BjarniBjarniBjarni 🙊 🇮🇸 🍏
I suspect people trying to find alternate CPU architectures that don't suffer from #Spectre - like bugs have misunderstood how fundamental the problem is.
Your CPU will not go fast without caches. Your CPU will not go fast without speculative execution. Solving the problem will require more silicon, not less.
I don't think the market will accept the performance hit implied by simpler architectures. OS, compiler and VM (including the browser) workarounds are the way this will get mitigated.
The Mysterious Em
@HerraBRE
Yup. It's a workable approach to meltdown which is a specific issue that some other CPUs don't suffer from, but not Spectre which impacts all caching speculative execution. Spectre will take a couple of design->silicon rounds, but newer will generally be better, preferably a couple of years from now.
clacke
Drew DeVault
@HerraBRE you're right, BUT big caviat here: that this is necessary is software's fault. Remember, programmers add abstractions as fast as (often faster than) Moore's law. Our computers are ridiculously powerful and still would be even without OOO or speculative execution, we've just grown accustomed to hugely overpowered machines and designed our software with that in mind.
BjarniBjarniBjarni 🙊 🇮🇸 🍏
Prediction:
Software will be used to mitigate #meltdown and #spectre, slowing everything down.
In 2020, a new line of Intel CPUs hit the market where you pay a premium for "virtual security extensions" (VSE) that let you turn off the mitigations.
Google, AWS buy truckloads.
Intel profites.
Yay!
Antanicus
@HerraBRE an interesting point, but won't a performance hit will happen regardless, as the proposed patches basically prevent concurrent execution of code?
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