3 ms·

It's affected by the bug and will never be patched.

by ztjio 9y ago

jcadam 9y ago
Damn (though the G3 has a fairly short pipeline if memory serves), how far back do I need to go? I may have an old Amiga 500 somewhere around here...
- Macha 9y ago
  You can get a Pentium 1. Or a 2012 Atom.
- hawski 9y ago
  Or you can buy AMD Zen and use it with branch prediction disabled ;)
- arcticbull 9y ago
  G3/750 have a 4-stage pipeline [1]. They were really cool chips actually, they used them in the GameCube (the 750CXe). [1] https://arstechnica.com/features/2004/10/ppc-2/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2004/10/ppc-2/
  - planteen 9y ago
    The RAD750 PPC (radiation hardened variant) is also used in a ton of satellites. It was state of the art until about a year ago for space.
    - r00fus 9y ago
      I wonder (my evil devil's advocate) if there are satellites or other hard-to-patch vital facilities that could be compromised with either of these vulnerabilities. I know they made space-hardened x86 chips too.
arcticbull 9y ago
Surprisingly, due to architectural limitations, it isn't affected by either of the issues in spite of having some speculative execution capabilities. The G5 might be but it appears the G3 and G4 are good to go based on this detailed writeup I found. "...the G3 and the G4, because of their limitations on indirect branching, are at least somewhat more resistant to Spectre-based attacks because it is harder to cause their speculative execution pathways to operate in an attacker-controllable fashion (particularly the G3 and the 7400, which do not have a link stack cache). So, if you're really paranoid, dust that old G3 or Sawtooth G4 off. You just might have the Yosemite that manages to survive the computing apocalypse." [1] [1] http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-and-powerpc-or-why.html http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-an...
- cat199 9y ago
  > You just might have the Yosemite that manages to survive the computing apocalypse. Just not MacOS yosemite, more likely Linux/PPC or Open/NetBSD... :D
- ztjio 9y ago
  The way I read it, it's not immune, just harder to attack. Furthermore, Meltdown and Spectre are just two specific ways to attempt a whole class of attacks and could be improved upon especially now that the whole world's attention has been brought upon it. So yeah probably you're not going to have issues in reality with a G3, especially given its small presence in modern computing, but I wouldn't choose it thinking it's immune either.

It's affected by the bug and will never be patched.

by ztjio 9y ago

It's affected by the bug and will never be patched.

Damn (though the G3 has a fairly short pipeline if memory serves), how far back do I need to go? I may have an old Amiga 500 somewhere around here...

Macha 9y ago
You can get a Pentium 1. Or a 2012 Atom.
hawski 9y ago
Or you can buy AMD Zen and use it with branch prediction disabled ;)
arcticbull 9y ago
G3/750 have a 4-stage pipeline [1]. They were really cool chips actually, they used them in the GameCube (the 750CXe). [1] https://arstechnica.com/features/2004/10/ppc-2/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2004/10/ppc-2/
- planteen 9y ago
  The RAD750 PPC (radiation hardened variant) is also used in a ton of satellites. It was state of the art until about a year ago for space.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    I wonder (my evil devil's advocate) if there are satellites or other hard-to-patch vital facilities that could be compromised with either of these vulnerabilities. I know they made space-hardened x86 chips too.

arcticbull 9y ago

Surprisingly, due to architectural limitations, it isn't affected by either of the issues in spite of having some speculative execution capabilities. The G5 might be but it appears the G3 and G4 are good to go based on this detailed writeup I found. "...the G3 and the G4, because of their limitations on indirect branching, are at least somewhat more resistant to Spectre-based attacks because it is harder to cause their speculative execution pathways to operate in an attacker-controllable fashion (particularly the G3 and the 7400, which do not have a link stack cache). So, if you're really paranoid, dust that old G3 or Sawtooth G4 off. You just might have the Yosemite that manages to survive the computing apocalypse." [1] [1] http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-and-powerpc-or-why.html http://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2018/01/more-about-spectre-an...

cat199 9y ago
> You just might have the Yosemite that manages to survive the computing apocalypse. Just not MacOS yosemite, more likely Linux/PPC or Open/NetBSD... :D
ztjio 9y ago
The way I read it, it's not immune, just harder to attack. Furthermore, Meltdown and Spectre are just two specific ways to attempt a whole class of attacks and could be improved upon especially now that the whole world's attention has been brought upon it. So yeah probably you're not going to have issues in reality with a G3, especially given its small presence in modern computing, but I wouldn't choose it thinking it's immune either.