One article about a patched vulnerability isn’t special or indicative of anything on a wider scale.
Of course. The wide-scale big picture thesis is that it’s foolish to needlessly add an attack surface to the core of your CPU. To those who are infosec aware already accept that automatically because it follows from basic prevailing well-established principles of the infosec discipline. We don’t need to wait for the attack surface to be exploited before realising that the attack surface exists. In laymans terms, we lock our doors even if we have never been intruded on.
The infosec uninformed don’t practice security by default. They favor the most convenient decision (to run the fastest chip) and will not consider security in the absence of a specific exploit. The hackaday article gives that. It does nothing to sway experts who already know it’s rock-stupid to needlessly introduce an attack surface. The hackaday article supports my thesis in the face of those who reject fundamental infosec principles.
Sounds like they have their shit together.
AMD abandons customers of their older products. AMD only reacted as they did because the defect was found in recent hardware. If you equate the similar mentality that also brings designed obolescence to “having their shit together”, you can only speak from the standpoint of a shareholder. When a serious 0-day emerges on a 10+ year old AMD spychip, it’s foolish to assume AMD will have their shit together and patch it. They will have their shit together only in terms of the corporate bottom line, not to the ethical extent of protecting /all/ their customers.
There are plenty examples of AMD not having their shit together, such as refusing to patch Spectre on some of their own products. Introducing the spychip in the first place is not “having their shit together” for the demographic of non-corporate consumers.