Well, one day people are going to realize having all these security holes patched makes the intel chips worse-off than the recent Ryzen 3xxx chips. So they will either (as some said above/before me) forgo the patches entirely or only take ones that don't hurt performance really bad, or they will patch them up and realize better safe than sorry. I do content creation and DO use things such as various sites to buy models and graphic files. However, that being said, I have no regrets skipping the intel when it saved me a few hundred to go AMD and still have 95%~120% the performance in the tasks I do daily here. For gamers though, I still think the intel will be performance king (maybe Ryzen 4xxx will take the crown, or maybe not), at-least until the games use more than 8 cores / 16 threads (some do, many don't). Hopefully they don't find too many bad holes on the AMD setups, will keep fingers crossed. Didn't think I'd see much improvement in performance on many things coming from a 4.4ghz 4790k with 2400mhz memory - but it was entirely worth it to get an 8-core Ryzen 3xxx chip. No regrets, and much less security holes (as of now!) to worry about taking performance away.

mbk1969:

You will never convince me that all these side-channel attacks have value for "professional" malware hackers. Why waste your time in trying to see valuable information in bits of cache memory when you can simply take remote "root" control on millions and millions of computers of uneducated users by sending them letters with fake links (and even software) promising something, or by putting "bad" versions of software to file servers (torrents)? And speaking about bank operations, as I take it most of the users use smartphones for that. I guess, such researches are valuable for researchers themselves: they got reputation, they got grants, probably they even got Ph.D.

You need to think of this as another 'tool' folks who have an interest in your PC/mobile/tablet/device can use in order to extract information and/or control. To bury your head in the sand - or divert attention - is very unwise, even if you think you have nothing to be concerned with. As society increasingly moves away from traditional methods of banking, shopping, communicating, etc etc then you can fully expect a 100% guarantee that opportunists/authorities/groups/etc will continue to probe. Yes, there are other methods to do this, but just as anti-malware/virus companies have an interest in protecting your data (or not!) then so do the criminals/others have a similar interest in maintaining 'tool/method' diversity. If you had a choice to make your device 100% impenetrable, would you? what would be every population's answer?

Mesab67:

You need to think of this as another 'tool' folks who have an interest in your PC/mobile/tablet/device can use in order to extract information and/or control.

We have no evidences that they already added those attacks into their tools. And I do not believe in folks having interest in my PC (except for bot-net). Any crime should be prepared, and preparation has to be short and cheap enough.

Mesab67:

To bury your head in the sand - or divert attention - is very unwise, even if you think you have nothing to be concerned with.

I do not. I just do not agree with hype/panic.

Mesab67:

As society increasingly moves away from traditional methods of banking, shopping, communicating, etc etc then you can fully expect a 100% guarantee that opportunists/authorities/groups/etc will continue to probe.

Sure. But there is bigger danger than hackers - big data collected by commercial companies. I saw dramatic example of "data fell into wrong hands". At the start of XX Dutch government decided to collect extended data from population (like religion, ethnicity) to offer a better services. And all was good until Nazis occupied Netherlands, took all collected data and got all Jews by the list.

Mesab67:

If you had a choice to make your device 100% impenetrable, would you?

Only if it will not cost a usability. Take a flat/house as an example. Sure I do install lock (or two), but despite the understanding that professional housebreaker will open those locks I do not install several more locks (may be of different types), several more doors, several dogs, etc.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/03/10/necurs-botnet-cyber-crime-disrupt/

yeeeeman:

I understand these researchers are doing it for press coverage, but don't they have anything else better to do? Watch movies, drink beer, enjoy life?

I don't understand this comment. Would you rather nefarious people find the exploits, never tell anyone, and use it to their bidding, because you apparently want these researchers to not discover them? Researchers discovering something has nothing to do with the exploit being, or not being there. It only allows companies to do something about it, rather then have no knowledge to do anything about it.

Cplifj:

frack Intel and their planned obsolescence. Such a shame they don't sell as much as they'd like too. But doing this kind of crap is not gonna help them either. And we don't have to install anything, Microsoft will make sure you get the update that will kill your pc performance to help their Technology Rob'em'blind Friends.

I'm no fan of intel, most people here will agree with that statement about myself. I don't like their business practices when it comes to competition, in the past, or current. However, what you're going on about? Pure nonsense. Tell me if i'm getting it wrong but you're actually implying that Intel purposefully left a bunch of vulnerabilities in their CPUs......so that way they could fix them later, lower performance, and force people to upgrade? If someone is upgrading due to vulnerabilities making their CPU slower......you really think they'd go with the same company again? To be clear i'm not saying people who have Intel processors won't be buying Intel processors again the future, but not likely because their CPU is lowered in performance due to fixes, but because something new has come out that they wanted the extra performance, regardless of the loss of performance of their previous CPU. So again my question is: If someone was upgrading because of the CPU vulnerabilities and decrease in performance from the fixes, you're really convince they would go with Intel again? Knowing the reason they are upgrading? That's not logical, sure there might be some, but not the majority. There's no way that these vulnerabilities help Intel, if anything, they help AMD since people will potentially be looking to go with a company that currently doesn't have a lot of known vulnerabilities. So there's zero ways this is "planned obsolescence", as that implies a benefit to ones company by making sure people have to/want to come back for more when they shouldn't have needed to. There's no reason for a tinfoil hat anywhere in these forums. https://media.kasperskydaily.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/85/2016/04/05125840/tinfoilhatday-3.jpg