4 ms·
It seems to me that almost all optimisations (and especially the accumulation of optimisations that we want to get more performance), that all optimisations are
by lifeisstillgood 5y ago
It seems to me that almost all optimisations (and especially the accumulation of optimisations that we want to get more performance), that all optimisations are going to be vulnerable in some way to timing attacks.
After all an optimisation is designed to alter the timing. If all actions must have the same timing, optimisations fail.
Do we simply offload any sesnitive processing to specialised chips? The silicon wafer seems to be developing vulnerablities like a network.
- lmm 5y agoWe need to stop trying to do transparent caching, and instead give developers control over what happens. Itanium wasn't wrong, it was just ahead of its time.
- pjmlp 5y agoI keep wishing that on an alternative reality AMD would have lost access to x86 IP, thus never coming up with x64 as cheap alternative to Itanium.
- geogra4 5y agoI think x64 WAS Itanium. x86-64 is the beast we are dealing with today. In that world maybe everyone goes to PowerPc? The move from 32bit G4 to 64bit G5 cpu wasn't a big deal since the PPC had 64bit variations back in 1997 with the 620 (though apple never used it)
- pjmlp 5y agoEveryone would go where Windows would go, as far as I remember PowerPC Windows NT did not got much love.
- geogra4 5y agoYeah, that was kind of tongue-in-cheek. Apple knows when to leave a cpu architecture. They've done it 3 times already (M68k->PPC->x86->ARM) Though I think we're getting now to the point that we would have gotten to then. AMD bought x86 another 15 years of life.
- sp332 5y agoItanium was IA-64.
- PedroBatista 5y agoI'm pretty sure in that alternative reality, you would be paying today top dollar for a quad-core. Today.
- pjmlp 5y agoI doubt that mass production of Itaniums would be kept the prices that high.
- hddherman 5y agoHaving a monopoly on the production of them would have. Example: Intel HEDT pricing before and after AMD Ryzen Threadripper release.
- pjmlp 5y agoIntel already had a kind of monopoly and the prices were going down. In Portugal there were only PCs with Intel CPUs around, the Cyrix, NEC and other clones were hardly anywhere to find until the first Athlons came to be.
- nobodyandproud 5y agoHas compiler state of the art changed? Years ago, I remember reading Itanium stalled because writing compilers to ably support speculative instructions was hard or simply impossible.
- lmm 5y agoThere hasn't been a quantum leap forward, but I think/hope we've got gradually better at programming. Certainly compiler development is a lot more active now.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoOr just disable optimizations for security-affected calculations, and let GTA V run with all the optimizations enabled.