Shares of $INTC Plunge on Processor Flaw Report; $AMD Soars

The Register is out with a report today, sending shares of INTC sharply lower and chief competitor AMD higher.

Updated A fundamental design flaw in Intel’s processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.

Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel’s virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.

Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we’re looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. More recent Intel chips have features – such as PCID – to reduce the performance hit. Your mileage may vary.

In case you were wondering if AMD’s chips were immune to these sort of attacks, they are.

AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel page table isolation feature protects against. The AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault.

For decades, AMD has been the red-headed step-child to Intel. While this set-back is most assuredly temporary for Intel, it does permit AMD shareholders with a glimmer of hope to possibly compete with Intel on a small scale — thanks to this critical chip flaw.

On a valuation scale, AMD is trading at ~2x sales and Intel ~3X. Shares of AMD are flat over the past year, while Intel’s are higher by 25%.