Paul, your last article was fine, this one has some flaws. You have facts mixed with some assumptions.
"We also know that Microsoft has already deployed patches in the fast ring Windows Insider builds. Those patches rolled out in November. Notably, there haven't been any reports of massive performance degradation from participants of the Insider Ring."
Would you expect to be hearing about any slowdowns from a patch designed to fix something that there is a NDA for? I'm guessing you wouldn't hear much. And what you heard wouldn't have been tabulated, benchmarked and compared so it really means nothing. No. We'll find out what the damage is when the patch goes live.
"The vulnerability appears to be most dangerous to data center workloads and virtualization. However, it is irrational to assume that the overwhelming majority of data centers will see a 30% reduction in performance. Losing even 15% of the computational horsepower from a data center would be a major blow, and that compute would have to be replaced almost immediately. The patch has been in development for several months, so if Intel and the major data center operators were expecting massive performance reductions, there would have been an incredible spike in data center equipment purchases."
Would there? Is this based on the last time Intel revealed a bug that lets anyone steal sensitive data? The last time there was a security flaw Intel sat on it for 2 years.
Did they put any money aside in the past when they had to refund customers for bad CPU's? I don't think so.
Or perhaps you're basing your assumption on the last time the industry worked together like this to fix a bug? I don't recall this happening ever on this scale.
"Also, we would have likely already seen signs of a pending financial disaster for Intel if there was a serious threat of hardware replacements to a wide swath of the data center."
So having two executives flee the company in the last year and the CEO liquidate his shares, isn't indication enough? He applied to sell those shares in October, he knew about this flaw since June. It really looks like an insider sale, I think he's toast. This flaw affects Intel's core business with the highest margin (servers and data centers), their competitor is unaffected. How do you think this will affect sales? Negatively is a good guess.
"Currently, there are no major shifts in Intel's stock that would indicate a mass sell-off by investors. "
intel confused a lot of people by releasing a Trump-like news release. The stock will fall as soon as people realize that Intel is selling vastly-overpriced and vastly inferior CPU's than the competition, which is AMD.
I can't for the life of me think of anyone who manages servers would want to deal with buying an Intel CPU which has a back door, suffers from up to 30% performance hit due to this security flaw, and is twice as expensive with about 1/4 the functionality as a comparable Epyc CPU. Who's Intel going to sell these things too? Nobody going to pay double for a slower security-hole riddled CPU.
It's almost as if in 2017 Intel turned into AMD.
Intel now builds hot, slow, and expensive CPU's compared to AMD.
AMD is to Intel as nVidia is to AMD. Weird but it's the truth.
The only thing that still works for Intel are games, but you know, their bread and butter is servers and the datacenter. So I really don't see their stock maintaining it's current levels after each quarter.. as they are unable to sell any CPU's this year that aren't affected by this flaw. And we've both heard about those rumors regarding their 10nm fabrication process. This year isn't looking good for Intel. No wonder they're taking chances.
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