[ImJustAnotherOkie]

All I know is what I read in the Papers.

It will be interesting to find out how long ago AMD knew about this and if they purposely leveraged this when putting out their new chips. If they knew this was pending it will be a pretty savvy business move.

[ConservativeMind]

Oddly, I don’t believe AMD knew anything about the specific implementation of speculative processing Intel used—it would have been a trade secret for Intel, as it is responsible for a speed boost AMD couldn’t copy. However, AMD does use something it made from scratch that kept track of permissions for code being speculatively run. If code without permission tried to use results it wasn’t authorized to use, it would error out. Intel let that information come right back to the unprivileged process. It only takes a small amount of logic and an extra couple registers and line traces to completely stop any issue. Intel didn’t bother to rethink what it made 10 - 20 years ago because it “worked.”