@meso @dushman I don't even think those security vulnerabilities are even the backdoor part, Intel is just that incompetent and cuts that many corners to "win" benchmarks.

The updates seem to be mostly crappy workarounds that don't actually fix the problem, as I believe it's kind of impossible to fix a hardware problem with speculative execution without disabling speculative execution entirely, which would reduce performance by like 80%.

The NSA still loves to use any available vulnerabilities regardless if they were a backdoor or not.


Really, installing proprietary microcode updates is trying to fix a problem caused by the running of proprietary malware on your computer by installing more proprietary malware: https://www.fsfla.org/ikiwiki/blogs/lxo/pub/who-is-afraid-of-spectre-and-meltdown.en.html