As I write, chipmaker Intel’s stock is tanking, having already shed $11 billion in value in just four hours, and still falling:
The drop comes on news, broken this morning at The Register, that a major security flaw has been discovered in apparently all modern Intel CPU chips. Unless you’re a major techie you don’t even want to know...and likely aren’t prepared to understand...the details of the problem (or, if you are a curious techie, the article does a good job of explaining what we know right now). Suffice it to say that there is no proper fix for the problem, because this isn’t a software bug, it’s a silicon bug — baked into the microscopic circuit patterns printed on the tiny silicon chip at the heart of your computer’s brain, it’s CPU.
While there is no proper fix, there are awkward work-arounds available, as folks studying the problem night and day for the past several weeks have discovered. Unfortunately, those work-arounds involve re-writing critical portions of the master software that makes your computer work — its operating system — in ways that undo some important performance features. This workaround will necessarily slow down the function of your operating system (and thus your computer as a whole). Depending on what it’s doing, the performance hit could be on the order of a 20% speed decrease, or even much more...though it’s still too early to have solid numbers on this.
System vendors for all the major operating systems (Windows, Linux, MacOS, and more) are right now putting the finishing touches on software updates that will patch their code to lock out and ignore the buggy bit of silicon in Intel chips. Those updates will be hitting our home computers...and their performance...very soon (or, if you’re running MacOS 10.13.2, you’ve already been patched).
If your computer doesn’t have Intel Inside (for example, if its CPU was manufactured by Intel’s major competitor, AMD) you’re in somewhat better shape (AMD’s CPUs do not have the bug) but you’re still not entirely out of the woods. That’s because much of the internet and the ‘cloud’ runs on Intel chips — cloud services like Amazon AWS (which serves up Daily Kos, along with tens of millions of other sites) and Google Cloud.
These performance hits look likely to be permanent...or at least to last until all existing Intel CPUs have been replaced (which will take a bunch of years to happen).
Intel competitor, AMD, is feeling pretty good about its future sales prospects right now.