3 ms·
There are a number of the vulnerabilities that affect other platforms than Intel x86 (including some POWER and ARM), though you're correct, a good amount of tho
by rincebrain 5y ago
There are a number of the vulnerabilities that affect other platforms than Intel x86 (including some POWER and ARM), though you're correct, a good amount of those disclosed are specific to Intel. But there has also been at least one that was AMD specific, too.[1]
I hypothesize it could have come down to "well, we made this type of decision this way before, and the world didn't fall down, so we can probably make it that way again, right?" Since these aren't formally proven systems, to some extent deciding whether an optimization is safe is going to be a judgment call - and if you go for "well, if this assumption is false, we're already doomed because we did X elsewhere...", the results could look like this.
Or maybe not, I've never worked for a chip design house.
[1] - https://mlq.me/download/takeaway.pdf https://mlq.me/download/takeaway.pdf
- johncolanduoni 5y agoOr simply none of them were aware that the kinds of speculation they were doing were capable of producing exploitable vulnerabilities. It took security researchers a long time to find these issues, and the kind of speculation that the original Spectre and Meltdown exploited were well known outside of the chipmakers for over a decade. Intel was simply more aggressive at that particular avenue of performance improvement.