Intel is being sidelined on servers for its vulnerabilities in favor of AMD EPYCs

Robert Sole 19 May 2019

0 773 1 minute of reading

According to Liftr Cloud Insight, both Microsoft and Amazon would be betting on AMD EPYC processors due to the vulnerabilities of the Intel Xeon.

The latest vulnerabilities in Intel processors are posing a major problem for the company. They are the umpteenth vulnerabilities at the microarchitecture level detected. Until now they were sought at the architectural scale, they had not gone deep into the silicon itself. These last vulnerabilities have to do with processing threads or HyperThreading. There is no patch to mitigate them at the moment, they can only be mitigated by disabling HyperThreading. This is causing the company to be questioned in the server and data center industry. So much so that some would want to migrate to AMD EPYC.

Intel could lose customers due to the latest vulnerabilities

These latest vulnerabilities, called ZombieLoad they are extremely dangerous. Basically this vulnerability can be exploited on almost any processor without problems. If we enter a password, the processor compares them. In case it is wrong, the processor asks for and returns the correct password. During this process the correct password is exposed and obtainable as it is not encrypted. But it goes further, since this vulnerability can be exploited remotely, you do not have to be physically on the site.

Liftr Cloud Insight, a company specializing in cloud services, has said that Amazon and Microsoft are switching from Intel. According to this company, these two very important Intel customers would be acquiring more EPYC processors.

Amazon for AWS would have gone from 18% EPYC processors to 18.9% EPYC processors in their systems. Whoever has bought the most EPYC processors from AMD is Microsoft for Azure. From 7.5% of EPYC processors in Azure, it would have gone to 13.1%, almost doubling the share.

It is due, among others, to the fact that Xeon Platinum processors, those used by Amazon and Microsoft, would lose up to 15% of performance. Intel's situation is getting more and more complicated. Bob Swan has encountered a disaster inherited by Brian Krzanich, who seems to have failed to look out for the good of the company. Be that as it may, it is Swan who must grapple with all the troublesome fronts.