Response to Meltdown and Spectre

[@lbutlr]

On 1 Feb 2018, at 16:04, Adam Vande More amvandemore at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Feb 1, 2018 at 3:48 PM, @lbutlr <kremels at kreme.com> wrote:
> 
>> the trouble is that AMD's behavior has been at least as bad as Intel's, if
>> not worse, in regards to Meltdown,
>> 
> 
> Can you explain what provoked this assertion?

First, they violated (not technically, but they made it bloody obvious) the NDA so that the flaw was widely discovered a week early by adding a comment to a meltdown patch that lead every expert int he field straight to the vulnerability: "The AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault."

Second, they initially claimed they were would not release any firmware because they were entirely immune, which was untrue.

They were almost immediately proved to be vulnerable to some of the flaws.

Third, while Intel released (and continues to release) detailed technical information, AMD released PR statements.

Honestly, as bad as Intel has looked in the last month, AMD looks worse since they'd behaved like children.

-- 
Don't be afraid to be weak, Don't be too proud to be strong.