VW broke the law by deliberately defeating regulations which applied to them. Is there a regulation that applies to Intel and AMD which requires them to allocate die space and performance to improving security?
I'm not even sure they could have delivered equal performance at the high end if they had included these mitigations earlier. Whether to produce processors which are safer or faster depends on what customers prefer, even now. Not everyone needs ultimate security or wants to pay for it (in money or performance). So unless the law says less-secure processors must never be sold, this situation was and still is inevitable.
> On December 20, 1994, Intel offered to replace all flawed Pentium processors on the basis of request, in response to mounting public pressure.[5] Although it turned out that only a small fraction of Pentium owners bothered to get their chips replaced, the financial impact on the company was significant.[citation needed] On January 17, 1995, Intel announced "a pre-tax charge of $475 million against earnings, ostensibly the total cost associated with replacement of the flawed processors."[1] Some of the defective chips were later turned into key rings by Intel.[6]
You seem to be trying to litigate this on Hacker News, which is does not have the authority to issue you a refund. If you feel strongly about this, sue Intel. Most of us will not be joining you because we either rent CPUs from Amazon or are out a tiny amount of money for our personal rigs. Yup, this is "how they get you" and someone should be a check and balance on a defective product. But, most of us have no appetite to spend years or decades litigating this. We accept that our $200 wafer of silicon with 13nm features that can execute billions of mathematical operations is "good enough". Sometimes there are bugs. But we don't know how to make these things ourselves, so we deal with them and aren't really looking for a pound of flesh from Intel because the billions of instructions their CPUs can execute per second is a slightly lower number of billions.
> You seem to be trying to litigate this on Hacker News, which is does not have the authority to issue you a refund. If you feel strongly about this, sue Intel. Most of us will not be joining you because we either rent CPUs from Amazon or are out a tiny amount of money for our personal rigs. Yup, this is "how they get you" and someone should be a check and balance on a defective product. But, most of us have no appetite to spend years or decades litigating this.
Part of the initial stages of a class action is verifying that there does indeed exist a class.
There's value in him talking about his grievance publicly and not just rolling over when he gets screwed by a corporation, just because that can beat him one on one in a legal brawl.
> We accept that our $200 wafer of silicon with 13nm features that can execute billions of mathematical operations is "good enough". Sometimes there are bugs. But we don't know how to make these things ourselves, so we deal with them and aren't really looking for a pound of flesh from Intel because the billions of instructions their CPUs can execute per second is a slightly lower number of billions.
I also can't build a modern car. Or insulin. Or a million other devices in my life. The bar isn't "you can only complain if you can make it yourself better", it's "you can complain if what was sold to you didn't meet it's advertised specifications".
I'm not even sure they could have delivered equal performance at the high end if they had included these mitigations earlier. Whether to produce processors which are safer or faster depends on what customers prefer, even now. Not everyone needs ultimate security or wants to pay for it (in money or performance). So unless the law says less-secure processors must never be sold, this situation was and still is inevitable.