowning in Competition, Bug Doors, Complexity, and Bloat
THE FANATICAL ENERGY consumption of AMD and Intel chips is a big problem as it hasn't been decent for decades. They just add more and more complexity - even known security weaknesses - under the assumption that people must still buy (or license) x86 hardware (or designs, respectively).
Just before the weekend we saw reports like "Spectre flaws continue to haunt Intel and AMD" and the Microsoft-connected sites tried to spin that as a "Linux" issue, not a hardware issue, by going with a headline like "Intel, AMD CPUs on Linux impacted by newly disclosed Spectre bypass" and then harping about "Linux" right from the start:
The latest generations of Intel processors, including Xeon chips, and AMD's older microarchitectures on Linux are vulnerable to new speculative execution attacks that bypass existing ‘Spectre’ mitigations.
The vulnerabilities impact Intel's 12th, 13th, and 14th chip generations for consumers and the 5th and 6th generation of Xeon processors for servers, along with AMD's Zen 1, Zen 1+, and Zen 2 processors.
It's not a Linux issue, it's a hardware issue. Linux isn't hardware. There has been a wave of FUD lately.
"Spectre has been afflicting Intel since before 2018," an associate has remarked, "and shows no sign of letting up as new hardware vulnerabilities in that category are detected every quarter."
The associate says it might be "related to layoffs, I suppose, since the layoffs also help distract from the Spectre news".
Today I spoke about the Intel layoffs with someone who knows many people there. They are terrified and they know more waves or layoffs are coming. For Intel there is no simple road to recovery. The only roadmap is, reduce costs; well, reducing staff may only worsen the products even further.
I'm told that right now Intel just relies on the US government rescuing it [1, 2]; for without Intel, "China wins".
Making defective chips for a number of decades was sheer Hubris; they just assumed people would continue buying Intel machines forever. And no matter how faulty or energy-inefficient they become, people will have no choice. █