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I would expect that it would actually be much harder to pull off such an attack, because you've got 4 threads fighting over the same resources instead of 2. The

I would expect that it would actually be much harder to pull off such an attack, because you've got 4 threads fighting over the same resources instead of 2. These attacks essentially require statistical analysis, and the more noise there is the more difficult the attack would be. If you've got more than just the attacker and the victim threads running on a core than it's a noisier environment to pull off such an attack.

coder543 7y ago
That’s a good point. Also imagine if the attacker controlled 7 out of the 8 threads on a core... maybe they would have even clearer statistics for analysis. Or maybe POWER9 is completely secure. My main point was that Epyc has already proven to be much more resistant to these attacks than Intel’s architecture, and it wouldn’t require dealing with porting your applications to run on a niche ISA, with very limited options to buy server hardware, and very few (if any) options to rent cloud instances on POWER9.