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And it doesn't require an overly suspicious mind to note the per-core performance margin Intel were able to claim for most of the last decade is pretty much the
by rodgerd 7y ago
And it doesn't require an overly suspicious mind to note the per-core performance margin Intel were able to claim for most of the last decade is pretty much the drop in their processor performance when you disable all the security holes.
- leoc 7y agoI've said it before, the whole speculation-exploit mess seems like chip design's answer to the real-estate-securitisation highjinks which caused the last financial crisis. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16105385 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16105385 And that's not an analogy which puts all the spotlight on Intel, by any means. > I'm finding it hard to escape the suspicion that Spectre and (to a lesser extent) Meltdown is another failure of expertise on the same rough scale as the run-up to the financial crisis, the decades of bad or poorly-justified dietary advice, and the statistical problems in experimental psychology. On the face of it, it seems obvious that speculation + cache + protected mode was a combination likely ripe for exploitation, but the response seems to have been "nah, it'll be fine, probably"? And even if it for some reason wasn't obvious, it's now clear that it actually was the case. So the academic and industrial and bad-boy "security community" collectively more or less let the CPU manufacturers take a flyer on this for, what, a decade?