This piece is (IMNSHO) trash. It's trying to stare into some crystal ball guessing at the cause of market fluctuations; but there's no real evidence they're right.
Not to mention it's pretty misleading about technical stuff, saying e.g. "Chip design errors are exceedingly rare. More than 20 years ago, a college professor discovered a problem with how early versions of Intel’s Pentium chip calculated numbers."
So, they imply that chip design errors are once in a few decades kind of things; that's just complete nonsense. Chip design errors are common most just aren't this bad.
Furthermore, they imply this stock change is anything more than temporary volatility; given the tiny, tiny changes so far that's just premature. Perhaps the stocks will adjust more in the future - we'll see. But as of now, this piece is financially and technically pretty misleading.
Major chip design errors, of this magnitude, are exceedingly rare. Especially in comparison to the software industry where bugs are released to production a couple orders of magnitude more frequently. How many other Intel hardware bugs can you point to that are comparable to the ones below?
"All computers with Intel chips from the past 10 years appear to be affected... The security updates may slow down older machinery by as much as 30 percent, according to the report."
"discovered a problem with how early versions of Intel’s Pentium chip calculated numbers... Intel had to recall some chips and took a charge of more than $400 million."
That's what you're saying (and indeed what I said too!), but that's not what bloomberg published. What you're saying makes sense! But they didn't qualify this by major. And the qualification is important to the heart of the story, since the way they phrased it suggests that chip design is largely reliable and thus that this is an exceptional error, when in fact errors are common, and impact is merely exceptional. In effect: they're overstating the signal-to-noise ratio this event implies.
Worse, they understated the noisiness of the chip error "signal" but they also understate the noisiness of the stock value signal. And hey presto; if you conveniently present only the data you want all of the sudden a correlation looks really meaningful!
Furthermore, even the qualification "major" isn't really deserved quite to the extent that bloomberg implies; specifically there have been worse chip errors much more recently than 20 years ago (e.g. amd's somewhat similar phenom issues). What makes this one worse isn't just the bug, it's how chips are used: cloud computing makes this much more relevant than similar bugs not too many years ago.
> How many other Intel hardware bugs can you point to that are comparable to the ones below?
Disabling a whole feature (TSX) across an entire generation of processor and early steppings of the next? That's pretty major, given it's a marketed feature.
I think it's pretty clear in this case. Plenty of people here in hn-land were talking about Intel/AMD short/long positions starting in the afternoon yesterday and word has gotten around.
Talk is cheap; investing perhaps less so. The asserted "soaring" stock price simply hasn't happened. The 7% rise they name as "soaring" is not a soar for a stock this volatile: https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/AMD:US - just look at the graph over the past year; value changes in excess of 50% happened several times.
To be clear; I'm not saying this increase won't stick, just that bloomberg is pretending they're reading this from the numbers, not merely expecting it to occur. It'd be fine to say you might expect the stock to trend higher. But pretending you can look at that noisy line and say the current 7% increase is statistically significantly higher in a humanly relevant way is just hogwash.
Obviously you might expect the stock to soar. It may well happen. It just isn't visible in the data they present; the article is simply click bait (or worse, market manipulation).
ok. I was more thinking about the "INTC decline" than the "AMD rise". you make a good point with previous volatility.
I didn't have options activated till this morning, because i hadn't gotten around to it. Had I been able to activate them yesterday afternoon, I'd be in on INTC and AMD, both sides. Anyways, I have options in play on the intel side but not the amd side, so while "Talk is cheap" - I'm in.
Yes, I'm sure all those Wall Street finance folks are all scouring HN comment threads just waiting for the next great piece of investment advice that they can move on.
> "So, they imply that chip design errors are once in a few decades kind of things; that's just complete nonsense. Chip design errors are common most just aren't this bad."
Many chip design errors are patched with microcode updates. There is speculation that this one cannot.
Not to mention it's pretty misleading about technical stuff, saying e.g. "Chip design errors are exceedingly rare. More than 20 years ago, a college professor discovered a problem with how early versions of Intel’s Pentium chip calculated numbers."
So, they imply that chip design errors are once in a few decades kind of things; that's just complete nonsense. Chip design errors are common most just aren't this bad.
Furthermore, they imply this stock change is anything more than temporary volatility; given the tiny, tiny changes so far that's just premature. Perhaps the stocks will adjust more in the future - we'll see. But as of now, this piece is financially and technically pretty misleading.