Apart from the AI Suite issue (lots of people are reporting that similar software no longer works) these could be placebo effects. If you've read about 30% performance drops on every site you may start seeing 30% performance drops on every site.
Plaintiffs in three different states disagree. As Law.com first noted, a class action complaint was filed January 3rd in United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Since then Gizmodo has found two additional class action complaints filed today (just eleven minutes apart)—one in the District of Oregon and another in the Southern District of Indiana.
All three complaints cite the security vulnerability as well as Intel’s failure to disclose it in a timely fashion. They also cite the supposed slowdown of purchased processors. However that is still up for debate. In a press release today, Intel claimed it has “issued updates for the majority of processor products introduced within the past five years.” Moreover, it says the performance penalty is not as significant as The Register initially claimed.
Intel continues to believe that the performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time. While on some discrete workloads the performance impact from the software updates may initially be higher, additional post-deployment identification, testing and improvement of the software updates should mitigate that impact.
This claim—of things not being as dire as they seemed—was seconded by Google today. In a post on its Security Blog, Google claimed “we have found that microbenchmarks can show an exaggerated impact,” which seems to suggest that localized attempts to benchmark affected processors before and after the fix has been applied may not yield reliable results.
AMD stands accused of "artificially inflating" its stock price by not making public a CPU design flaw the tech world now knows as Spectre,
Plaintiffs in three different states disagree. As Law.com first noted, a class action complaint was filed January 3rd in United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Since then Gizmodo has found two additional class action complaints filed today (just eleven minutes apart)—one in the District of Oregon and another in the Southern District of Indiana.
All three complaints cite the security vulnerability as well as Intel’s failure to disclose it in a timely fashion. They also cite the supposed slowdown of purchased processors. However that is still up for debate. In a press release today, Intel claimed it has “issued updates for the majority of processor products introduced within the past five years.” Moreover, it says the performance penalty is not as significant as The Register initially claimed.
Intel continues to believe that the performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time. While on some discrete workloads the performance impact from the software updates may initially be higher, additional post-deployment identification, testing and improvement of the software updates should mitigate that impact.
This claim—of things not being as dire as they seemed—was seconded by Google today. In a post on its Security Blog, Google claimed “we have found that microbenchmarks can show an exaggerated impact,” which seems to suggest that localized attempts to benchmark affected processors before and after the fix has been applied may not yield reliable results.
AMD stands accused of "artificially inflating" its stock price by not making public a CPU design flaw the tech world now knows as Spectre,
This is a wider period than the Intel case, which begins its lawsuit with shares bought from 27 July 2017, roughly the time that the third Meltdown flaw was discovered, and 4 January 2018, when the full extent of the issues became public.
As evidence of hiding the knowledge of the chip vulnerabilities, the complaint highlighted AMD's end-of-2016 statement, as well as its Q1, Q2 and Q3 filings. These all contain the same paragraph warning about the general risk of hackers and potential consequences of attacks, the place where investors would expect to read about fundamental issues with the company's chips, but did not. Signed and declared accurate by Su and Kumar, these reports would indicate that all was well in terms of security at AMD.
On January 2, The Register revealed the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, and AMD responded to the news saying its processors were only at risk from one variant of Spectre. On January 11, AMD published a statement to say that in fact both Spectre flavors affected its cores, with CEO Su confirming this in an interview on the same day. This information caused AMD's share prices to dip.
While not explicitly mentioned in the filing, the Google Project Zero blog stated it informed AMD about Spectre on 1 June 2017. It is not clear why the class period begins earlier than this date and makes reference to the end-of-2016 and 2017 Q1 reports, as AMD would not have been aware of the flaw at those points in time.
There's also the little annoying fact that AMD's share price went up after details of Meltdown and Spectre emerged in early January, and at $12.12 today, the stock price is more than its June 1 value of $10.93. It peaked at $14.76 in July.
Kim bought 21,000 shares in AMD at $12.24 on January 8, 2018, presumably thinking it was a safe bet. He now appears to be upset they declined in value by 0.99 per cent to $12.02 on January 12, the day after the chip design clarified its position on Meltdown and Spectre.
Responding to the class-action lawsuit, an AMD PR rep told The Reg: "We believe these allegations are without merit. We intend to vigorously defend against these baseless claims." ®
You are trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill, and trying to validate ridiculous FUD.AMD’s stock took an insignificant hit in after-hours trading on the day it announced its BIOS updates, but its has since recovered.