Earlier quoted context omitted.
What he said isn't wrong, this new ucode changes fencing and branching prediction semantics regardless of using the instructions added for spectre. The problem is varied. While most people should run the new ucode and pending kernel and toolchain fixes, not all must. Most businesses buy computers on rated performance, and they are about to take an unexpected performance haircut. Intel ucode isn't really optional, as…
I wonder if this will end with Intel selling a lot of new chips, or Intel having to issue massive recalls. I doubt Intel will be able to be able to get away with discount/trade-ins without some serious legal complications. I doubt we'll see entire data centers move to AMD as that would get stupid expensive. For the short term, we might see data centers order extra AMD blades and changing their provisioning systems to…
Dieselgate is the closest thing I can think of recently where a product was marketed primarily on performance that was later rescinded through mechanical and/or software clamping. I wonder if there will be any FTC action for consumers.
Separate from the above thoughts, intel was already testing customer patience with Skylake. It wasn't a substantial performance increase, but it was a substantial pricing increase. A lot of that, because, in merging the 4S (E5-4xxx) and 8S (E7) into one marketing line, a majority of users are paying big premiums for unwanted UPI scalability to get clock speed, cores, and caches they do want. They also gambled poorly on clamping I/O lanes to fight GPU, and with omnipath which is a niche at best. History will most likely judge Krzanich poorly. I expect AMD and IBM will have a good couple years coming up.