I'm disheartened by the number of comments here who are taking the stance that Intel has idiot designers or that management doesn't care about security. This attack is very clever and unexpected. Even though side-channel attacks have been talked about for awhile, even the guy who developed Meltdown was surprised that it worked. It just seemed like an "in theory" security hole, not an exploitable one.
AMD isn't vulnerable to Meltdown not because they foresaw this issue, but probably because they simply weren't as aggressive as Intel in allowing speculative execution. For years people have preferred Intel over AMD cpus due to their performance advantage, due in part to that higher sophistication of their pipeline.
Or to recast it, nobody is hating on AMD right now, but AMD CPUs do allow a user process to learn some things about the kernel via timing attacks. If next month a researcher develops Meltdown2 for AMD, are AMDs designers now suddenly idiots for missing an obvious security hole?
AMD isn't vulnerable to Meltdown not because they foresaw this issue, but probably because they simply weren't as aggressive as Intel in allowing speculative execution. For years people have preferred Intel over AMD cpus due to their performance advantage, due in part to that higher sophistication of their pipeline.
Or to recast it, nobody is hating on AMD right now, but AMD CPUs do allow a user process to learn some things about the kernel via timing attacks. If next month a researcher develops Meltdown2 for AMD, are AMDs designers now suddenly idiots for missing an obvious security hole?