In retrospect I regret bringing up the Phenom because my argument could've stood without it, and I could realistically argue either way.
But my original intention was pointing out that the failure mode of the Phenom was such that it wasn't exploitable for anything other than potentially denial-of-service; it was just inconvenient, and only affected a subsystem of the CPU which worked fine without it using a firmware workaround.
Though you don't expect your CPU to halt and lock up, I believe it's far more insidious when you feed a device inputs and get the wrong output without any obvious indication that something went wrong, like in the case of rowhammer-vulnerable memory and FDIV.
But my original intention was pointing out that the failure mode of the Phenom was such that it wasn't exploitable for anything other than potentially denial-of-service; it was just inconvenient, and only affected a subsystem of the CPU which worked fine without it using a firmware workaround.
Though you don't expect your CPU to halt and lock up, I believe it's far more insidious when you feed a device inputs and get the wrong output without any obvious indication that something went wrong, like in the case of rowhammer-vulnerable memory and FDIV.