Most books frame this as "one common mistake is ...". I always understood this phrase to mean that the author has personally made this mistake more than once.
> and the relative ease with which AMD has come through the problems make me wonder if we would be better with AMD.
I think the only reason this is the case is the difference in market share. There are much more Intel processors out there, so finding an Intel vulnerability makes a much better academic paper (and much more lucrative for bad actors).
AMD might have made some inroads into the enthusiast market lately, but with cloud providers they are basically non-existent. These guys buy (or manufacture) servers by tens of thousands. They hate rebooting servers, even if they got a VM live-migration stuff worked out (as everybody does these days). BIOS and RAM problems that people mention here make AMD a complete no-go.
I'm sure that now there are people at Amazon/Google/Microsoft thinking hard about reducing their dependence on Intel, but I doubt we will see any difference for years.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/web-hijack-riles-belkin-rou...