Intel is in hot water this week, with the recent revelations of a critical security flaw in the design of its processors wreaking havoc in the tech world - and Intel"s share prices. The company still has more challenges to come as a result of these vulnerabilities, however, as three class action lawsuits have been filed against it in the two days since.
The lawsuits, filed in Oregon, Indiana, and California, argue that Intel failed to inform its customers about the vulnerability in a timely fashion, as the company has been aware of their existence for months now. Also included in the plaintiffs" list of grievances are concerns that the patches rolling out to fix these issues cause a significant drop in performance.
Intel, for its part, has denied that the impact on performance will be as high as initially reported, arguing that "the performance impact of these updates is highly workload-dependent and, for the average computer user, should not be significant and will be mitigated over time." Google, too, issued a similar statement in regard to their impact on the company"s own cloud servers.
The Santa Clara-based chipmaker isn"t the only one whose products are affected, either. Of the two bugs revealed, Meltdown and Spectre, the latter also affects a number of processors from AMD and ARM. It remains to be seen if these companies will also face legal retribution in the coming weeks.