There is emerging news that has spread like wildfire on Reddit. Apparently, there is a massive security failure under the Intel processors (currently under embargo) that would directly affect large cloud service providers such as Amazon and Google (and many others). The solution to this problem would be dramatically reducing the performance of Intel equipment by up to 35 %.
A massive security failure would affect the performance of Intel computers
A massive BUG in Intel CPUs would affect up to 35% of its performance
People have noticed a recent development in the Linux kernel quite essential and too fast for Linux standards. The “official” reason is to incorporate a prevention technology called KASLR, which most security experts consider almost useless.
There are also some unusual and suspicious things happening: missing documentation and some of the comments that are deleted.
The bug would be affecting a low-level central feature (virtual memory) and has severe performance penalties when applying a patch: 29% for an i7-6700 and 34% for an i7-3770S, according to Brad Spengler of security. This problem would not be present in AMD CPUs. The kernel signal is called X86_BUG_CPU_INSECURE, and its description is “CPU is insecure and needs isolation from kernel tables.”
Apparently, Microsoft was already aware of this problem since November and worked on a patch since that date.
Cloud-computing providers most affected
What is being speculated at the moment is that there is a possible massive failure of the Intel CPU hardware. That directly opens severe vulnerabilities in large cloud-computing providers that offer shared hosting and other types of services. So this ruling would not affect, for now, the processors of domestic use (The series that we usually buy mortals).
It is normal for Intel to want to keep this secret, but it seems that everything will finally come to light. For this reason, we believe that if AMD moves quickly with its AMD EPYC can do enough damage to Intel in these first months. What do you think about this bug?