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> This is clearly what Intel did. And ARM, and IBM, both the POWER and mainframe/Z teams. Although this design decision of Intel's was in the early 1990s, shi
by dfrage 7y ago
> This is clearly what Intel did.
And ARM, and IBM, both the POWER and mainframe/Z teams.
Although this design decision of Intel's was in the early 1990s, shipping in their first Pentium Pro in 1995. When AMD's competition was a souped up 486 targeting Intel's superscaler Pentium, although I assume they were also working on their first out-of-order K5 at the time, it first shipping in 1996.
- panarky 7y ago> And ARM, and IBM, both the POWER and mainframe/Z teams Is the point of your argument that others did it too, so Intel shouldn't be accountable? Or that others did it too, so it's reasonable to believe that the vulns were impossible to prevent? This argument sounds a lot like the "deflect" part of Facebook's strategy to "delay, deny, deflect".
- dfrage 7y agoI'm saying Intel's design decisions are found in so many other vendors, Spectre in all of them I've looked for, that it represents an industry blind spot. Which calls for different kinds of "accountability", unless you're a rent seeker.
- chx 7y agoNah, the K6 was not an AMD design, it was NexGen. (I had a Nx686 motherboard back in the day. I was young and wasted way too much money on exotic parts. I also had an Ark Logic video card about the same time, it might've been the Hercules Stingray Pro but my memory is a bit fuzzy after 25 years.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K6 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K6 The AMD K6 is a superscalar P5 Pentium-class microprocessor, manufactured by AMD, which superseded the K5. The AMD K6 is based on the Nx686 microprocessor that NexGen was designing when it was acquired by AMD. Despite the name implying a design evolving from the K5, it is in fact a totally different design that was created by the NexGen team, including chief processor architect Greg Favor, and adapted after the AMD purchase.
- dfrage 7y agoThat's interesting, and relevant in that the NexGen team was joined by DEC Alpha people to do the K7, but the K6 is not AMD's first out-of-order speculative execution x86 design, per Wikipedia the K5 was an internal project that "was based upon an internal highly parallel 29k RISC processor architecture with an x86 decoding front-end."