"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."
Sounds like AMD's chips are not affected by variants of this attack either. Sure, we should wait for the details to be published before making sweeping claims, but the details we have so far paint a reasonable picture of what the vulnerability involves. It is reasonable to assume that AMD's design decisions prevent this attack, while Intel's decisions enable it.
It was an AMD engineer, and he referred to specific details about a microarchitecture bug that seems to be important in this attack. So we are really being asked to believe that Intel's PR team knows more about AMD's microarchitecture than AMD's engineers (or that AMD's engineers are secret PR agents).
Well, at least one time I found a bug in OpenBSD, told NetBSD, then looked at their fix and discovered our fix was incomplete because my regress had a false negative. But up until that moment I was pretty confident about our fix.
I think that's sort of a pattern. Vendor X is affected by a POC, so they fix the issue. They then develop more tests. Vendor Y concludes they are not affected, perhaps based on a false negative test, and fails to investigate further. Now X understands more about the true scope of the problem than Y and they have tests to demonstrate on Y, but Y does not.
Sounds like AMD's chips are not affected by variants of this attack either. Sure, we should wait for the details to be published before making sweeping claims, but the details we have so far paint a reasonable picture of what the vulnerability involves. It is reasonable to assume that AMD's design decisions prevent this attack, while Intel's decisions enable it.