Security vulnerabilities in processors are a major concern in many industries. When we talk about a security issue, we can talk about two different issues. The first of these is that applications perform operations outside of memory spaces where they are not allowed to operate. The second, more complicated, concerns remote access to the PC by a third party. The latter is something that at the user level is not as important as in the enterprise market where servers, data centers, and different workers’ PCs move very sensitive information.
Are Intel processors less secure than AMD’s?
If we look at the lists of documented vulnerabilities, we can see how up to 486 security vulnerabilities have been found in Intel processors at the time of writing this article. The figure that AMD has? Apenás 21. Situation that creates a debate with the following question: are Intel CPUs dangerous?
If we assume that the two companies make processors with sets of x86 registers and instructions, Intel processors and AMD processors shouldn’t be much different. The reality is that what the ISA defines is the decoding code in the control unit during the instruction cycle, as well as the common registers involved. It shows what each instruction does, but not how, and in this regard Intel and AMD differ.
One of the keys to improving performance in processors is speculative execution, another is transactional memory. Both rely on executing some code outside of the space allocated to applications. Since in all modern processors and due to the requirements of the operating system, the RAM memory space is divided into several different spaces. In them, applications cannot intervene in the space of the operating system.
In the case of speculative execution and transactional memory, parallel execution spaces are opened, which opens the door to vulnerabilities of Intel processors greater than those of AMD. Because of the way they were implemented. In other words, Intel has sacrificed the security of its processors for design speed. Intel processors have more vulnerabilities than AMD’s.
A disadvantage for Intel compared to AMD
Due to the sacrifice of security for performance and the continued emergence of new vulnerabilities. Intel was forced to update the microcontroller which acts as a control unit in its processors, thus eliminating functionality. This slows down your systems and therefore your overall performance.
Since the design and production stages of a processor take several years, currently in the industry the average is 5, the changes in Intel processors affected in 2018 by Meltdown and Specter should start to be felt. 2022 or 2023 Speculative execution is difficult to achieve. patch because it is associated with out-of-order execution. All this is not to say that AMD does not have security issues, it does and just as serious, and what is clear is that as its EPYCs AMD are increasingly used in the enterprise market. where the interest in breaking out their security will go into increasing. Intel’s larger market share makes it much more vulnerable to the discovery of security holes in its processors. More than anything, because there is more juicy information to get or keep.
