• floofloof@lemmy.caOP
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      6 months ago

      tl;dw: x86 processors have been doing speculative execution of branches for years in an insecure way. New variants of the Spectre vulnerability keep being found and patches issued. Each patch reduces performance, and the performance reduction is cumulative. The video accuses Intel of adopting a fundamentally flawed architecture for the sake of pursuing performance, a cheat that they eventually got called out for. It’s not so much performance loss, the video claims, as performance that shouldn’t have been available in the first place in a secure design. (And AMD I guess cut some of the same corners to compete with Intel.)

      For any x86 CPU these days you should not expect the performance shown in the initial reviews, because problems always come to light and get fixes that reduce it. It happens to AMD too, but Intel seem to be slightly worse for this.