Researchers reveal SPOILER Intel CPU vulnerability

[HEXUS]

Similar to Spectre flaws but this leakage stems from the Memory Order Buffer.

Read more.

[Tabbykatze]

I feel that Intels official comment is "developers of software should mitigate the problem, why should we?"

[lumireleon]

is this true? "intel X86 processors are bloated with old instruction sets unlike AMD who delete unused instruction sets and so holes are frequently covered."

[afiretruck]

is this true? "intel X86 processors are bloated with old instruction sets unlike AMD who delete unused instruction sets and so holes are frequently covered."

No (or not entirely). One of the main points of the x86 architecture is backward compatibility with old software, so deleting instructions because they're old makes no sense in this part. What would happen is that the CPU would simply emulate the old instructions on the new silicone, instead of retaining the silicone originally designed for those old instructions. They may be a little slower, but who cares if they were slow to begin with? I still see people using the old FPU-style floating point instructions.

Saying that, I recall that Intel has announced the removal of some really old, barely used instructions recently, and that was a big announcement (as it could break old software).

The lack of recent security vulnerabilities on AMD CPUs is much more likely to be a result of AMD having a better design philosophy, instead of trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the silicone at any cost like Intel.

[DevDrake]

is this true? "intel X86 processors are bloated with old instruction sets unlike AMD who delete unused instruction sets and so holes are frequently covered."

No (or not entirely). One of the main points of the x86 architecture is backward compatibility with old software, so deleting instructions because they're old makes no sense in this part. What would happen is that the CPU would simply emulate the old instructions on the new silicone, instead of retaining the silicone originally designed for those old instructions. They may be a little slower, but who cares if they were slow to begin with? I still see people using the old FPU-style floating point instructions.

Saying that, I recall that Intel has announced the removal of some really old, barely used instructions recently, and that was a big announcement (as it could break old software).

The lack of recent security vulnerabilities on AMD CPUs is much more likely to be a result of AMD having a better design philosophy, instead of trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the silicone at any cost like Intel.

Not quite, the intell is/was keeping instruction that are/were almost not used and are intell specific. Instructions like that in AMD processors (AMD specific that was not used widely) were usually removed after few iterations.
So the statement is rather true.
Apart from that both are having lots of undocumented instructions that may affect security.