It's no surprise that leading Chinese tech companies have close associations with the Chinese Government and the PLA. Intel has waded into controversial waters as reports point to the chipmaker sharing information about its products' vulnerability to
Meltdown and Spectre with Chinese tech companies before warning the United States Government, potentially giving the Chinese government either a head-start into securing its IT infrastructure, or exploiting that of a foreign government.
Lenovo and Alibaba were among the first big tech companies to be informed about Meltdown and Spectre; Lenovo is Intel's biggest PC OEM customer, while Alibaba is the world's largest e-commerce platform and cloud-computing service provider. Both companies are known to have close associations with the Chinese government. The United States Government was not part of the first group of companies informed about the deadly vulnerabilities.
37 Comments on Intel Warned China of Meltdown and Spectre Before the US Government
Some will probably think/say intel are supporting the "commies" over the US.
I don't think Intel sells nearly as many CPUs in China as it does in the US.
From my perspective it makes no difference who gets this info, before it becomes publicly known. The only difference is that in case of Alibaba and Lenovo it's a vital piece of info for creating temporary remedies and patches for their hardware, data centers and cloud services, and in case of US - yet another cyberweapon against all "evil non-democtratic" threats in the world.
Not saying that either scenario is right, but think of it this way: sharing an unpatched vulnerability with public before it is patched creates a window of opportunity for hackers to exploit it before hardware manufacturers and large data centers even have a chance to do something about it. Since their proactive partners like Google and MS already knew about it, Intel did the next logical thing: warn the lazy fat partners like Lenovo and Alibaba. That's way too naive... Don't forget that nearly everything is made in China, including Intel-powered laptops, AIOs, tablets, phones, STBs, etc.
If US was really a leading consumer of Intel CPUs, then I would've probably switched my supply of replacement Core-U and Core-Y chips to US at least for the sake of faster shipping.
US may be on the receiving stick of this product chain, but they are not the ones who actually buys CPUs directly from Intel.
Retail sales of Intel desktop chips for consumers is only a small fraction of Intel's business.
I think Steam stats alone will back me up on this one, there is 2billion Chinese and 80% play PUBG, so do the maths
Honestly, I'm questioning the credibility of half these 'news' articles right now.
Intel Warned Chinese Companies of Chip Flaws Before U.S. Government - WSJ Looking at Intel prices. Looking at FPS counter. Still faster than AMD.
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Needing to upgrade motherboard to upgrade processor. Looking at FPS counter. Still faster than AMD.
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Hearing about Intel's monopolistic tactics. Looking at FPS counter. Still faster than AMD.
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Hearing about security problems in Intel processors. Looking at FPS counter. Still faster than AMD.
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Hearing that Intel informed Chinese before US government. Looking at FPS counter. Still faster than AMD.
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