Friday, January 5, 2018

Food for thought for the Weekend (6-Jan-18): Intel

Food for thought for the Weekend: My series where I present assorted collection of interesting blog posts, TED talks, podcast and articles I read/listened this week, some quotes that resonated with me, excerpts from my own reading.

Yesterday there is a big story on Intel chips having a security breach (later confirmed that even processors from ARM, AMD etc., also to have similar issues), which means that almost every PC, smartphone, tablet is under threat. Here's some background (including Intel's official response).

This reminds me of the famous Pentium floating point bug that had come to plague Intel in 1994. As an young engg then, I had found it very fascinating (the mathematical analysis of the bug, how it was discovered, what all it'd affect and some jokes around it at Intel's expense) and if you read Andy Grove's  (Intel's co-founder and later its CEO) seminal book "Only the Paranoid Survive", you'd learn a lot about this story in the very first chapter itself.

Some people are predicting that the current crisis is much bigger than that. I also read about work arounds people are already proposing (which would have performance impact). Infact in the RFmx global weekly update meeting y'day, there was a very short discussion on how this might affect NI's product and is there anything we need to do. Worth keeping a tab on it (and if you find interesting articles, kindly let me know or put the links in the comments section for everyone's benefit).

Finally, some people are accusing Intel's CEO of selling all his shares (worth about $39M) after knowing about this bug, but before it became public.

Interesting links if you want to know more:

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