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It bugs me that they classify Alder Lake as being Sunny Cove. It is not. The code name for Alder Lake is Golden Cove / Gracemont for performance/efficiency core
by pbsd 4y ago
It bugs me that they classify Alder Lake as being Sunny Cove. It is not. The code name for Alder Lake is Golden Cove / Gracemont for performance/efficiency cores.
In fact it is quite strange that the attack skips Tiger Lake (Willow Cove), which changes almost nothing from Sunny Cove besides L2 and L3 cache sizes, but shows up again in Alder Lake (which has two types of cores: does the attack work on both efficiency and performance cores?)
- titzer 4y ago> which changes almost nothing from Sunny Cove besides L2 and L3 cache sizes AFAICT the attack targets buffers that go between L2 and L3, so it is isn't surprising to me that it just happens to not work with a slightly different cache geometry.
- pbsd 4y agoGolden Cove has the same sizes as Willow Cove, though different geometry (10 vs 20-way L2, for example). However, Golden Cove's L3 has incredibly high latency compared to predecessors, which might be what makes it work by forcing data to stay in the superqueue longer.
- tptacek 4y agoOh, that's interesting (well, to a dummy like me); it suggests that the logic could be comparably broken, but we just can't observe it to be exploitable because the latency masks it off.