On Wed, Jan 3, 2018 at 4:37 PM, Alex Elsayed <eternaleye@gmail.com> wrote:

In addition, Intel has published a press release, claiming that this
issue (counter to some claims elsewhere) does in fact affect other
vendors and architectures:

https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-responds-to-security-research-findings/

Contrary to the PR, Intel CPUs do indeed have a design flaw aka bug which makes them vulnerable to Meltdown. Meltdown has not been reproduced on ARM or AMD and AMD thinks Meltdown is not applicable to their chips due to architectural differences.

The Spectre attack is the attack that is applicable across the board.

As far as Linux is concerned only Intel machines will be hit with the KPI-related slowdown (5%-30%) since KPI will be disabled on AMD CPUs. (And I assume this goes for Windows too.) This looks bad for Intel, hence the FUD.