AMD argues that Zombieload and other MDS-vulnerabilities not endanger their processors

According to AMD company statement, discovered in Intel processors new class of MDS-vulnerabilities does not affect processors of their production.

Previously this month was reported about discovery in Intel chips vulnerabilities as Zombieliad, RIDL, Fallout and Store-to-Leak Forwarding, linked with the mechanism of speculative execution.

With their use attacker can get access to your data in different inner buffers of central processor.

“At AMD we develop our products and services with security in mind. Based on our analysis and discussions with the researchers, we believe our products are not susceptible to ‘Fallout’, ‘RIDL’ or ‘ZombieLoad Attack’ because of the hardware protection checks in our architecture. We have not been able to demonstrate these exploits on AMD products and are unaware of others having done so”, — argue in AMD.

For other vulnerabilities were released patches however, as show results of testing, they make Intel-powered machines much slower.

According to Photonix, after installation of patches computers with enabled regime of hyperthreading work in average 16% slower. Moreover, Apple and Google advised their users to disable hyperthreading on Intel-machines for security reasons.

Read also: Intel tried to buy silence of researchers that discovered MDS vulnerabilities

This step may decline performance by 40-50%, depending on application. As vulnerabilities do not affect AMD processors, there is no need to install patches and disable simultaneous multithreading (analog of hyperthreading in Intel).

As a rule, hyperthreading mode used for working stations and servers, and considerable part of this market belongs to Intel processors. As reports Phoronix, after installation of patches for new MDS-vulnerabilities Core i7-8700 is close to Ryzen 7 2700X in its performance.

Source: https://www.amd.com