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Garbage article. Like, cool, you guys are starting to talk about a new instruction set that will make C safe somehow. Yet you failed provide an ounce of detai

Garbage article. Like, cool, you guys are starting to talk about a new instruction set that will make C safe somehow. Yet you failed provide an ounce of detail for how you'll accomplish that. This might as well been a "And we'll make our CPUs 10x faster and they'll use 10x less power!". Or "Future CPUs will have a 10ghz clock speed!" Again, who is this article for? The government maybe to assure them that x86 will take cyber security seriously?

xattt 1y ago
> Future CPUs will have a 10ghz clock speed! Glad to see Tejas finally making it to see the light of day! Can’t wait to pair it with my Larrabee GPU in my BTX case.
- cogman10 1y ago
  I'm happy another old hardware nerd got that dated reference :D. I was convinced back in the day that Larrabee would change the world. It seemed like such an amazing technology especially since multi-core CPUs were just starting to take off in consumer hardware.
  - timschmidt 1y ago
    Honestly it could have, if Intel had invested in the platform for more than a few generations and built the software ecosystem around it. It had on package HBM before it was cool with all the modern AI GPUs and APUs. Intel had the opportunity to build the CUDA ecosystem, and chose to shelve it. I'll never understand the obsession that new platforms must be profitable immediately. Seems they take ~10 years to develop, and planning for that should be part of what's expected before the decision is made. Gelsinger seemed to understand at least that much.
    - cogman10 1y ago
      Well, they did half-heartedly try at it. Intel Phi was produced from 2010->2020. I think the problem is that Intel pigeonholed the product, relegating it to just supercomputers. I also think Intel has historically done a bad job of supporting the software needed to power their hardware. The reason CUDA was so successful (IMO) is because it was highly available and the software is a better quality to competitive software. OpenCL was supposed to be the answer to CUDA and ultimately it was just a weird, hard to work with, and minimally supported language. I don't think that's all Intel's fault. Apple's dumb war against Khronos has really undermined a lot of progress for anyone doing GPGPU programming.
      - timschmidt 1y ago
        Agreed. They tried to approach the market top down, when they should know from institutional experience that bottom up wins.
  - helf 1y ago
    [dead]
fooker 1y ago
Given that this technique is used in production for all current gen Iphones should tell you this isn't vaporware.
- cogman10 1y ago
  What technique? There's no technique described in the article. It's just a long article about why this is needed, an announcement of collaboration, and naming the set of instructions.
  - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
    ARM has an extension called the "Memory Tagging Extension". It works by borrowing 4 bits per 16 byte block of memory to color the allocation. Pointers are given a color "key" inside the pointer during allocation and if that pointer's key isn't the right color as the underlying memory block's during deref, then the hardware throws an MTE segfault. It's a neat system with pretty much no overhead and it's pretty easy to integrate into code as long as your underlying language and libraries are at least semi-intelligent about how they handle pointers and memory allocation (i.e. as long as you aren't doing any long range pointer punting then things "just work"). https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Arm%20Developer%20Community/PDF/Arm_Memory_Tagging_Extension_Whitepaper.pdf https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Arm%20Developer%20Communit...
    - cogman10 1y ago
      Right, but none of this is in the article. MTE is neat and it'll be interesting if AMD64 brings in a similar technique but none of that is actually described in the article.
      - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
        Sure but given the description of ChkTag and given the new exceptions and interrupts model they established with FRED, I don't see ChkTag being anything other than an MTE-style lock-and-key color tagging solution. The press article is just saying what the EAG is working on next now that they have shipped FRED, ACE, and AVX10. ChkTag is the current top priority item on the EAG's list and the standard for it should be finalised/released some time in the next few months. What they have done publicly so far is to say that ChkTag will be part of the ISA standard, they just haven't also revealed the details past that.

xattt 1y ago

> Future CPUs will have a 10ghz clock speed! Glad to see Tejas finally making it to see the light of day! Can’t wait to pair it with my Larrabee GPU in my BTX case.

cogman10 1y ago
I'm happy another old hardware nerd got that dated reference :D. I was convinced back in the day that Larrabee would change the world. It seemed like such an amazing technology especially since multi-core CPUs were just starting to take off in consumer hardware.
- timschmidt 1y ago
  Honestly it could have, if Intel had invested in the platform for more than a few generations and built the software ecosystem around it. It had on package HBM before it was cool with all the modern AI GPUs and APUs. Intel had the opportunity to build the CUDA ecosystem, and chose to shelve it. I'll never understand the obsession that new platforms must be profitable immediately. Seems they take ~10 years to develop, and planning for that should be part of what's expected before the decision is made. Gelsinger seemed to understand at least that much.
  - cogman10 1y ago
    Well, they did half-heartedly try at it. Intel Phi was produced from 2010->2020. I think the problem is that Intel pigeonholed the product, relegating it to just supercomputers. I also think Intel has historically done a bad job of supporting the software needed to power their hardware. The reason CUDA was so successful (IMO) is because it was highly available and the software is a better quality to competitive software. OpenCL was supposed to be the answer to CUDA and ultimately it was just a weird, hard to work with, and minimally supported language. I don't think that's all Intel's fault. Apple's dumb war against Khronos has really undermined a lot of progress for anyone doing GPGPU programming.
    - timschmidt 1y ago
      Agreed. They tried to approach the market top down, when they should know from institutional experience that bottom up wins.
- helf 1y ago
  [dead]

fooker 1y ago

Given that this technique is used in production for all current gen Iphones should tell you this isn't vaporware.

cogman10 1y ago
What technique? There's no technique described in the article. It's just a long article about why this is needed, an announcement of collaboration, and naming the set of instructions.
- OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
  ARM has an extension called the "Memory Tagging Extension". It works by borrowing 4 bits per 16 byte block of memory to color the allocation. Pointers are given a color "key" inside the pointer during allocation and if that pointer's key isn't the right color as the underlying memory block's during deref, then the hardware throws an MTE segfault. It's a neat system with pretty much no overhead and it's pretty easy to integrate into code as long as your underlying language and libraries are at least semi-intelligent about how they handle pointers and memory allocation (i.e. as long as you aren't doing any long range pointer punting then things "just work"). https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Arm%20Developer%20Community/PDF/Arm_Memory_Tagging_Extension_Whitepaper.pdf https://developer.arm.com/-/media/Arm%20Developer%20Communit...
  - cogman10 1y ago
    Right, but none of this is in the article. MTE is neat and it'll be interesting if AMD64 brings in a similar technique but none of that is actually described in the article.
    - OneDeuxTriSeiGo 1y ago
      Sure but given the description of ChkTag and given the new exceptions and interrupts model they established with FRED, I don't see ChkTag being anything other than an MTE-style lock-and-key color tagging solution. The press article is just saying what the EAG is working on next now that they have shipped FRED, ACE, and AVX10. ChkTag is the current top priority item on the EAG's list and the standard for it should be finalised/released some time in the next few months. What they have done publicly so far is to say that ChkTag will be part of the ISA standard, they just haven't also revealed the details past that.