5 ms·

I'm getting annoyed with all of these yawning security holes in Intel's CPUs. I'm tempted to replace my Intel MacBook Pro with an Apple Silicon model sooner tha

I'm getting annoyed with all of these yawning security holes in Intel's CPUs. I'm tempted to replace my Intel MacBook Pro with an Apple Silicon model sooner than I normally would.

SoftTalker 3y ago
I'm not sure what evidence there is to think that Apple's chips are any better. And that's not really a dig at Apple; these are just very complicated devices and especially with the optimizations that CPUs need to make to run today's software with acceptable performance, it can become very hard to foresee all possible attacks and vulnerabilities.
- stalfosknight 3y ago
  I'm not trying to suggest that Apple's ARM chips are magically better because they're designed by Apple. Rather that the x86 architecture is obviously very long in the tooth and now would be a great time to switch to a far more modern architecture especially in light of this steady stream of vulnerabilities and defects that keep being found in x86. I'm sure ARM64 isn't perfect but I've yet to learn of something as severe as this, or Spectre, or Meltdown.
  - Remnant44 3y ago
    Almost all of these exploits are due to the out-of-order/speculative execution.. which is incredibly complicated. There is no reason to believe that an out of order architecture that has not been hardened is any better at defense here than x86 - Just that as a minority architecture, it's still less profitable to target for exploitation. I have very little faith that the Apple ARM chips do better here without extensive exploit attempts made...
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - coder543 3y ago
    Just as a couple of examples… ARM has suffered from Spectre too: https://developer.arm.com/Arm%20Security%20Center/Spectre-BHB https://developer.arm.com/Arm%20Security%20Center/Spectre-BH... There was also PACMAN: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/10/new-pacman-flaw-in-apple-silicon-is-an-echo-of-spectre-and-meltdown https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/10/new-pacman-flaw-i... Speculative vulnerabilities have virtually nothing to do with the instruction set. Changing the language of the processor has little to do with how the processor works under the hood, especially for fundamental technologies like speculative execution. Also, as a corollary, speaking the same language doesn’t mean every vulnerability is shared. AMD does not seem affected by Downfall, for instance.
    - stalfosknight 3y ago
      I did not know about PACMAN!
  - tedunangst 3y ago
    Today you get to learn that there were ARM CPUs affected by Meltdown as well, including those sold by Apple.
- alerighi 3y ago
  x86 architecture is now proven to be a minefield. It has too many instructions, being a CISC instruction set (something that was obsolete in the 90s but was keept for backward compatibility with older software). This means that to make efficient CPU the manufacturer has to do a ton of optimizations. These optimizations have resulted in most of the bugs we have seen. Contrary ARM or other RISC instruction set are more simple. Being more simple they rely on compilers being more smart to generate optimized programs (something we have to this day). For this processors are more simple and straight forward, they don't need all the complexity of an x86 CPU. For this reason they are also more efficient since they don't waste resources doing useless operations. Of course vulnerabilities can be everywhere (there were a few also on M1, tough not as impressive like these one, they were mostly stuff nearly impossible to exploit|). But recent times proved that particularly on x86 chips this is a real issue.
  - saagarjha 3y ago
    All high-performance processors have very complex optimizations. This has nothing to do with x86. The vulnerabilities found in other processors are similar in design and about as difficult to exploit.
darkclouds 3y ago
Its the trade off for performance.
rincebrain 3y ago
Yes, it's definitely only Intel who has these problems. [1] [2] [1] - https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/zenbleed.html https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/zenbleed.html [2] - https://comsec.ethz.ch/research/microarch/inception/ https://comsec.ethz.ch/research/microarch/inception/
- stalfosknight 3y ago
  I don't own any AMD products but your point is well taken.

I'm getting annoyed with all of these yawning security holes in Intel's CPUs. I'm tempted to replace my Intel MacBook Pro with an Apple Silicon model sooner than I normally would.

SoftTalker 3y ago

I'm not sure what evidence there is to think that Apple's chips are any better. And that's not really a dig at Apple; these are just very complicated devices and especially with the optimizations that CPUs need to make to run today's software with acceptable performance, it can become very hard to foresee all possible attacks and vulnerabilities.

stalfosknight 3y ago
I'm not trying to suggest that Apple's ARM chips are magically better because they're designed by Apple. Rather that the x86 architecture is obviously very long in the tooth and now would be a great time to switch to a far more modern architecture especially in light of this steady stream of vulnerabilities and defects that keep being found in x86. I'm sure ARM64 isn't perfect but I've yet to learn of something as severe as this, or Spectre, or Meltdown.
- Remnant44 3y ago
  Almost all of these exploits are due to the out-of-order/speculative execution.. which is incredibly complicated. There is no reason to believe that an out of order architecture that has not been hardened is any better at defense here than x86 - Just that as a minority architecture, it's still less profitable to target for exploitation. I have very little faith that the Apple ARM chips do better here without extensive exploit attempts made...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- coder543 3y ago
  Just as a couple of examples… ARM has suffered from Spectre too: https://developer.arm.com/Arm%20Security%20Center/Spectre-BHB https://developer.arm.com/Arm%20Security%20Center/Spectre-BH... There was also PACMAN: https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/10/new-pacman-flaw-in-apple-silicon-is-an-echo-of-spectre-and-meltdown https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/06/10/new-pacman-flaw-i... Speculative vulnerabilities have virtually nothing to do with the instruction set. Changing the language of the processor has little to do with how the processor works under the hood, especially for fundamental technologies like speculative execution. Also, as a corollary, speaking the same language doesn’t mean every vulnerability is shared. AMD does not seem affected by Downfall, for instance.
  - stalfosknight 3y ago
    I did not know about PACMAN!
- tedunangst 3y ago
  Today you get to learn that there were ARM CPUs affected by Meltdown as well, including those sold by Apple.
alerighi 3y ago
x86 architecture is now proven to be a minefield. It has too many instructions, being a CISC instruction set (something that was obsolete in the 90s but was keept for backward compatibility with older software). This means that to make efficient CPU the manufacturer has to do a ton of optimizations. These optimizations have resulted in most of the bugs we have seen. Contrary ARM or other RISC instruction set are more simple. Being more simple they rely on compilers being more smart to generate optimized programs (something we have to this day). For this processors are more simple and straight forward, they don't need all the complexity of an x86 CPU. For this reason they are also more efficient since they don't waste resources doing useless operations. Of course vulnerabilities can be everywhere (there were a few also on M1, tough not as impressive like these one, they were mostly stuff nearly impossible to exploit|). But recent times proved that particularly on x86 chips this is a real issue.
- saagarjha 3y ago
  All high-performance processors have very complex optimizations. This has nothing to do with x86. The vulnerabilities found in other processors are similar in design and about as difficult to exploit.

darkclouds 3y ago

Its the trade off for performance.

rincebrain 3y ago

Yes, it's definitely only Intel who has these problems. [1] [2] [1] - https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/zenbleed.html https://lock.cmpxchg8b.com/zenbleed.html [2] - https://comsec.ethz.ch/research/microarch/inception/ https://comsec.ethz.ch/research/microarch/inception/

stalfosknight 3y ago
I don't own any AMD products but your point is well taken.