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Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw

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

#51
post #7
post #2

As a shareholder that's great. Concerned that this is a very fragile win though. I don't think there will be much real world fall out.

How you hold this stock is a mystery to me. With it bouncing between $10 and $15 constantly last year it just seems far to volatile. I'd be panic buying / selling every day to adjust which seems stressful... Maybe why its a favorite of /r/wallstreetbets

My current position's aggregate cost basis is around 2.35/share, so that's why I'm holding.

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

#52
Can someone help me understand why this is such a big deal? This doesn’t seem to be a flaw in the sense of the Pentium FDIV bug where the processor returned incorrect data. It doesn’t even seem to be a bug at all, but a side channel attack that would be almost expected in a processor with speculative execution unless special measures were taken to prevent it. And it doesn’t seem like it can be used for privilege escalation, only reading secret data out of kernel memory. It seems pretty drastic to impose a double-digit percentage performance hit on every Intel processor to mitigate this.

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

#54

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?

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

Yes. Which is why I'm saying "up to 30%"

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

#56

"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.

This reddit thread has more information on the bug https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/7nl8r0/intel_bug_...

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

#57

"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.

Very little by way of details has been made public yet. Not even the technical press. Even relevant comments in the Linux source are redacted at the moment. Hopefully, further details will be released in good time (in the next month?) when people have had time to install the patches that are going out RealSoonNow (i.e. the huge plan of updates on Azure's VM hosts).

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

#59
Honest question, does the performance hit from this patch actually hit Intel's best processors enough to make them perform worse than AMD's best?

I don't keep up on these kinds of metrics, but I'm under the impression that Intel still dominated CPU benchmarks berfore this issue, so if this question is answered in the negative then I doubt it will affect Intel very much.

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

#60
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...

I don't think there needs to be much "reporting".

Intel has a rule where c-suite and up execs who have been at the company 5+ years must hold a minimum amount of stock. For the CEO, that number is 250,000. The CEO recently exercised options and immediately sold them, holding onto the absolute minimum required (250k).

This is all available on the SEC's website, trades like this are reported to the SEC and are considered public information.

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