Intel vs AMD Processor Security: Who Makes the Safest CPUs?
 

Intel vs AMD Processor Security: Who Makes the Safest CPUs?
https://www.tomshardware.com/features/intel-amd-most-secure-processors

Published a few minutes ago today... (this is just the summary below).

1) Intel currently has 242 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities, while AMD
has only 16. That¢s a 15:1 difference in AMD¢s favor. The gap is just too
large to ignore.

2) Less than half of the speculative execution side-channel attacks
disclosed for Intel since early 2018 seem to affect AMD¢s Ryzen and Epyc
CPUs. It¢s true that in some of the cases where the flaws were declared to
affect Intel¢s CPUs, the researchers may not have looked primarily at AMD¢s
CPUs. However, even then AMD confirmed that those bugs didn¢t affect its
processors after carefully verifying how the vulnerabilities affected its
own processors. It truly seems as if AMD designed the new Ryzen
microarchitecture with better security in mind than Intel¢s essentially
Nehalem-based microarchitectures have been. Why Nehalem-based? Because most
of the speculative execution attacks affect Intel¢s CPUs since at least
2008 when the Nehalem microarchitecture came out.

3) With the release of the new Zen architecture, AMD also seems to have
been one step ahead of Intel in terms of supporting new hardware encryption
features. It remains to be seen if AMD will maintain this pace in regards
to security, as Intel tries to fix all of the Spectre issues and improve
its image with consumers, but at least for now, AMD seems to have the lead.

Even ignoring all the various performance slowdowns the Spectre-related
patches have caused for both old and new systems alike, AMD¢s processors
seem like the safer and more secure platform to choose in the near and
medium-term.