Intel’s nightmare continues as lawsuits loom over Meltdown and Spectre bugs

By Darren Allan

As the Meltdown and Spectre controversy rumbles on, Intel is now taking more flak in the form of three class-action lawsuits filed in California, Indiana and Oregon, over in the US.

And what’s more, further suits are expected to be in the pipeline as the Guardian reports.

The lawsuits have been filed alleging design flaws in Intel CPUs, and furthermore the company’s delay in publicly disclosing these vulnerabilities, with the plaintiffs also unhappy about the potential slowdown of PCs that the fixes for the issues could possibly cause.

On the latter point, Intel argued earlier this week that contrary to all the initial talk of up to 30% slowdowns, any performance impact will be very much workload-related, with the effect on the average PC user not likely to be significant (and even then, it will be “mitigated over time” according to Intel).

The Californian lawsuit claims for “breach of warranty and violations of consumer protection statutes alleging that Intel’s selling of computer chips with this fatal security flaw misled consumers about the performance and reliability of the computers operating with this hardware”.

Gerard Stranch, managing partner of BS&J, one of the firms which is filing the Californian suit, commented: “We look …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components