From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: bakul@bitblocks.com (Bakul Shah) Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2018 09:07:41 -0800 Subject: [TUHS] OT: critical Intel design flaw In-Reply-To: <20180103134358.3F16818C098@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> References: <20180103134358.3F16818C098@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> Message-ID: <51CA1A1A-F9AE-4A20-A431-4BF904DAA04D@bitblocks.com> On Jan 3, 2018, at 5:43 AM, Noel Chiappa wrote: > > I'm highly amused by the irony. Intel throws bazillions of transistors at > these hyper-complex CPUs in an attempt to make them as fast as possible - and > (probably because of the complexity) missed a bug, the fix for which > involves... slowing things way down! This bug appears to be the result of taking a shortcut rather than complexity. I suspect this shortcut was taken consciously, not realizing it could be misused. And the "Rowhammer" problem is certainly not due to complexity but (again) playing close to the edge -- the cell geometry is too small to not fail! > I wonder how many other bugs are lurking in these hyper-complex designs? > Didn't anyone at Intel stop to think that complexity is bad, in and of itself? They did try a newer architecture (itanium) but the market rejected it. The same reason we still continue to use buffer overflow inducing languages. Inertia & the cost of change. > http://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/11299/133439/1/oh405rrs.pdf This was a fascinating read! Thanks for the reference.