Intel processors are dead, so I have an AMD question

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Meltdown can be fixed

No, you don't do your research right!

Only Intel CPUs are affected by Meltdown. Period.

Nevertheless AMD and ARM CPUs are affected by Spectre.

That doesn't really mater, because having one severe vulnerability less is still having one severe vulnerability less.

the voice of reason has spoken! LOL!

That was very funny, indeed.

I'm not giving you the benefit of the last word, Silly Mind! That's not the correct reply. The right statatement would be "I XenoMind am completely wrong and acknowledge my sheer inferiority because I have no social skills even among the most autistic people, I can't reason as a civilised human being and feel superior to everyone else just because I regard myself as such. I deserve to be humiliated and all the shame my family, peers and useless existence cast upon me."

You think you're the scientist type, you foockin' Kanye West? I'm not leaving you alone. I require your most deep apologies for what you said of me here.

Your arrogance is only seconded by your ignorance.

You're wrong again. Your arrogance predates any arrogance plus you have no rights to talk about ignorance from what you just showed everyone here. You just showed us the sad pathetic figure you really are, sat on an invisible throne on a non-existent mountain.

Your statements are becoming shorter and shorter. What's next? You'll be writing in monosyllables?

Otherwise, show me how deeply sorry you are for what you said of me and choose your best words to address your peers next time.

Only Intel CPUs are affected by Meltdown. Period.

Patching against Meltdown can degrade performance by almost a third. And there's no patch for Spectre; the microprocessors have to be redesigned to prevent the attack, and that will take years.

This is bad, but expect it more and more. Several trends are converging in a way that makes our current system of patching security vulnerabilities harder to implement.

The first is that these vulnerabilities affect embedded computers in consumer devices. Unlike our computers and phones, these systems are designed and produced at a lower profit margin with less engineering expertise. There aren't security teams on call to write patches, and there often aren't mechanisms to push patches onto the devices. We're already seeing this with home routers, digital video recorders, and webcams. The vulnerability that allowed them to be taken over by the Mirai botnet last August simply can't be fixed.


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The final reason is the nature of these vulnerabilities themselves. These aren't normal software vulnerabilities, where a patch fixes the problem and everyone can move on. These vulnerabilities are in the fundamentals of how the microprocessor operates.

It shouldn't be surprising that microprocessor designers have been building insecure hardware for 20 years. What's surprising is that it took 20 years to discover it. In their rush to make computers faster, they weren't thinking about security. They didn't have the expertise to find these vulnerabilities. And those who did were too busy finding normal software vulnerabilities to examine microprocessors. Security researchers are starting to look more closely at these systems, so expect to hear about more vulnerabilities along these lines.

Spectre and Meltdown are pretty catastrophic vulnerabilities, but they only affect the confidentiality of data. Now that they -- and the research into the Intel ME vulnerability -- have shown researchers where to look, more is coming -- and what they'll find will be worse than either Spectre or Meltdown. There will be vulnerabilities that will allow attackers to manipulate or delete data across processes, potentially fatal in the computers controlling our cars or implanted medical devices. These will be similarly impossible to fix, and the only strategy will be to throw our devices away and buy new ones.