Intel Told Chinese Firms of Meltdown Flaws Before the US Government (engadget.com)

According to The Wall Street Journal, Intel initially told a handful of customers about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, including Chinese tech companies like Alibaba and Lenovo, before the U.S. government. As a result, the Chinese government could have theoretically exploited the holes to intercept data before patches were available. Engadget reports: An Intel spokesman wouldn't detail who the company had informed, but said that the company couldn't notify everyone (including U.S. officials) in time because Meltdown and Spectre had been revealed early. Lenovo said the information was protected by a non-disclosure agreement. Alibaba has suggested that any accusations of sharing info with the Chinese government was "speculative and baseless," but this doesn't rule out officials intercepting details without Alibaba's knowledge. There's no immediate evidence to suggest that China has taken advantage of the flaws, but that's not the point -- it's that the U.S. government could have helped coordinate disclosures to ensure that enough companies had fixes in place.

Comments

Or not?

[TimothyHollins]

There's no immediate evidence to suggest that China has taken advantage of the flaws, but that's not the point -- it's that the U.S. government could have helped coordinate disclosures to ensure that enough companies had fixes in place.

Not to mention it would have been really handy for NSA to take advantage of the flaws for a while to spy on the Chinese government.

Re:Intel plants are in the USA

[TheRaven64]

Intel is literally over 10X the size of AMD by revenue

That's slightly misleading, because it assumes that all of Intel is competing with all of AMD. They have some competing business units, but they are not entirely direct competitors. For example, Intel has a huge network business unit (NICs, ICs for switches) and a large storage division, one of the two largest FPGA manufacturers, and it owns its own fabs. AMD no longer owns its own fabs, so doesn't require the same economise of scale to get the cost per wafer down (the fabs that make AMD chips also make chips for a load of other companies, so can benefit from large economies of scale).

Just because Intel is ten times the size doesn't mean that Intel's x86 chips are getting ten times (or even double) the investment that AMDs are.

People tend to think of AMD as a close competitor but they aren't. Intel spends over double AMD's total revenue on R&D alone

The vast majority of that is on process technology, which is no longer a business that AMD is in (and where the returns have been very low for the past 5 years).