You're comparing apples to oranges. Operating system architectures can vary a lot. CPU architecture between Intel and AMD can't vary much since they both target x86. Every vulnerability found with Intel CPUs can and has been tested for against AMD CPUs which is something you simply cannot do with operating systems, and AMD CPUs have been found not to have the same vulnerabilities.
> CPU architecture between Intel and AMD can't vary much since they both target x86.
Completely and utterly false. The exploits being found exist at a point much lower than the x86 instruction set. ARM processors were also hit with speculative execution exploits.
You're focusing on something that doesn't really matter in the context of what he was saying, and ignoring the bigger truth which is that security researchers DID look at AMD processors and they DID find that they do not suffer from the vulnerabilities that plague Intel.
All the vulnerabilities. Speculative execution vulnerabilities were found in AMD, just not the meltdown vulnerability.
And, his point still stands. While intel has/had meltdown, which was pretty bad. That doesn't mean that a Meltdown like bug doesn't exist in AMD's hardware.
It's like finding a bug in the OpenJDK that isn't in Zulu and then declaring that "Zulu is more secure than the OpenJDK!"
Or an even closer example "Intel doesn't have the TLB bug[0]! Intel makes better CPUs!"
AMD isn't guaranteed free of all exploits. It is only guaranteed to not suffer specifically from meltdown.
> All the vulnerabilities. Speculative execution vulnerabilities were found in AMD, just not the meltdown vulnerability.
Just Not Meltdown. Or SPOILER. Or Fallout. Or RIDL. Or ZombieLoad.
You're really underselling the difference between the two. AMD's processors have only shown vulnerability to the issues that are inherent to the nature of speculative execution (Spectre).
Intel, on the other hand, has suffered from no less than 5 or 6 separate disclosures of vulnerabilities from various places in their microarchitecture where they cut corners on process separation in order to gain speed. None of these exploits have been pulled off against AMD, despite many of the papers authors explicitly trying to,
You're doing exactly what you wrongly accuse me of...
The original rebuttal was AMD gets less researcher eyeballs because there are more Intel devices in the wild so it's expected that Intel has more vulnerabilities found.
This was fully correct, yet the GP and you apparently are fixated on the idea that AMD didn't have certain vulnerabilities that were originally found _by studying Intel CPUs_. Yet no big surprise most don't apply to AMD in that case... because they were found by studying Intel CPUs first.
>CPU architecture between Intel and AMD can't vary much since they both target x86
Yes they can. Instruction sets are just that, a bunch of op codes and "things" for a processor to do. How a processor actually performs them is open to implementation.
