Wednesday, January 3rd 2018

Intel Shares Down, AMD and NVIDIA Up Following VT Flaw Surface

Intel's stock pricing has taken a 6.19% dip at time of writing, in a regress that analysts say has everything to do with the reported VT flaw in Intel's central processing units. The flaw, which Intel has been silently firefighting and which we've covered extensively here on TPU, is a hardware-level vulnerability which has the potential to allow unauthorized memory access between two virtual machines (VMs) running on a physical machine, due to Intel's flawed implementation of its hardware-level virtualization instruction sets. Kernel patches are already being deployed that mitigate the issue; however, these should incur in performance losses for Intel processors, and are being deployed in an apparent "spray and pray" method that also affects performance in AMD-based machines, which are expected to be immune to the Intel flaw.
AMD's stock, however, has surged by 9.2% at time of writing, which is more upwards variance than the sometimes volatile stocks have been showing. The surge is being associated with AMD's image as offering a credible - and the only viable alternative, really - to Intel's dominance in datacenters, where AMD's recent EPYC line of processors has now seen bolstered levels of confidence. NVIDIA, another player in the data-center race, has also seen a 6.54% increase share pricing following the news. Reports that Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich sold $24 million in Intel stock back in November of 2017 don't help the case, but this doesn't really seem to have any connection with the bug's existence, since the move was a pre-planned sale of stocks (10b-51 plan), which is exactly intended to prevent insider trading. It seems that Intel is only looking to fix the flaw via software implementations, however, since the company hasn't created a financial reserve to deal with hardware write-downs and substitutions for affected customers, as it has done in the past.
Sources: Bloomberg, Tom's Hardware
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26 Comments on Intel Shares Down, AMD and NVIDIA Up Following VT Flaw Surface

#26
renz496
so what this have to do with nvidia share price going up?
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Apr 25th, 2024 23:38 EDT change timezone

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