Wednesday, January 3rd 2018
Intel Shares Down, AMD and NVIDIA Up Following VT Flaw Surface
Intel's stock pricing has taken a 6.19% dip at time of writing, in a regress that analysts say has everything to do with the reported VT flaw in Intel's central processing units. The flaw, which Intel has been silently firefighting and which we've covered extensively here on TPU, is a hardware-level vulnerability which has the potential to allow unauthorized memory access between two virtual machines (VMs) running on a physical machine, due to Intel's flawed implementation of its hardware-level virtualization instruction sets. Kernel patches are already being deployed that mitigate the issue; however, these should incur in performance losses for Intel processors, and are being deployed in an apparent "spray and pray" method that also affects performance in AMD-based machines, which are expected to be immune to the Intel flaw.
AMD's stock, however, has surged by 9.2% at time of writing, which is more upwards variance than the sometimes volatile stocks have been showing. The surge is being associated with AMD's image as offering a credible - and the only viable alternative, really - to Intel's dominance in datacenters, where AMD's recent EPYC line of processors has now seen bolstered levels of confidence. NVIDIA, another player in the data-center race, has also seen a 6.54% increase share pricing following the news. Reports that Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich sold $24 million in Intel stock back in November of 2017 don't help the case, but this doesn't really seem to have any connection with the bug's existence, since the move was a pre-planned sale of stocks (10b-51 plan), which is exactly intended to prevent insider trading. It seems that Intel is only looking to fix the flaw via software implementations, however, since the company hasn't created a financial reserve to deal with hardware write-downs and substitutions for affected customers, as it has done in the past.
Sources:
Bloomberg, Tom's Hardware
26 Comments on Intel Shares Down, AMD and NVIDIA Up Following VT Flaw Surface
www.techpowerup.com/230973/nvidia-stock-tumbles-amidst-analyst-talk-of-gamings-decline
The comments there are funny however you want to slice it.
Crazy world! Intel keep tripping up, AMD are back to relying on CPUs again, and nVidia are... you get the picture.
In any case, the EOD stock results:
INTC -> -3.39%
AMD -> +5.19%
And people need to keep an eye on Intel for dirty tactics they might pull with this one, like applying fix to AMD which doesn't need it, gimping own old generations that aren't affected, all just to shill their new generation when they fix it, because they'll be desperate to bring back in the lost revenue...
Wasn't it said that some older gens aren't affected? Or was that for something else? Or they found out all of them are affected?
As for the kernel bug.....
I haven't found any concrete info saying specifics. This article from PCWorld says it could be all CPUs from the past 10 years on the kernel bug.
googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2018/01/reading-privileged-memory-with-side.html
spectreattack.com/
@Raevenlord @btarunr
An interesting comment from Linus Torvalds if you know who he is:
Personally, I hope someone OUTSIDE of Intel's PR department is doing exactly this right now: