Intel Confronts Potential ‘PR Nightmare’ With Reported Chip Flaw
Can someone help me understand why this is such a big deal? This doesn’t seem to be a flaw in the sense of the Pentium FDIV bug where the processor returned incorrect data. It doesn’t even seem to be a bug at all, but a side channel attack that would be almost expected in a processor with speculative execution unless special measures were taken to prevent it. And it doesn’t seem like it can be used for privilege escalation, only reading secret data out of kernel memory. It seems pretty drastic to impose a double-digit percentage performance hit on every Intel processor to mitigate this.