| > If the history of Microsoft and Windows security is any indication, it'll take Intel many many years to turn that ship around. AMD's Bulldozer debacle may be a better example, because in some ways it's a better example than Windows. By that, I mean two things. 1) Silicon typically has a pretty long up-front design phase. Meaning there's probably at least 2 upcoming generations in development at any given time. 2) Intel's marketing is somewhat coy about 'architecture' changes, but the sources I found (admittedly just an SO post and Wikipedia) indicate that the number of pipeline stages in the Core series has not changed much over the last few years. IOW it's probably not a full architecture revamp in their 3-step cycle. P6 as an Arch lasted around 15 years, when you think about it (including the original 'Core' i.e. Core 2 Duo/Solo here, as while heavily optimized and revamped, it was still P6). K7/K8 lasted about the same longer (15-ish). Netburst was a bit of an outlier, only lasting around 7 years. Same for Bulldozer. Big assumption here, but based on the pattern I'd assume that Intel originally wasn't even considering a full revamp (or, depending on how they do their iterations, it wouldn't be fully revamped) to be ready until around 2023. Because of the time involved (back to the first point,) I doubt they would be able to have the problem mitigated in silicon until 2021 at the earliest. (As a bonus, they'd probably want/have to qualify it extra well, lest they accidentally introduce a whole new class of vulnerabilities.) |