Hector Martin

I think intel DESIGNED their chips under the mantra that anything that happens in speculation doesn't matter and no transistor shall be "wasted" on that, and any engineers who brought up security concerns were ignored.

You realize that nobody, nobody anywhere, brought up security concerns about these features until they'd been in every CPU for like over a decade, right? It's not JUST Intel that missed it. Either don't turn an "oops" into "Intel engineers are evil monsters!" Ridiculous.

Have you missed the part where Intel has a zillion data leaks and AMD doesn't? There's a difference between "oh we can do interesting things in speculation" and "<Intel> who needs page tables? your virtual address is now physical in speculation".

Look: what you have wrong is the MOTIVE not the consequences. You said Intel DESIGNED this feature to ... cause security holes and reduce their own sales? That makes no sense. If you truly believe it, you're creating a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

Maybe the issue is you don't know what the word "designed" means? I mean I don't know man.

Maybe the issue is you didn't read my original tweet closely enough? Intel *designed* their CPUs to do insane things *in speculation*. Their mistake was assuming that those things would never leave speculation.

This is what you typed: "Intel still has the lead in designing CPUs that give up all their secrets *by design* in speculation." If that's not what you meant, well, I can't read minds. I'm just reacting to what you typed.

Yes, see the *in speculation* part. Intel didn't design their CPUs to be insecure under a normal architectural view, the problem is they designed them to be explicitly insecure (probably with "performance"/"cost" arguments) **in speculation** and ignored the possibility of leaks.