Reply to post: Re: Speed

Intel's commitment to making its stuff secure is called into question

Michael Wojcik Silver badge

Re: Speed

If a car manufacturer produced a car that was race-car fast, but dangerous to drive, the car manufacturer can absolutely be faulted for it even if the market overwhelmingly wants race-car speeds.

Many car manufacturers do sell models that are very fast and difficult to control when they are operated at high speed. Notorious examples include many of the Porsche 911 models, the Aston Martins of the 1990s, pretty much all American muscle cars, ...

And most of the security (safety) measures that cars incorporate are present due to government regulation, because given the choice, the market would prefer faster and cheaper over safer. There's no evidence to suggest that a significant portion of the automobile market is willing to pay more (either in direct price, or in reduced features elsewhere) for safety.

There is no similar regulatory regime for CPUs or other IT components, except in extremely limited areas such as FIPS 140 compliance for cryptographic systems sold to the US Federal government (and FIPS 140-2 is arguably counterproductive). A "more secure" CPU would almost certainly have failed, or at least been a niche product.

Consider that Intel ended up canceling the '432 because no one wanted to buy it. The AS/400, a not-quite-a-capability-architecture system, succeeded only among IBM's largely captive market. How many Burroughs mainframes (B5500 and its successors) or MCP-based ClearPath systems do you run into?

By and large, people have been unwilling to spend money on security beyond the point where they believe they have achieved parity with their peers.

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon