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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.
Intel needs there cheap labor to crush AMD by volume
If you are BASED in the US and hold GOVERNMENT CONTRACTS, then the Chinese (STILL a US ENEMY) should be the LAST to be informed of Exploits. This was a ridiculous, and a DANGEROUS misstep on Intel's Part. They need to "FEEL" This mistake Monetarily.
Talk about a non-story. Vendors told of problems that only vendors can fix before non-vendors involved.
News at ... fuck it, this is not news. It belongs in the Daily Flail.
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.
Intel needs there cheap labor to crush AMD by volume
Nice theory but it lacks any basis in reality. Intel is literally over 10X the size of AMD by revenue (~$60B versus ~$5B) and AMD is in no danger of catching up to Intel any time soon. Furthermore most of Intel's manufacturing sites are in the US. They have precisely ONE chip fab in China versus NINE in the US. Approximately 75% of Intel's chip fabrication occurs in the US.
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 (~$12B last year). Frankly AMD really has no means to catch Intel in the markets that Intel dominates. Intel simply has an insurmountable cost advantage over AMD.
it's that the U.S. government could have helped coordinate disclosures to ensure that enough companies had fixes in place.
With all the NSA disclosures of the last years, the US government did not exactly proofed themselves as more reliable when it comes to fixing things as compared to keeping them private and using them to spy on others.
Please note that I'm NOT saying Chinese, Russian or any other government would be trustworthier, so skip those replies
bickerdyke
Time and time again we've heard this argument that some incumbent has an "insurmountable advantage". Then what happens? Some competitor comes along and crushes the incumbent!
Web browsers are a good example of this. Netscape had huge market share for a few years. Then IE came along and rather quickly the tables had turned. IE became the dominant browser for a number of years. Then all of a sudden Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox comes along, and it takes a huge chunk out of IE. Of course, Mozilla didn't listen to its users and started making unwanted changes to Firefox, so Chrome came along and utterly destroyed both Firefox and IE. Now Chrome is the dominant browser by a huge margin.
Linux is another example of this effect in progress. Linux managed to see a lot of server and embedded use, and even a small amount of desktop use. But we've seen things like systemd ruin Linux's reliability in server environments, causing users to move to more reliable OSes like FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Linux has failed to provide a good desktop environment, so we see users using macOS or Windows instead. Linux is even failing in the embedded arena, with many users now choosing the better-licensed NetBSD, or the more reliable QNX, or even creating their own embedded OSes, like Google appears to be doing with Fuchsia. It's looking more and more likely that Linux, despite seeing significant use, will become a dead/irrelevant OS much like Windows XP now is.
An "insurmountable advantage" is often not insurmountable at all.
calling the accusations "speculative and baseless" is not actually a denial.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Why is it automatically assumed US would do good, but China bad? Haven't we seen Wikileaks? I am 100% sure US would keep it secret and use this however they could dream about. They are no Robin Hood. Works, not words define who you are. Both regarding person or country.
AMD doesn't escape them, but they get to share them.
Sharing them only helps if your competition cannot fully utilize their own production capacity. That is not the case here. Intel has substantial production capacity which they (so far) are able to utilize efficiently and don't have to pay any margin leakage. Furthermore there are substantial advantages to be had from being vertically integrated. Any time you rely on a third party to produce something there are a host of frictional problems that add costs. Sometimes these are worth dealing with but they aren't a good thing if your competition doesn't have them.
Let me give an example from my own company which is comparable. We make wire harnesses. One of our products is a simple lead (wire plus terminal and seal) we sell to one of our customer for about $0.15 each. Currently we buy these leads from a third party for about $0.11 each because we don't have quite enough business to justify the $100,000 price of the automated production equipment needed to make them ourselves. We would need to make about a million of these per year to justify the equipment with a reasonably short breakeven but we only have orders for about 300,000 per year. If we owned the equipment and operate it at scale we could make the leads for about $0.08 each. At our current scale it makes sense to outsource the production but a larger company that already owns the production equipment. A competitor that has enough business to own the machine and utilize it fully could easily undercut us on price and not even have to take a loss. In this case we are in the role of AMD and our theoretical competitor is Intel.
YThe cost of developing a new process tech is huge (on the order of $10bn+). If you're selling ten million chips, then that's $1,000 per chip. You need to get a good hundred million chips out of the fabs before they start to bring the cost per chip down low enough that you can sell them.
And to date Intel has been able to do exactly that.
Even Intel is struggling to get the required economies of scale. They keep trying to get other people to use their fabs, but no one wants to use a fab where they're always going to be lower priority than Intel and where Intel may suddenly decide that they're competitors. They event threw in Atom IP cores basically for free for anyone willing to fab their SoCs with Intel. It didn't work.
This is actually a real concern for Intel. They have a huge investment in production capacity and they have to be able to utilize it fully to continue to maintain their strategic position and cost advantage. So far they've managed the trick but if they have an Achilles heel where AMD is concerned, this is it.
Again, that's a nonsense comparison. It's including Intel NICs, Intel SSDs, and all of the other things where Intel has a huge presence and AMD has none.
It's not nonsense at all. Those additional profits matter because they can support Intel in a price war in a particular market segment. It's illegal to sell below cost but Intel doesn't have to do that to hurt AMD. Intel just has to price their chips below AMD's cost to produce and it is game over. And Intel can do that because they have a cost advantage. Intel could put AMD out of business and not even have to go into the red to do it. Now this won't happen for various reasons but it is the economic cloud AMD has lived under for decades. It's also why AMD has been diversifying away from their CPU business. They know they cannot beat Intel in the CPU market.
You really don't understand how economies of scale work in this market.
I'm a certified accountant and I run a contract manufacturing company for my day job. I assure you I understand the economies of scale better than most and you aren't thinking about it properly. You have the bits about the startup capital costs more or less correct but yo