AMD's CFO Devinder Kumar recently commented that AMD stands ready to manufacture Arm chips if needed, noting that the company's customers want to work with AMD on Arm-based solutions. Kumar's remarks came during last week's Deutsche Bank Technology Conference, building on comments from AMD CEO Lisa Su earlier in the year that underscored the company's willingness to create custom silicon solutions for its customers, be they based on x86 or Arm architectures. Intel also intends to produce Arm and RISC-V chips, too, meaning that the rise of non-x86 architectures will be partially fueled by the stewards of the dominant x86 ecosystem.
AMD has divulged details about a chipset vulnerability that can allow non-privileged users to read and dump some types of memory pages in Windows. This technique allows an attacker to steal passwords or enable other types of attacks, including circumventing standard KASLR exploitation (aka Spectre and Meltdown) mitigations (via TheRecord).
Word of the bug came as part of a coordinated disclosure with Kyriakos Economou, a security researcher and co-founder of ZeroPeril, who exploited the vulnerability to downloaded several gigabytes of sensitive data from impacted AMD processors — but as a non-admin user. AMD has prepared mitigations that can be downloaded either as part of its latest chipset drivers or by using Windows Update to update the AMD PSP driver (details of how to update are below).