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A lot of the cheaper Pi-like boards also aren't affected for the same reason, as are lower-end Android phones. The articles claiming it affected every modern CP
by makomk 9y ago
A lot of the cheaper Pi-like boards also aren't affected for the same reason, as are lower-end Android phones. The articles claiming it affected every modern CPU were basically mistaken. It was an easy mistake to make, given that ARM's announcement only listed the cores that were affected and had a little note saying everything not listed was unaffected by both Meltdown and Spectre. (There is precisely one ARM-designed core that is affected by Meltdown, a high-end one so new that no chips based on it have been released yet.)
- davrosthedalek 9y agoOne could argue that CPUs without branch prediction are not modern in the sense of "modern, state of the art design". The fact that they still produce,e.g. 8051, even "new" overall designs, doesn't make the 8051 modern.
- zzzcpan 9y agoBranch prediction is neither new nor modern. Modern state of the art design doesn't actually do branch prediction in hardware at all. I mean look at all the ideas from VLIW architecture, no hardware - no problems.
- haimez 9y agoYou're being pretty silly by zeroing in on the word modern and then using an equally silly redefinition of it yourself. Branch prediction isn't new, you're right. But VLIW instructions are equally unmodern and are entirely orthogonal to speculative execution. Sufficiently smart compilers are also no substitute for runtime analysis.
- harlanji 9y agoMy CS book (Bryant and O'Hallaron, 2003, p. 399) says Control Data 6600 in 1964 was the first processor w out of order executuon, considered exotic until RS/6000 by IBM in 1990/PowerPC 601 in 1993.