[IronKettle]

Disclaimer: I know relatively little about differences between processor architectures, so this might be totally wrong because Intel might just have them over a barrel on this.

I think the major difference between this and, say, the Equifax blowup, is that Intel's institutional clients are affected by this.

I'm not sure what they're thinking internally, but it stands to reason that they're probably a bit upset at least: Their CapEx just went up to maintain the same level of computing power. I'd be surprised if internally Google is buying the "AMD is just as affected" line that Intel's been throwing out.

So, I wouldn't be surprised if they're at least evaluating AMD.

Or, again, maybe Intel just totally has them over a barrel and transitioning isn't feasible at all. It certainly doesn't paint a great picture of Intel's future if AMD does catch up, though.

[sdhgaiojfsa]

I think the big institutional clients are always evaluating AMD, and even more exotic options. But I don't think this bug has materially affected the equation here. Savvy buyers understand that there will occasionally be bugs, and this one has already been mitigated. How Intel verbally responds to the issue matters much less than their actions, because the words do not affect the costs of using their products, and the actions do.

I am deeply skeptical of the commentary on Intel's attitude and press releases. I really doubt that matters much to most buyers.

[hedora]

I think Intel has two problems:

First, ARM is doing to Intel what Intel did to the Unix workstation vendors in the 80’s.

Second, given that they’re being cornered into the server business, they need to have products that are rock solid there until they can regroup. This is one of a long parade of recent screwups with their big bets in this space:

(1) A while back, all their server atom chips (tons of crypto and I/O with piles of ECC DRAM and cores for < $1000 and < 20W) had a bug where they stopped booting af 18 months of uptime. These compete exactly in the space server-ARM has a chance, so many affected vendors were already dual sourcing.

(2) NVIDIA crushes them for AI, and Intel is a distant third for graphics in general

(3) Samsung SSDs generally trounce Intel ones.

(4) They’re rapidly losing client device share. Their big recent innovation there is AMT, which is increasingly considered an anti-feature.

That leaves conventional IT compute, (web services, DBMS, etc) for their core business, but even on-prem stuff is moving to private cloud, which needs multi tenancy, and they’re looking pretty risk for that use case too (vs AMD?)

They’ll certainly be around for a long time, but it’s not clear how long they’ll keep their “no one gets fired for buying IBM”-level of dominance.

[wtallis]

> (3) Samsung SSDs generally trounce Intel ones.

This is true only for the consumer SSD market, where Intel outsources large portions of the product development. It's also a market that Intel may abandon completely in the next few years as Intel and Micron start to pursue separate flash memory development. If Intel doesn't score a solid win with a consumer SSD in the next two generations, it would be reasonable for them to pull out and focus solely on enterprise SSDs, where they have no trouble winning.

[IronKettle]

> this one has already been mitigated

Correct me if I'm wrong: It's been mitigated by applying a patch that has fairly severe performance implications, no? How does this not affect the institutional clients' bottom line in that case?

[ethbro]

> fairly severe performance implications

1 - 30% impact range for best / worst case. On the kernel mitigations. So really workload dependant.

[hajile]

There's the 15-20% hit for going to database. Most servers out there do nothing but CRUD to some DB somewhere because most businesses don't do HPC. It's definitely an issue for them.

Then there are companies like Epic Games who reported horrific numbers. It seems if you do lots of simple communications (eg websockets or UDP), you can expect a huge slowdown.

https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/forums/news/announcements...

[crdoconnor]

>Or, again, maybe Intel just totally has them over a barrel and transitioning isn't feasible at all.

That was my hypothesis for why their stock didn't drop much. The problem is very bad but intel's quasi-monopoly and the very high switching costs involved will let them weather it.

[BeeOnRope]

Not only will they probably weather it (short term), it will probably result in a reasonable sales bump as affected datacenters replace capacity lost to the various patches and mitigations and also perhaps accelerate replacement schedules when hardware that has designed-in mitigations becomes available.

[coldtea]

>I'm not sure what they're thinking internally, but it stands to reason that they're probably a bit upset at least: Their CapEx just went up to maintain the same level of computing power. I'd be surprised if internally Google is buying the "AMD is just as affected" line that Intel's been throwing out.

They don't have to buy it. Whether affected or not, AMD is a non starter at this moment for those things.

[IronKettle]

Semi-related question: Why is that? I've been looking for resources on why AMD is a non-starter, but most searches just turn up comparisons for low-level consumers.

[seanp2k2]

AFAIK, it’s the ecosystem and availability. Let’s say you’re a Dell shop and you’re using mostly PowerEdge R730s (one of their middle-of-the-road 2-socket options). Your choice right now is Xeon E5-2600 v4 family, because that’s what that platform supports. These aren’t motherboards that you just pick up at Fry’s, they’re designed as an entire system, which takes a while to get going. Dell is not going to invest the R&D money unless they have demand, but there won’t be much demand without stories of success in the field, so we’re at a bit of a chicken and egg problem right now.

Speaking of Dell, they are launching some EPYC stuff: https://blog.dellemc.com/en-us/poweredge-servers-amd-epyc-pr...

But again, getting the ball rolling might take a couple of years. Look at what happened with Opteron as an example.