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Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

bloomberg.com

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Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#31

Post by maratd »

rocqua wrote: post #23
Waterluvian wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm. Do cloud providers need to provide up to 30% more capacity for the same price, or do customers need to purchase up to 30% more capacity to get the same speed?

Unless demand is fully inelastic, if you up the price fewer people will buy. As such, this should hit the cloud provider profits.

> Unless demand is fully inelastic

It's mostly inelastic. People don't buy resources unless they need to do work. Alternatives, such as on-prem hardware, are affected as well.

The only work that would be affected would be the work that becomes unprofitable at a 10-30% hardware cost increase and this is probably marginal enough to be ignored.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#32

Post by grendelt »

emn13 wrote: post #27

This piece is (IMNSHO) trash. It's trying to stare into some crystal ball guessing at the cause of market fluctuations; but there's no real evidence they're right. Not to mention it's pretty misleading about technical stuff, saying e.g. "Chip design errors are exceedingly rare. More than 20 years ago, a college professor discovered a problem with how early versions of Intel’s Pentium chip calculated numbers." So, the…

> It's trying to stare into some crystal ball guessing at the cause of market fluctuations; but there's no real evidence they're right.

Welcome to the world of business reporting.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#33

Post by ascagnel_ »

dzink wrote: post #20

Didn’t the Intel CEO just sell half of his shares/options? If he knew about these issues isn’t that illegal?

I saw that rumor spreading last night, but have yet to see any trustworthy reporting on any such action.

Edit: Here's trustworthy reporting on that action that also predates this announcement: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/12/19/intels-ceo-just-so...

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#34

Post by addicted »

littlestymaar wrote: post #13

Interestingly enough, Intel and AMD market values are affected by this but the cloud provider aren't, which I find surprising.

Are there any major cloud providers whose stocks depend on their cloud earnings?

Cloud is probably a fraction of Google’s, IBM’s, Oracle’s and MS’s profits. It’s probably a significant part of Amazon’s profits but Amazon doesn’t trade on earnings.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#37

Post by bryanlarsen »

cesarb wrote: post #35

This article appears to be jumping the gun. It presents the defect as a fact, but aren't we still in the "rumor" phase (other than perhaps the few who have early access to embargoed details)?

Stocks tend to move a lot more on rumour than they do on fact.

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#38

Post by Choco31415 »

cjbprime wrote: post #30
BoorishBears wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bug doesn’t magically chop all CPU performance down by almost a third.

What does it do, then? That is approximately what the mitigation patch does, according to early averages of perf changes.

Performance is chopped 5-30%, with newer CPU's with PCID being affected less significantly. [0] BoorishBears is possibly pointing out that 30% is a worst case.

[0]: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=linux-41...

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#39

Post by marmaduke »

willvarfar wrote: post #12
NinjaKitten wrote: post #3

"Intel has a bug that lets some software gain access to parts of a computer’s memory that are set aside to protect things like passwords." Seems like very little got through to the media about the details regarding this flaws effects and costly workaround.

in this particular case, will the generalization help their readership? I actually think it will - it would be easy to give more accurate details that cause many readers to glaze over.

That was my reaction. How to ELI5 the risk in multitenant VM environment? It could steal passwords

Re: Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

#40

Post by dnautics »

grendelt wrote: post #32
emn13 wrote: post #27

This piece is (IMNSHO) trash. It's trying to stare into some crystal ball guessing at the cause of market fluctuations; but there's no real evidence they're right. Not to mention it's pretty misleading about technical stuff, saying e.g. "Chip design errors are exceedingly rare. More than 20 years ago, a college professor discovered a problem with how early versions of Intel’s Pentium chip calculated numbers." So, the…

> It's trying to stare into some crystal ball guessing at the cause of market fluctuations; but there's no real evidence they're right. Welcome to the world of business reporting.

I think it's pretty clear in this case. Plenty of people here in hn-land were talking about Intel/AMD short/long positions starting in the afternoon yesterday and word has gotten around.
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