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> The feedback loop that powers everything is: faster chips allow better engineering and science, creating faster chips. We’re not inserting the security commun
by tadfisher 3y ago
> The feedback loop that powers everything is: faster chips allow better engineering and science, creating faster chips. We’re not inserting the security community into that loop and slowing things down just so people can download random programs onto their computers and run them at random. That’s just a stupid thing to do, there’s no way to make it safe, and there never will be.
Note that in the vast majority of cases, crypto-related code isn't what we spend compute cycles on. If there was a straightforward, cross-architecture mechanism to say, "run this code on a single physical core with no branch prediction, no shared caches, and using in-order execution" then the real-world performance impact would be minimal, but the security benefits would be huge.
- bee_rider 3y agoI’m in favor of adding some horrible in-order, no speculation, no prefetching, 5 stage pipeline architectures 101 core which can be completely verified and bulletproof to chips. But the presence of this bulletproof core would not solve the problem of running bad code on modern hardware, unless all untrusted code is run on it.